Tonight’s first contest pits “Kick the Habit” vs. “Toejammin’.”
Toejammin’?
“You’ll understand when you see us play,” says team captain Lee Seitelman. But playing at all appears to be in doubt, since, unlike the Kick the Habit dugout, which is overflowing with eager, energized 20-somethings and late teens, Toejammin’ is experiencing a personnel crisis. Meg Leibreich is on her cell phone telling someone, “Haul your booty, sister.” She shrugs and says, “A lot of people are stuck in traffic.”
“Hey, I just got off a plane two hours ago,” says Captain Seitleman, pointedly unsympathetic.
The problem is Toejammin’ is an older team, which means they all have jobs and assorted complicated commitments, which may not be entirely true of the opposition, a carefree-looking bunch, led by Captain Don Woznica Jr.
Age matters, even in kickball.
That’s right, kickball, that dimly remembered game from our halcyon playground days, the game most of us left behind by the age of 12″but not entirely. The mere mention may get your juices flowing and send waves of nostalgia coursing through clogged veins.
That’s what Greg Evans, manager of adult and senior leisure services for the Park District of Oak Park thought when he attended a charity fundraiser in Grant Park last year for a kids foundation that the Shaker family supports. Thirty-three adult kickball teams raised over $100,000. Evans could hardly believe it. So he included it as an option in the spring recreation catalog and six teams signed up”$300 for a team of at least 16 residents, $450 for non-residents. A lot of the teams, Evans said, signed up for $450 because they didn’t want to bother collecting the IDs. He calls it “quick pay.”
One of the benefits of kickball, Evans noted, is that it’s “easy and cheap.” The park district provides a ball and an umpire. No bats, no gloves, no spikes. You don’t even need much athletic ability, as was fully in evidence last Thursday evening at Stevenson Park.
In fact, athletic ability may be a real drawback since it’s about the only element that might tempt someone to take these games seriously”although it doesn’t seem possible to take kickball seriously.
And yet … you guessed it. Go to worldkickball.com and you’ll find WAKA, the World Adult Kickball Association web site, which has been around a good seven years already. The web site has a countdown to the July 9 regionals, the beginning of the World Kickball Championship, which will be played July 23 in Washington D.C. (“Save the dates!”). The monthly newsletter, Everybody Loves Kickball, plans to announce the winner of the WAKA Haiku contest this month (“so the next time you find yourself talking about kickball, you can do so in exactly 17 beautiful syllables”).
The WAKA mission statement aspires to nothing less than establishing “the WAKA Kickball experience as the New American Pastime!” New American Pastime, by the way, has been trademarked, as have WAKA Founders Cup and World Kickball Championship. So somebody is sure as hell taking it seriously.
But not on this night. Not even umpire Chris Mullin, although he dutifully explains the rules to the two captains.
The main rule to remember is that you can’t deliberately hit somebody in the head with the ball”the “peg,” of course, being the one element of kickball that elevates the sport beyond mere recess regression and sparks universal interest, even among the macho. You can, as in baseball and softball, register outs by tagging or throwing to first base, but you can also nail the runner with a well-aimed peg.
If you hit him or her in the head, however, and the ump determines it was deliberate, you’re immediately ejected from the game. If it happens a second time, you’re out for the season.
“The older players go flying a little bit when they get hit,” notes Mullin, with a remarkably straight face.
The ball is soft and a little under inflated, so players can grab it and throw. It’s about the size of a small basketball (8 1/2 inches diameter). The pitcher rolls it from the mound and the kicker stands where the catcher usually does and strides forward to meet the ball.
If you hit it too low, you pop up, which is an easy out. If you hit it high, you’ve got a good chance of getting on since the infield tends to be a bit porous (not the ground, the players). Hit it dead center and you get a line drive, often with a lot of “english.” Evans says some guy played barefoot the first week. He doesn’t recommend it because, you know, toes are involved, and the field harbors its share of rocks, but that guy ended up kicking the ball the farthest.
The first “batter” this evening is 7-year-old Katie (one of several underage subs for the missing Toejammin’ adults that Umpire Mullin generously overlooked). She grounds the ball back to the pitcher who chucks it to the first baseman, who equally generously, muffs it, so Katie is safe. To give you some idea of the level of intensity in kickball, when he catches the next throw to retire the second underager, his own team boos him with gusto.
There is, in fact, lots of whooping and chatter, especially from the Kick the Habit side. In regular baseball, the dugout rides the opposing players. Here they ride their own teammates.
When he returns to the dugout at the end of the inning, Don’s younger brother, Edgar is having none of their guff. “We don’t bend the rules in kickball. This is serious,” he explains, a big smile plastered across his face.
This is actually a close-knit squad. In addition to Don and Edgar’s sister Maura, who rounds out the Woznica clan’s participation, most of these kids have grown up together and been on several Appalachian service projects through Ascension Parish. In fact, several will be missing from next week’s game because they’ll be building homes in Kentucky. Edgar, meanwhile, will be at the White House picking up a Presidential Scholar award, possibly from the president himself.
But tonight he looks as if he’d rather be playing kickball, having perfected the drag bunt down the third base line.
Kick the Habit starts scoring runs in bunches and playing with abandon. A kid named Connor pulls a Vladimir Guerrero flop at home plate to score and opens a bloody cut below his knee. Presumably he’s used to such mishaps. An Army Ranger, he recently finished a tour in Iraq.
Who says kickball is for sissies?
Don Woznica Sr. shows up to watch his kids’ team. He doesn’t really understand the appeal, but his theory is that the game “brings us back to our childhood when we were all more or less equal.”
It also brings him back to his own family’s early days when he and his wife, Celine, were lay missionaries in Mexico and Central America. There, he recalled, the only game girls were allowed to play was kickball, so Maura was playing it “when she was kneehigh to a grasshopper.” Now she’s sprinting toward home just ahead of her older brother’s four-bagger.
On this night, the youngsters just have too much legpower, not to mention enthusiasm, and the slaughter rule is soon invoked.
“What happened?” I ask the only mildly subdued Toejammin’ dugout.
“That question implies a win-at-all-costs mentality,” snaps the left-fielder, tongue clearly in cheek. “That’s not what we’re all about.”
Capt. Seitelman has a more mathematical explanation.
“When you figure in the age differential, it was actually quite close.”
A few of the regulars were off watching their kids play. One was having dinner with an elderly parent.
“The sandwich generation is finding it tough to play,” explains a beleaguered Meg Leibreich. “It’s a lot harder than it looks,” she adds. “Most of us haven’t played kickball since we started wearing a bra.”
Maybe what they need are sponsors, which the Happy Hands Club has in spades, judging by the banner already hung on the first base dugout, which lists Winberie’s, CLTV, Sign Express, and Oak Park Food Market.
On the third base side, things seem a little more informal.
“Meg brought us together,” explains one of the players of Unexplained Bacon. “We’re just friends. We were tired of going to our kids’ games. We thought we’d bring ’em to ours.”
Unexplained Bacon?
“It’s a Simpson’s reference,” says the young kid with the shoulder tattoos and the “Canibal Corpse” T-shirt. He’s no slacker though, making all three defensive stops at second base in the first inning of game two.
The other squads rounding out the league are Kick Me and Team Maxim.
There is, by the way, a fall kickball league, starting Sept. 8 and running till Oct. 27. If you don’t have a team, you can sign up as an “orphan,” and they’ll put you on a team. Just contact the park district. If you need to brush up on the rules, consult oakparksports.com.
And what does Greg Evans have up his sleeve for adult and senior leisure services for next year?
Well, Vince Vaughn fans, it looks like Dodgeball.