The Legend of Debaucheryball

Ancient and modern societies have devised elaborate playing fields to show off to their friends. Stonehenge, Easter Island, the Mayan temples, even the North American serpent mounds have all been archeologically proven to be debaucheryball playing grounds.

Getting drunk and throwing things at other things is the oldest game known to mankind. While the popularity of bocce ball has waxed and waned throughout its history, the popularity of its older and more obnoxious brother, debaucheryball, has always held an underground, cultish sort of stranglehold on the lower and lower-middle working classes.

As early as 5000 B.C. the Egyptians played a form of bocce with rounded stones. Early art depicting the elite tossing a ball or monkey’s head have been recorded as early as 5200 B.C. But what history ignores is the fact that the true game of games, debaucheryball, originated many thousands of years earlier. Ancient cave paintings clearly show primitive man neglecting his hunting duties and instead playing debaucheryball.

While bocce today looks quite different from its early predecessors, the unbroken thread of debaucheryball’s lineage is the consistently common objective of drinking beer, talking smart (the elusive and seldom-taught language of "smartbonics"), screwing your friends with unreasonable rules, and violating helpless objects like birdbaths and garden gnomes. >>>

Cave paintings from 18,000 B.C. show why this civilization perished: notice the meaty animal in the background running free (and uneaten) while the men engage in less productive pastimes.

Most of the nobility in ancient Egypt and Greece were too far removed from the working man to interpret much of the nonsense that the D-ball competitors called rules, so they civilized it (as nobles often do) into a watered-down, wussy version of the true game.

It was reported in the Old Testament (somewhere towards the back) that when the arrogant and high-brow Roman guards were bored, they took great pleasure in joining Jewish debaucheryball pick-up games, but then slaughtered their opponents as soon as they made an unfair rule.

From Egypt the games made their way to Greece and then to the Romans, who introduced it throughout the empire. Legend has it that the “proper” societies preferred to play the easier and less-entertaining bocce ball, and the pariah societies (Moabites, Philistines, et al.) chose the relative low-profile but high-challenge version of debaucheryball. The Romans and the Greeks had the wherewithal to use imported coconunts or carved, polished wood, while the plebes had to resort to human skulls, gourds, and the occasional rock.

Beginning with Emperor Augustus, the early Greek physician Ipocrates, and the great Galileo, the early participants of bocce ball have noted that the game’s athleticism and spirit of competition rejuvenates the body.

Even Christ himself has been said (New Testament, again, somewhere towards the back) to have verbally browbeaten his disciples when he caught them drinking wine on the beach and crawling around in the sand when they were supposed to be out telling people about God.

Debaucheryball, on the otherhand, prides itself on being almost entirely non-athletic. The only spirit or rejuvenation to be found in its execution is a spirit of malicious mischief and the rejuvenation of the idea that it’s really, really funny when people fall down. That, and seeing someone screw themselves with a throw that ends up in an alligator pit and you’re playing “play it where it lies.”

As the game enjoyed rapid growth throughout Europe, being the sport of the peasants (who knows what the hell the aristocracy was up to?), it began to “threaten with the health of nations,” to hear the church say it. Disease and disinterest in working was passed from peasant to peasant in the course of a typical game.

The popularity of the game, presumably, interfered with the security of the state because it took too much time away from such important activities as dying of horrible diseases, indentured servitude, and being taxed out of existence. Consequently, Kings Carlos IV and V prohibited the playing of debaucheryball and bocce ball alike (blithely claiming it a form of gambling), and lords and clergy were permitted to then take great pleasure in racking and executing offenders caught in the act.

The debaucheryballs were always confiscated, though curiously, often "disappeared” before they could be destroyed. We can only speculate on why the walls of the big castles were so high and their lawns were so green and why their inhabitants always seemed, well, kind of hung over.

(The game of marbles appeared during this same period, likely in an attempt to play a proper game of debaucheryball within the private confines of the plebes’ reeking, filthy homes.)

At one point, the Republic of Venice publicly condemned the sport, punishing those who played with fines, imprisonment and stonings (usually with the condemned’s own bocce set).

Eventually, the renaissance rekindled an interest in proper bocce, and the improper, funner version again took hold with the poor huddled masses. Such nobility as Queen Elizabeth I and Sir Francis Drake were avid fans who liked to go “slumming” for a proper game of “Screw the Peasants.”

*It has been noted that one early American playing field was an amazingly lovely field in Gettysburg. 

It seems "...north and south first tried to hash out their differences in a good old fashioned game of debaucheryball, then got out the muskets when it got dark and there was only enough beer left for one side." 

According to legend, Sir Frances Drake refused to set out to defend England against the Spanish Armada until he finished a debaucheryball game with his non-military and decidedly fratty drinking buddies. He proclaimed, "First we finish the game, then we fry the keg, THEN we’ll deal with the Armada." >>>

The sport first came to America in the English version called “booyah” from the French “cest’ boule plais,” meaning “waste of time.” In accord with how the game was played in Britain, American players engaged one another not in the filthy, urban conditions, but on amber waves of grain and purple mountains.

(The mountains were purple because they were usually soaked with spilled wine from explorers having a good game of booyahball, something F. Scott. Key never mentioned in his little "tune.")

In modern times, debaucheryball has gone pretty much underground. It's mostly disorganized and resembles nothing like the first bocce clubs that appeared in Italy, then other western countries like the U.K. and the U.S.

Things are beginning to change in this regard, though. The forties and fifties saw almost no D-ball because everyone was working so hard to scratch out a living.>>>

After a long week of work at the sweatshop, mid-century Americans enjoyed a secret game behind the woodshed where the wives couldn't see.

Now that free time, cheap beer, and public parks are plentiful and accessible, the U.S. once again offers plenty of opportunity to flex the pernicious muscles of the working-class szchlubs. That, and there’s not much left on TV anymore.

*It should be added that the oral traditions of debaucheryball are an important a part of the game. It’s not easy for the uninitiated to just think up cool rules to screw their friends. They need to be taught.

Throw out a pallino and you’re just a bocce ball player. Throw it at a grove of pine trees or into a public swimming pool at midnight--or better yet, into the unlined bed of someone's cherished pickup truck--and you’ve stepped into the world of debaucheryball.

Become part of the long history from great thinkers such as Galileo and da Vinci, to gods like Dionysus and Bacchus, to the noble Sir Francis Drake and even America’s own Thomas Edison (who spent more of his time devising cool new rules and perfecting his spin shots than inventing stuff).

Enjoy the world’s oldest sport, a sport known to revive the animal in everyone and generally piss off the neighbors. The sport that, next to courting women, is the most popular game in the world.

Light the Fuse