Tetherball

Napoleon Dynamite is one of those movies that thoroughly cracks me up every time I see it. Basically a comedy about a gangly, awkward, and sensitive high school boy growing up in Idaho, this movie has a lot in it that reminds me of my youth. And I guess this appeal to people’s memories is one of the main reasons for its general popularity. In this age of sequels, I don’t know why they haven’t done one of this film, too.

The main character, naturally named Napoleon Dynamite, has one sport of which he is the master (at least in his own mind): tetherball. He’ll invite anyone he talks to for a game, and if they accept, watch out! Napoleon shows no mercy as he slams the ball around the pole, far out of his opponent’s reach.

Like Napoleon, I was a tetherball “master”, although I was much younger than him. Actually, I was in the third grade. My elementary school in West Hollywood, Florida had several tetherball poles on its playground, and I quickly learned how to outmaneuver others to victory. My parents even bought me my own tetherball pole, which we put up in my back yard. So I became quite unbeatable at something for a brief period in my life. But, alas, as is the case with Napoleon Dynamite, there really isn’t a future for tetherball jocks. There are no tetherball teams in high school that you can letter in or put on your school resume, you can’t get an athletic scholarship for college in tetherball, and there are no professional tetherball tournaments or leagues. I can’t hire myself out as someone’s personal tetherball trainer or coach. Shoot, there aren’t even any tetherball saloons in which I could hustle some unsuspecting suckers out of a few bucks!

Eventually, I lost interest in tetherball, seeing that no one could beat me in it, as well as the fact that the new school I went to the next year, five miles down the road, never played it. The pole in my backyard came down, but the ball and its tether remained. It became the favorite toy of our long-lived cockapoo dog Michelle (named after the Beatles song), who would grab the tether in her mouth, clamp her teeth down on it, and then slam the ball back and forth on the floor. And sometimes one of us would grab the tetherball and have a playful tug-of-war with Michelle (always letting her win in the end, of course).

It’s nice to know that there’s still tetherball being played somewhere. It did help my self-esteem quite a bit back in the “good ol’ days” of 1964-1965.