Keep Away!

We used to love to play "keep away". "Keep away" was our version of touch football except for the fact that we didn't have any rules. It was "every man for himself". If you had the ball then everybody else had to try to get it away from you. It was a massive pile of kids (both boys and girls) kicking, hitting, screaming, punching - you name it we did it! Basically the goal was to inflict as much pain as possible - actually the goal was to KILL each other - it had NOTHING whatsoever to do with the ball. The ball was just a formality.

I became so immmune to the pain that there was only one way to get the ball away from me - tickle me. This worked so well that we used it on everybody. The only one that it didn't work on was Rusty. So we all had to pulverize him which wasn't easy considering the fact that he weighed 300 lbs. by the time he was 12 years old!

We did develop one rule though. "NO PULLING HAIR!" My sister, Rhonda, and I had waist length hair from the time we were little. We would be running with the ball at full speed, our hair streaming behind us, when all of a sudden somebody would grab our hair and then our feet would fly up and our heads would be ripped back - effectively clotheslining our asses! There was no defense from this manuver.

At first the other kids cried foul (because we didn't have even one other rule in effect) but they quickly learned that if they wanted us to play (and we were extremely vicious and competitive players) then they had to comply.

It was one of the few times that my sister and I stood together on something. It worked.