It’s sort of has been descirbed already. At the least the version we played.
A bucnh of kids line up against a wall facing the wall. Then some psycho stood about 20 feet back and threw a tennis ball at one of the “butts” of one of the kids. If you got hit you were out and had to sit out until the last person was against the wall. The last person got to be the new ball thrower.
Looking back now it doesn’t seem to be as much fun as we thought it was back then. Except for when I got to nail that one kid.
Huh. I remember tag, racing, sledding and tobogganing, fistfights, softball, hide and seek, hopscotch, jumprope, and (I think) Pogs. No smearing of any queers or any such like.
We called it “Kill the Kid”, back in New Jersey in the late '70s.
“Butt’s Up” sounds somewhat like a game we played in middle school (early '80s) which we called “Butt-ball”. A crowd of kids would stand 20 feet or so from a wall, and someone in the crowd would hurl a tennis ball against the wall so that it bounced back into the crowd. You had to catch the ball in one hand. If you a) dropped it, or b) got hit by it (and failed to subsequently catch it), you then had to run up to the wall and tag it before someone else scooped up the ball and tossed it against the wall. If the ball reached the wall before you did, you had to stand with your hands against the wall and your back facing the crowd, and the person who “got” you (by bouncing the ball off the wall before you could reach it) got to throw the tennis ball at your defenseless butt.
Wow… that actually sounds complicated now that I’ve written it all down.
We always played those types of games. Smear the queer, British bulldog, and a ball game we called hand-ball, but wasn’t anything like the real hand-ball.
When we played, we had anywhere from three to a dozen guys, and a few tennis balls. If you had a ball, you’d throw it at a large brick wall, and then the goal was to catch the ball when it bounced back (anyone could try to catch it, not just the thrower.) If you caught it, then you got to throw. If you tried to catch but fumbled it, then you had to run towards the wall and touch it before someone else got the same ball and hit the wall with it. If you failed, you got a “strike.” When you got three strikes, you had to stand at the wall and everyone with a ball threw it at you as hard as they could.
Ah, Kill the Man with the Ball… how deliciously descriptive. Heard it occasionally referred to as StQ, but KtMwtB was much more common (80s, east coast).
A bit of that, a bit of King of the Hill, and a bit of Jarts.
Damn, good thing they raised the drinking age to over fifteen, else there’d be a lot fewer of us around.
ETA:
OH MY GOD! In the NYT article… those are the front doors of my elementary school!!!
Ya we played this a bunch but I couldn’t remember the name. I really sucked at handball though I couldn’t catch or run fast enough. Then I figured out the secret to bat the ball away from everyone else to buy more time.
SW Chicago city, here, and we grew up calling it “Kill the man with the ball,” “kill the nigger with the ball,” and “smear the queer.” I’ve always assumed “queer” was being used because “Smear the faggot” didn’t rhyme. Yep, it was that kind of neighborhood.
I think the most dangerous game that was regularly played on my playground was Crack the Whip, with occasional dog-piling. Otherwise, full contact was left to football and a twisted full contact version of soccer with no name, but involved carrying the ball and football style tackling.
Early to mid 90’s, by the way. Had never heard of Smear the Queer before this thread.
We played a mildly modified version in our neighborhood. We’d denote two areas as “end zones”. One person has to carry the ball back and forth from one end zone to the other with the rest of the neighborhood kids trying to tackle the other. If the person got tackled and stopped in their tracks or if they felt like giving the ball up, they could throw it. You can drop it, throw it wherever you want, however you want, just so long as you throw it. If it wasn’t thrown, then the beatings started or the ball would be humanely removed from your clutches. Person that scored most “won”.
I always heard it and played it as either “Smear the Queer” or “Kill the the Guy with the Ball.” I don’t remember ever giving much thought to the meaning of the words at the time (other thn noticing it rhymed) and (like a lot of others, it seems), by the time I knew what a “queer” was, I had outgrown the game.
We also played various violent dodgeball and ball tag games (even a hideous adapation called “rock tag”), and in the winter, of course, there were ice and snowball wars.
I remember British Bulldog too.
My all time favorite, though, was Capture the Flag (best played at night with like a hundred kids spread out over as large an area as possible). A full scale simulated war with a concrete objective – find and steal the other teams flag and return it to your “base” – and essentially no rules or limitations on how to accomplish it. This allowed for a great deal of variety in gameplay, strategery, lots of (perfectly legitimate) brawling, espionage, sub-missions and even the taking and keeping of “prisoners” (although “jailbreaks” were frequent, largely because being a “jailer” was boring and the kids appointed to do it tended to wander off looking for action, leaving the jailers outnumbered by the prisoners).
A really good game could go on for hours and novels could be written about them.
We played a similar version against a wall at the neighborhood church. We called it “California Handball” or just “Handball”. We’d have a racquetball or a tennis ball and throw it against the wall. You’d have to catch it after it hit the wall with one hand only. If you bobbled it, it touched you and you didn’t catch it, or you caught it with two hands, you had to run and touch the wall before someone else grabbed the ball and hit you with it. If you missed the wall completely or for a rules violation, you’d have to stand against the wall (facing towards your executioner or away from, depending on the severity) and get the ball thrown at you at least three times. Then the game would commence.
