High school and college football is underway, and the NFL season starts Thursday.
So, are you ready for some … dodgeball?
I was on Monday, or so I thought.
Labor Day meant the annual dog days of sports had finally officially ended. So what better way to celebrate that than with a viewing of “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story”?
As it turned out, the answer is one word: Anything.
I guess I enjoyed this movie the only other time I saw it, shortly after it was released 20 years ago.
Now I realize most of it was really bad, except for the performance of one actor: Ben Stiller as the bad guy — but even that wasn’t as good as his brief appearance in “Happy Gilmore,” and nowhere near Shooter McGavin, the ultimate awkward antagonist.
“Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” is a blatant rip-off of “Happy Gilmore,” which debuted eight years earlier. Even the subplots were the same, with one difference: Those in the Adam Sandler movie are still funny.
Both were farcical comedies. One happened to be based on an actual mainstream sport, the other on a P.E. and playground activity that separated the alphas from the wimps at an early age — and in the Middle Ages; Mongol warriors are said to have celebrated a victory in 1241 by hurling, dodging and catching the heads of their vanquished opponents.
With that in mind, I won’t argue with anyone who wants to claim that dodgeball is a real sport.
Plus, it’s one of the 25-or-so different competitive activities marketed as sports that I’ve seen on TV after the conclusion of the NBA Finals in June.
Of course, the Olympics had something to do with that, with its contributions of fencing, team handball and a few other things most of us watch just once every four years.
Then there is ESPN8, “The Ocho.” It’s the dodgeball movie’s only lasting contribution to society, other than the line, “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.”
“The Ocho” was fictional, a joke for the movie, but it is now very real for a few days each August since 2017. ESPN platforms host anything competitive, from air hockey to cherry-pit spitting. It helped make cornhole a mainstream sport. This year was special since it marked ocho years of The Ocho.
I didn’t see everything The Ocho offered this year, but it doesn’t take a lot of channel surfing (will this be a sport soon?) to chance upon kickball, pickleball or Pop-a-Shot. Some are on various ESPN channels, and competitors have picked up on the concept.
So now we have The Warehouse Games on Bally, from YouTube star Jimmy “Jomboy” O’Brien.
“Two years ago we bought a warehouse and crafted a plan to create something that nobody knew they wanted: high-production sports leagues with a backyard-BBQ feel,” said O’Brien, in a Variety interview.
The games include blitzball, which can best be described as wiffle ball on steroids — and a concrete floor.
Maybe someday we’ll draft fantasy blitzball teams.
“Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” was not true, and the plot was unoriginal.
But the concept was prescient, and its legacy is real.