Download | Duration: 00:03:17

This week, Michigan Radio sports commentator John U. Bacon could discuss the All-Star game or the British Open. But instead of those big-time sporting events, John wants to discuss the smallest sports of all – the game no on seems to play anymore…the games kids used to make up… 

Summer’s here. If I had kids, I’d be scared stiff.  I remember all the havoc my grade-school pals and I created once school let out. 

We didn’t play any sissified educational games. No, when it was summer, we would reach the threshold of stupidity and parental disapproval by inventing our own games. 

A favorite was the Baloney Game. It became popular when my friend’s mom started working.  The gang would go to Dave’s house for lunch. Then each of us would grab a slab of Oscar Meyer and whip it toward the kitchen ceiling.  Whoever’s slice stuck the longest was declared the winner of Phase One. 

But even the best tosses had to fall sooner or later. That took us to the second leg of this lunch-meat biathlon: The Catch.  As the bologna peeled off the ceiling and fell, we had to crane our little necks skyward and open our mouths to take a bite out of the falling pink disc.  If you failed, your ceiling time, no matter how long, was disqualified.  That’s why all the other kids would circle the last player, hoping their screams would make him miss the bologna.  

We played this game for months, until Dave’s mom noticed a constellation of dark circles on her ceiling.  The Baloney Game came to a quick end.

Fortunately, at about the same time, Scotty’s folks bought an automatic garage door opener.  It was amazing!  You just pushed a button, and voila – the garage door went up by itself!  Can you believe it?  We could not.  Our little nostrils flared with the possibilities of creating something far more dangerous and parentally unacceptable.  The result was The Garage Door Game. 

The rules were simple. See how far away from the open garage door you could push the remote control and still make it under before the massive metal sheet cut you in half.  It was impossible to cheat because the runner started the door himself. He either ended up inside the garage whooping it up, or outside licking his wounds.

No debates, no ties, no crying.  As we moved farther from the door, we thought we had reached our limits until Scotty himself came up with his patented James Bond under-the-door roll on the concrete driveway.  We were far more impressed than Scotty’s mom.  The Garage Door game was also short-lived.  

But not long after that, Scotty’s parents – who must have been living in solitary confinement – thought it was a great idea to give him a few BB guns.  Brandishing those air rifles, God’s message was clear: invent the BB Gun Game. 

None of us could shoot accurately enough to do any real damage, so we did what any three 12 year old boys would do: Invent the Triangle of Death. In this game we took turns shooting the kid to our right.  It went like this:

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

(Bang!)  “Ow!”

Incredibly, three decades later, two of us have jobs.  Or all three, if you count what I do as a job.  

There were other games – the Sour Milk Game, the Evel Knievel Game, the Make a Towering Inferno Out of the Oreo Package Game – but the Triangle of Death pretty much marked the end of this golden era.  Lawyers, soccer moms and travel teams of five year olds put an end to such fun.   

Decades later these same friends drink lite beer with fruit in it, use “interface” as a verb, and insist their four-year old sons wear OSHA-Approved protective helmets to ride their tricycles up and down the driveways of their gated communities.  

Say what you will about the old games.  We all survived.  So, as for me, Give me the Baloney Game, or Give Me the Triangle of  Death. 

Copyright © 2008, Michigan Radio