Welcome to the “underground dizzle bizzle.” Grown men playing dodgeball.
You would think that the first rule of Dodgeball Fight Club would be that you don’t talk about Dodgeball Fight Club. Au contraire. Not only are you supposed to talk about it, you’re supposed to bring friends. And girlfriends and wives are encouraged to watch.
Bruce Newman of the San Jose Mercury News writes that it all started after some guys saw the movie “Dodgeball” (2004). They were drunk one night and found themselves in a parking garage in Los Gatos, Calif., with a hankering to live what they’d just witnessed. They decided to come back again when they were sober. And, unlike so many other broken promises uttered by drunken men, they followed through. And a force of nature was born.
The game has been kept alive by Kenny Cox, a banker in the daylight hours but a ball-slinging terror at night. His Facebook page is mostly devoted to “Underground Dizzle Bizzle.” He says playing is a rush, and clobbering someone squarely in the face is the biggest thrill:
“As long as we don’t break anything,” says Cox, “it’s kind of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ thing. And the cops are kind of ‘see no evil, do no evil.’ As long as we’re out of sight, we’re out of mind.”
“You tell your friends, ‘I went to an underground parking garage last night and got my face smashed in with a dodgeball,’” Cox says. “How cool is that?”
Pretty cool, indeed. The group accepts all comers, but if you find yourself in a Los Gatos parking garage, just remember the wise advice of Patches O’Houlihan: “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.”
—Seth Putnam
Before I moved out of Boston in 2005 I played in a league called Big Kids Dodgeball. It was a friggin blast. Although there were brawls nearly every weekend. It was hysterical.