VOLGERBALL RULES !

I know, this is just an old leather soccer ball, but it is the right color for a great German game invented by a fromer professor of mine: Volgerball. I don't even know if I spelled it right, or if the shape of the ball is like a soccer ball or football, but I know the rest of the rules.

I had a lot of classes in Gifted Education and Summer Institutes at SIU. In one I learned about the game.

The reason that I'm writing about it today is because of a couple of ten or eleven year olds I watched while eating at an Italian restuarant this week. We had a window seat without much of a view, but the two kids were playing baseball with a tennis ball and an orange rubber cone used by street workers to block off areas. They played for quite a while. It took me back to basement ball when we would shoot down at a clothes basket partially filled with dirty laundry. Or wastebasket ball where aluminum foil basketball, much smaller obviously, would caroom off a metal wastebasket when misfired. Or even sock ball where wadded up socks served as the ball fired into a cigar box supported by door closure. We used to play games like that all day.
I don't know how many time Sy Hugo Green made buckets in my house, certainly not as many as Cliff Hagen or Bob Pettit, but appreciably more than Bill Russell or Satch Sanders.

But I never knew that was a sign of giftedness until I took that class. Volgerball was perfect for the kid who always got picked last. If he was smart. Volgerball had basically the same rules as American football, but after, say a five yard run, the running back would have to answer a question, similar to the ones asked in Scholar Bowl (or the old G. E. Quiz Bowl) or he would have to go back to the original line of scrimmage with loss of down. The more yardage made on the play, the tougher the question. I can't recall how the linemen or others on the offensive unit not directly involved in the individual play got questionned, and it may have been after a touchdown had been scored. But with the gifted, creative play would be a sign that you were intellectually superior.

And to think, we just did it because of economics, weather, or to combat boredom.