hawaiian sellout

 hawaiian sellout

     There is a quote by the great Dodger hero Roy Campanella that says "you need to have a lot of little boy in you to play baseball for a living." You could say that about a great number of activities in our adult lives from laughing at farts to being fascinated by balls moving about a TV screen. However, there was nothing as basic to the men and women, boys and girls in these posts as spirited games of "hawaiian sellout" The term comes from a hilarious Firesign Theater sketch where contestants play a game called hawaiian sell out that ends with the greediest player getting a prize of a big bag of shit. Since we often quoted silly Firesign sentences that everybody but nobody truly understood we plucked the nonsense title out of our subconscious to describe a game we began playing out of sheer boredom in the old crash pad on Midvale. All hawaiian sellout entails is any kind of wadded up piece of paper, cloth or soft nerf ball that is batted around a group that keeps trying to keep the object from hitting the floor. Over the decades we occasionally played hawaiian sellout whenever we could get a room full of willing friends. Players could be of any age and I can be sure it has been played by those from ages 3 to 81. Around this basic and silly game we created a mythology where keeping the "bird" aloft kept the planet from exploding or rescued players from being dunked into a room full of boiling lava or warm diarrhea. There were records supposedly achieved and surpassed along with terms for maneuvers we used in starting the game or keeping the bird in flight. Alcohol and  pot were welcomed onto the pitch. Imagine a dozen full grown adults sweating, hooting, diving and bellowing in delight at some stretch of the limbs that kept the bird off the ground. Hawaiian sellout was played at Midvale, Veteran and Ohio, Church lane, Holly Knoll, Dillon and Lavell drive. The torch was passed to other generations and Sarah Creason knew the bird just as her grandpa Stephen added a particularly vigorous spirit to sellout. He even coined the term foofing for an easy touch in pushing the bird toward another player. Ed Sheehy played hawaiian sellout and Katya was a pretty decent foofer herself. Greg played with a solid hand and kept the bird moving without much tomfoolery but started an opening gambit called the Algonquin that commenced the action with a kick instead of a loft. Yes, in a room chock full of  PhD's, Masters degrees, many college degrees and professional careers among the players the shouts and gasps during a hawaiian sellout were just pure fun.