Crossing Broad
In case you missed it:
First of all, “smear” was a great game. We played it every day at Boyertown Junior High East from 1997 to 1999.
The gist is that there’s somebody with a ball and you tackle that person and try to get the ball. Kind of like a football and rugby hybrid. You don’t even keep score, you just try to hold the ball as long as possible while any number of people mob you. Sometimes you had 9-10 people all ganging up on one kid and trying to take the ball, but it taught us resilience and courage. It separated the men from the boys, because you needed strength to fend off myriad idiot friends, or agility to evade them in the first place. Then they get tired and don’t have anything left in the tank to claim the ball. That was always my strategy
We didn’t know it at the time, but the game had a lot of different names. We said “smear the queer” in the exurban hinterlands, while Coggin and the South Jersey guys report that it was “kill the man with the ball.” Others called it “cream the carrier.” Maybe the kids of Haddon Heights were more cultured than the boorish thugs of Berks County and Upper Montco, but to be 100% clear, there was never anything homophobic about any of this. Back in the day, a lot of these words were used interchangeably to mean that something was stupid or dumb, and while that sounds kind of pitiful now, they weren’t necessarily mean spirited or used to put individuals down. For instance, everything in 1999 was “gay,” i.e. “this discman is gay” or “this pencil sharpener is gay.” Obviously we’ve evolved in the past 25 years or so, and don’t say these things anymore, but that’s the context.
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