The best games are created out of boredom and ridiculous circumstances. This story is about the creation of the most fun, yet oddest, game I’ve ever been a part of: Cockball.
To tell this story, I have to back up to my senior year of high school. My best friend at the time, Kent, and I used to spend almost every night driving around listening to rap music that could literally be heard a mile away (I knew he was coming about two minutes before he actually pulled into my driveway).
Kent loved African American culture (I assume he still does) and would constantly say even though he was white everywhere else; he had a big black dick. It was funny mostly because he was the whitest person I knew. A fact I would constantly point out whenever he mentioned it.
For his 18th birthday, I decided it would be hilarious to give him exactly what he already claimed he had: A big black penis. A 10 inch black dildo, to be exact. On his birthday, when he came over to pick me up and hang out, I told him I had a present for him. He took one look in the little plastic bag and started laughing. I explained my reason for buying it for him, which made him laugh harder.
We drove around for a few hours, going to the nearby towns and talking to various people we knew in the area. When he dropped me off (somewhere around 11 or so, I don’t remember the exact time), I walked into my room and realized he left his present behind. I called him and he told me he would get it later (spoiler alert: he never did).
A few months later, I moved to Cedar Rapids to go to Kirkwood Community College. Kent and I still hung out quite a bit, but not as much, with me having class all the time and him working every day. Eventually we grew apart, as friends who grow up usually do. I still talk to him every once in a while, but I haven’t actually seen him in years. Sad, I know.
That first year of college, I still made trips back home to play with my band at the school and visit family and old friends still in high school. One night, after band practice, my friends/band mates Robert and Sam wanted to hang out. Even in college, it was hard to avoid the things you did in high school, so we decided to drive around while listening to CDs. We stopped at my dad’s house for about an hour to find some new CDs to listen to.
While rummaging around in my room, Robert found the dildo (still in the package, in case you were wondering). I told them my reason for buying it and they found it hilarious. I told Robert to put it back where he found it because we were leaving. We went out to my car and as soon as we got in, Robert pulls out his pocket knife and the dildo and opens the package.
“What the hell?” I asked.
“I’ve never seen one before, I want to know what it’s like.”
I shook my head and drove away. When we got to Belle Plaine, Robert rolled his window down and started waving the dildo out at people as we passed them. This went on for about an hour before I decided to leave town before we got in trouble. I took Robert and Sam home, the dildo being put in the glove compartment before Robert got out. I didn’t realize he had put it in there until days later when I returned to Cedar Rapids. Once I found it, I muttered a “God damn it” and closed the glove box.
After that, whenever I would have someone in my car, I would tell them about my glove box treasure. Absolutely everyone thought it was hilarious and pulled it out and waved it at the Cedar Rapids traffic. I’m surprised to this day I never got in trouble for people doing that.
Before class one day, I was telling one of my classmates about my band and how we didn’t have a name yet.
“You should name your band ‘Steve.’”
“But no one in the band’s name is Steve.”
“That’s why it would be funny!”
While I didn’t like that name for a band, I did think it worked for the dildo. Therefore, its new name was Steve.
By my second year of college, the band had broken up and I was no longer going home on the weekends. I had college friends, now, and they took up all my time. Kent and I stopped hanging out almost completely and Robert and Sam would come up to visit once in a while, but otherwise we didn’t see each other.
That fall, I was in the school musical, “Urinetown.” I met many new people, notably Stan, Jack, Jesse, Woody, and Topher. During tech week, Woody, who was playing the villainous lead, started flubbing his lines, which he had perfect only the day before. The music director blamed it on his pants: a pair of jeans with flared legs that Woody had done himself by adding a plaid patch to them. Very unique. He was told to never wear them again, so as a memento, he nailed them to his apartment wall.
A few weeks after this, Topher (who was Woody’s roommate) and I thought it would be funny to take Steve inside and take a picture of him inside the zipper of the pants. After that, simply because I was tired of having the damn thing in my glove compartment, Steve stayed on the wall with the pants.
One night, Woody, Topher, Stan, Jack, Jesse, and I were hanging out at Woody and Topher’s apartment after class. Steve had become quite popular with our friends, because, let’s face it, a bunch of young college guys with a dildo devolve into children. Jack, as a joke, took Steve off the wall and told Jesse to toss a Nerf ball that was sitting on the floor. He hit the ball across the room, and realized that the ball traveled pretty well across the room.
Now, I had gone into the other room to look something up on Topher’s computer.
“Woody, bend over, I’m going to hit it into your gooch.” I heard Jack say.
What the hell? I got up and went out to the living room to see Jack trying to hit the ball into Woody’s ass. After a few minutes of laughing about this, we started playing indoor baseball with Steve as the bat. When we figured out that we couldn’t actually run bases in the apartment, we invoked ghost runners.
Thus, Cockball was invented.
Throughout the two years we played, we made the rules up as we discovered the need for them. For instance, if you hit the back wall without touching a person or the ceiling, it was a home run. If it hit the air conditioner, it was a triple. If it went behind the couch, it was a double. Everything else was a single. For the first few games, as a joke, we had Woody bend over in the outfield and called it the “7th inning Gooch,” where, if you hit him in the ass, it was an automatic grand slam (even if there was no one on base). I don’t recall anyone ever doing it.
We thought about patenting it as a college game, and wrote out the rules and everything, but realized that apparently ”Cockball” was already a different game (a stupider one at that. Look it up if you don’t know it). That and we really had no idea how that kind of stuff worked.
We bought a white board and a permanent marker and drew out a score board, which still hangs on my refrigerator. Steve resides with Jesse as a souvenir. And we all have the memory of this wonderful game.
