In this game there is no Brad Pitt or Edward Norton. In fact there isn't even a Meatloaf song playing in the background.
But there are plenty of bloody knuckles and the occasional broken bones. We aren't talking about an illicit underground fight club, instead a group of Bay Area bankers, programmers and your average everyday people playing underground dodgeball.
Using the word play seems inappropriate based on a profile in the Oakland Tribune of the parking garage nighttime obstacle of stealthily maneuvering around whirling rubber balls.
The paper describes it best:
Dodgeball experienced a brief rec-league renaissance following the release of the 2004 comedy "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story," whose lovable losers were instantly recognizable to anyone ever forced to play the game in gym class. But this isn't that. Underground dodgeball is closer in spirit to "Fight Club," the 1999 film starring Brad Pitt in which young men release aggression by beating each other senseless late at night.
But the one major difference between "Dodgeball Club" and "Fight Club" is that you can take about "Dodgeball Club."
Games usually consist of 30 to 40 players and unlike bicycle polo in the City these games usually go on in parking garages late at night without interference from authority figures as long as the players stay out of sight, out mind.
"You tell your friends, 'I went to an underground parking garage last night and got my face smashed in with a dodgeball,' " one player told the paper. "How cool is that?"
Cool indeed. Cool enough to ask that person how to get your face smashed in your face yourself.
