Today’s blogging prompt is sports we’ve played and what we thought of them. Although spectator sports is not my bag, and I’ve always been more of a reader than an athlete, I did enjoy playing pick-up games as a kid in the neighborhood. Basketball was the easiest, of course: I could entertain myself for hours shooting hoops in the back yard, listening to music through my open bedroom window where I’d stuck a radio. The neighborhood kids liked playing football and baseball, but we didn’t have enough for one team, alone two, so for baseball we’d settled for catch or use ‘ghost’ players — and of course, we’d argue over how many bases the ghost player could advance when the ‘real’ player hit the ball for them.   After watching The Mighty Ducks, I became obsessed with hockey and had a street hockey goal and two sticks, but I was only able to badger the guys  into trying that a few times. More popular was our version of ‘extreme biking’, wherein we’d build ramps of wooden planks and cinder blocks and then do stunts on bicycles and skateboards.

School was a different story, since we had enough people for teams, and it was the only place we ever played kickball, dodgeball, or volleyball. I was also introduced to golf through school, but frankly I found creating courses in Sid Meier’s SimGolf more interesting at that point. Football was where it was at, and one of my most salient memories from high school is going out to the field in the early morning, the grass wet with dew and fog still hanging close to the ground, and lining up to play. I tried to coax Bing into capturing that particular mental image..

These days I don’t really play sports, beyond hiking, casual cycling, shooting hoops sometimes at the gym, or playing cornhole (bean bag toss) at parties. (The latter appears at any family function, even in the winter.) It’s not a matter of interest so much as opportunity: I don’t have children to play catch with, and my offline friends prefer cinema and books to physical activity. Such couch potatoes!