These don’t seem like your grandfather’s Olympics.
But then again …
Some of the events at this summer’s Paris Games may deviate from the norm, but I’m a grandpa who can relate.
We Baby Boomers from Santa Barbara’s Mesa district — we called ourselves “Mesa Rats” — invented plenty of eccentric sports during the Wonder Years of the 1960s.
Paris, for example, is breaking in the sport of “Breaking” — an urban dance competition — during the final week of this year’s Olympics.
We beat them to that punch during the Chubby Checker craze of the early ’60s.
Our neighborhood organized a “Twist” contest for all the kids. A few dollars of prize money drew a large turnout of Mesa Rugrats.
All I got out of my dime entry fee was a twisted colon, but it made for a nice memory, nonetheless.
Sport climbing, Basketball 3×3 and Skateboarding were all included in the Paris Games after making their Olympic debuts in Tokyo four years ago.
We were also fully engaged in each of those events during the ’60s.
Paris is sponsoring 45 events altogether, and that’s even after it dropped baseball and softball from the list.
They will be reintroduced as temporary, “guest-requested sports” for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. Flag football, lacrosse and squash are the other additions for the next Summer Games.
The first modern Olympics kept it simple. The 1896 Athens Games sponsored just nine sports: athletics (track and field), cycling (road and track), fencing, gymnastics, shooting, swimming, tennis, weightlifting and wresting.
Wrestling has been a staple sport for us homo sapiens since the Ice Age. A match was depicted in a French cave painting that dates back to 15,300 BC.
I’m proud to say that it certified sports reporting as the real oldest profession.
I suppose it also proved the point of former Olympic basketball coach Bobby Knight when he described my line of work as “one or two steps above prostitution.”
A wrestling match, Mom said, also triggered the endless stream of sporting contests that were waged in the Patton home.
I reportedly waddled toward my older brother, Greg, yanked a cookie from his hand, and toddled toward the nearest exit.
Big brother caught me from behind and then wrapped me up in a headlock. The cookie was fumbled and then accidentally stomped into an inedible mess of crumbs.
We were knocking that chocolate chip off each other’s shoulders through games of sport for the rest of our childhood.
When younger brothers Kevin and Sean joined the roster a few years later, our grudge match — lamps and vases be damned — evolved into a two-on-two sport we called “Living Room Football.”
We did wait, however, until our brothers graduated from diapers. Tackling a tyke with a full load is a mistake you make only once.
But all that sports stuff didn’t really hit the fan until Dad made us take it outdoors.
Our neighborhood was teeming with kids who were game for some competition. And when such traditional contests as “Kick The Can” grew tiresome, we invented some sports of our own.
The most memorable included:
Box Sledding
When the summer sun dried out the grassy slopes above Cliff Drive, we’d hunt for the sturdiest cardboard boxes behind Jordano’s Supermarket and race them as warm-weather toboggans.
The smartest sledders took a “crash course” on the lay of the land. Knowing where the rocks lurked among the weeds could spare the undercarriage of your toboggan … as well as your own personal undercarriage.
The best toboggans were found with produce still inside. Throwing rotten fruit and vegetables at your opponents was legalized during the Cliff Drive Rules Convention of 1964.
Ultimate Over-the-Line
Finding enough players to fill two baseball lineups wasn’t easy even during the Baby Boom Era. We often resorted to a modified version of the national pastime that required as few as three players to a side.
You earned a single by hitting a ground ball past the fielder(s) on the line, a double when the ball got past the outfielders, a triple when it hit the fence on a fly, a home run when it cleared the fence …
… and sudden-death victory when it broke the back-yard window of the old grouch who lived beyond the fence.
Mud Football
Those of us on Cordova Drive were lucky to have the Cathcart family as neighbors. Sam Cathcart coached football at Santa Barbara High School and his three sons were all standout players.
The youngest Cathcart was the ringleader of the clan. My pal, Scotty, who grew up to become the athletic director at Allan Hancock and Palomar community colleges, got some early training for his career by organizing our neighborhood football games.
He’d hit the phones to recruit players whenever a rainstorm muddied the sports field at nearby Washington Elementary School.
Few kids could resist the opportunity of getting messy while acting out in a slapstick game of pratfalls.
Scott had us play by NFL rules so that a ball carrier could only be downed by contact. Sliding untouched into the end zone from beyond the five-yard line was worth an extra point.
It would get so difficult to tell the mud-covered players apart that the Player of the Game Award occasionally went to the kid from the losing team who tackled his own teammate.
Tackle Basketball
I was a sixth grader at Washington School when I inadvertently helped to create a hybrid game we called “footsketball.”
I was assigned to referee a noon league basketball game between the school’s two fifth-grade classrooms. My calls became so widely panned that both teams began to ignore them.
The game soon degraded into a brutal free-for-all. Bodies bounced on the pavement as much as the ball. Dribbling eventually became optional.
Tackle basketball did have a side benefit, serving to improve the players’ fundamentals: The skill of passing off to a teammate was never promoted more effectively.
Roof Diving
My home on the sloping street of Cordova Drive became a popular venue for our Mesa Olympics.
Dad grew a garden of ice plant on the uphill side of the house, creating a somewhat soft landing pit for our “cool-fall” competitions.
(Warning: Kids, don’t try this at home). Contestants would climb onto our roof, get shot by an imaginary gun, and make their most dramatic fall into the ice plant below.
A panel of judges would rate the effort from 1 to 10. A perfect score would be automatically awarded if you either drew blood or emerged from the garden with a stalk of ice plant in one of your nostrils.
When you’re a sports-loving kid, you’ll take the sweet smell of success any way you can get it.