Wherever boys gathered, there were ball games.  That’s the way it was when I was growing up, and I assume that’s the way it was with all boys everywhere, and that it is the same still.  Of course, with the advent and triumph of video games, and the gaming world they have spawned, maybe it is different now.  I don’t know; I wouldn’t touch a video game if you paid me to.

But when we were young, the urge to throw a ball was over-powering, and being inside the house never stopped us, much to the dismay of our Moms.  It might be a football, a basketball, a beanbag, a Frisbee, or something that was never meant to be thrown at all.  I can recall a late night with Paul Stanton and some others in one of our apartments, drunk and stoned, of course, throwing potatoes at each other across the room, with delighted abandon.

I distinctly remember being ordered out of the Nelson living room by an irate Eileen Nelson and moving our game to the basement room, where there were fewer, and less expensive things to break.  I’m sure that happened many times to all of us at all of our houses.

Perhaps the strangest incident I remember was on Christmas Day, probably ’67 or ’68, throwing something, maybe a stuffed toy, around the dining room with some of my siblings, and my father, of all people, deciding to join in the fun.  That was shocking enough – the proper, well-mannered Gilbert Marshall not only failing to chastise us, but actually joining the fun – and, of course, the first time he threw it, it struck and broke the crystal punch bowl he had gotten my Mom for Christmas.

It’s pretty funny, in retrospect, but at the time, it was shocking.  My father was mortified, of course, and apologized profusely to Mom, promising to buy her another to replace it.

Age didn’t slow us down at all.  In fact, living in apartments with roommates only made the indoor games more frequent and wilder.  We had presumably become adults, but, with only ourselves to supervise ourselves, the games blossomed, sometimes even acquiring “rules” and ways to score and win, but usually just involving throwing and catching.

Eventually, indoor gaming evolved into the brutal insanity of “knee football.”  For those of you who were never involved, knee football was played in the living room of the house that the three elder Wards and I (and several others who came and went) rented on Route 15 in Jericho.  It was always late at night, always dead drunk, and always painful.  Playing tackle football on our knees on a hard wooden floor, in a not-very-big living room where a deep pass was six feet at most.

Why did we make things so hard on ourselves?  It must have been fun, because we kept doing it, in spite of the pain.

Now that we’re all old enough to play wheelchair football, it’s fun to think back on those wild days.