But I Digress...

Out of my distant past: Animal Ball.

Some times we would reserve a racquet ball court and go out after work and play Animal Ball. This was played within the completely enclosed court, and was volleyball style with a net across the middle, except that there were no rules. Well, except three hits max, no floor hits. Everything else was allowed, including hits off the walls, the back wall, the net, the ceiling, and so on.

But the fun part was the extra activities that could be brought into the game due to having “no rules”. For example, if the opposite team was about to spike the ball, I would jump up, grab the top of the net and raise it as high as I could, preventing the spike even though I was not in front of it. Plus I would pull the net down on a serve from our side so the ball would fly directly at the head of an opposing player, then raise the net as high as possible. Or, since you could play a ball off the net, it was also acceptable to grab the ball from the other side of the net and hold it captive in the net until you could ground it out.

Or, as I sometimes did, actually change sides in the middle of a play and wreak havoc on the opposing team. Sometimes this involved pulling down their shorts as they were jumping up for a hit. Other times it just involved yelling “mine – I got it”, and then letting the ball hit the floor and running back to my own side again. Or untying their shoelaces while they were looking at the ball in play. Every play was some sort of melee. Sometimes I’d just grab the ball on their side and take it back to our side. Lots of hoorahs and bellowing… and laughing.

It was kind of a rough game, with body blocks and running headlong into the walls, or having the net pulled over your head. I sometimes took a spike to the face, and I remember how the ball – as hard as it was – would wrap around my face from ear to ear yet not bloody my nose.

One tactic was to try to serve the ball so hard and high that it would bounce off the back wall with such a forceful trajectory that it would come clear back to our side again, so that we could stuff it on the rebound. Oh yeah, it was also legal to reach waaay over the net and grab the ball out of the other team’s play, or to down-spike their own spike set-up.

Lots and lots of laughs. Occasionally a person would come to play who couldn’t stand the anarchic deviations from standard volleyball rules. Those types never came back. No loss to us.