“If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.”
Like swine flu did in 2009, the World Cup craze has fully descended onto Hong Kong. Samba dancers sashay through the streets and every restaurant from your local dai pai dong to McDonald’s is offering some sort of football special. So you could be forgiven for being unaware of the fact that, over last weekend, Hong Kong had the honor of hosting the world championships of another sport: dodgeball. Yes, dodgeball, that playground game most commonly played by children during recess or gym class in North America, has a world championship. For actual grown adults. In fact, this is its third, with the inaugural tournament hosted in Malaysia followed by New Zealand last year.
When you make your first steps into the dodgeball community, you’re not entirely sure if it’s a massive joke, a cult, or both. On one hand, teams have infantile names like “Fondle My Balls”, “Balls On Your Mom” and “Ball So Hard”, on the other hand, players take time off work and shell out money to fly halfway across the globe to play in a tournament. The players put off a goofy, jovial vibe but the local league itself is organized with precision normally reserved for sports televised on ESPN.
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Brian Li, 36, who grew up in Hong Kong and studied in the US, could rightfully be called the godfather of dodgeball. Like many others who created their own local leagues around the world, Li started the Hong Kong Dodgeball Association (HKDA) in 2006 after being inspired by the 2004 American comedy Dodgeball: The Movie, starring Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn. “I was looking for something to do on weeknights and I thought, why not start a league?,” he recalled. The game is played with opposing teams of six players and six balls on the court. If a player is hit with the ball then they’re out of the game, and can only return into play when a teammate catches a ball thrown by an opposing player.
The league started out at a respectable 30 to 40 players in 2006, but it soon hit a plateau in garnering more interest. “We discovered […] that no one likes getting their ass kicked,” Li said. “The game is very quick-paced, it’s very aggressive, and you throw a ball at a person. It’s legal and people applaud you for it.” Perhaps some people, who unsuspectingly strolled into what they thought would be a glorified kids’ game, were not prepared to have their faces pummeled by balls thrown by screaming strangers. The solution, they found, was to create more divisions to allow players to compete at a comfortable level. Now there are four co-ed divisions and two women’s divisions, with a staggering 1,000 players, and the HKDA is entirely self-sustaining financially by collecting fees from teams (many of which are sponsored by companies). Unbelievably, the game has paid referees and one full-time employee, whose job it is to record every single game, put it on YouTube, and re-watch them to calculate team and individual player stats.
With visionary foresight and mildly frightening zeal, Li ensured the legitimacy of the league from the early days: he registered the company as a non-profit in 2008 in order to make it eligible for it to become an official “national sports association” for Hong Kong, which it has yet to achieve. “I saw potential for it, I saw that it could be a lot bigger than it is, Li said. “I can see it becoming an Olympic sport, at the very least an Asian sport.” He said this with no hint of irony, and his actions support his words. He developed the rules now being pushed as the global standard, and even designed and found a manufacturer to make the perfect dodgeball—not too hard, but still sufficiently aerodynamic and completely affordable—after a year of research and design tweaks. Hence if dodgeball ever makes it to the Olympics—the hope of most if not all dodgeball diehards—Hong Kong, one of the founding members of the World Dodgeball Federation (WDBF), will probably go down in history as the birthplace of serious competitive dodgeball. “We got voted the best dodgeball league in the world [by the WDBF],” Li boasts. “We actually have a few Canadian players who flew here just to play in our league for a couple of months.”
Li is not the first of his family to find the initiative to create a community around an obscure sport from scratch. His older sister is one of the founding pioneers for women’s ice hockey in Hong Kong and is the current captain of the national team—in fact, to recognize her contribution to the promotion of the sport, she will soon be inducted into the Toronto Ice Hockey Hall of Fame.
But compared to other athletic pastimes, like ice hockey, Li stressed that this is the perfect sport for Asians with an argument that vaguely recalls phrenological theories: “Asians love it. It’s perfect for us—it’s not about how big you are!” He explained further: “The smaller you are, the harder it is to hit you. Asians have a great power to size ratio.” When asked whether this could be construed as slightly racist, he responds that it’s not, and emphasizes that dodgeball is a “multicultural sport”.
Whether or not you fit Li’s stereotype of Asians, whatever that is, Li indeed believes that dodgeball may be the one sport to unite us all. In fact, the league has a healthy mix of ages, from 18 to 55, and of expats (or internationally-educated people) and local people, though the latter makes up less than a tenth of teams. A Kowloon league is in the works to try to encourage more participation from Hongkongers who may not have grown up playing the game.
Even athletic ability may not be a limiting factor in your potential for dodgeball greatness: “We all started at D4, everybody,” Li said. “This is the only sport in the world where if you want to get good, like world cup level, you will be, with dedication—everybody!” He described the path to dodgeball addiction. “One girl makes a catch [when there are] six [players] on one and saves the game and she’s addicted right there. People are applauding and she feels like a rock star for the next two minutes.” But at the end of the day, “it’s all about teamwork, rather than individual skill,” said Li, always prepared with a sound bite to sell dodgeball to anyone within earshot.
The Friday before the tournament began, the “HKDA 2014 Spring Season End and WDBF World Championships Kick-Off Party” was hosted at Privé, a popular nightclub in Lan Kwai Fong. Prizes like “Best Sportsmanship” and “Most Improved” were handed out with medals, while highlights from the season—complete with text overlays naming the signature moves—were played on the clubs’ various TV screens.
Not unlike many other sport cultures, there exists a slight undertone of male jock douchebaggery among the members. The photo for the party’s Facebook event features a man with the tip of a bottle of Grey Goose vodka shoved into his eye socket. Outside Privé, a hair-gelled guy tries his luck on a girl standing by the entrance (in vain): “Hey… What division do you play for?” Later, Li quips to the male coach of the Australian women’s team that being in that position is “the best way to get girls man, they have to listen to you!” The Australian laughs in response, and adds: “You’re kind of in a fraternity, and with a whole bunch of medals!” Li acknowledges that there is indeed, some “bad hype” in some dodgeball leagues due to their organizers’ macho tendencies but assures that there is none of that in Hong Kong.
On Sunday night at the finals, hosted at Queen Elizabeth Stadium in Wan Chai, the spectators may not have filled the stadium in numbers but most certainly did with the volume of their cheers. As the Hong Kong women’s team duked it out against the American team, the chants of “Hong Kong! Hong Kong!” grew louder and louder until the American supporters decided to roar “USA! USA!” in retaliation. Players were flying face-first and bending backwards à la Matrix to avoid the trajectory of the balls, with their legs protected from unnecessary skinning by their knee-guards. Unfortunately the Hong Kong women were defeated, but winning two silvers and one bronze in three years is more than respectable. Tracy Lai, thirty-something project manager at a private equity firm and three-time Hong Kong all-star team member, is happy with the result: “I think we did really well. Coming into this we had high hopes of making it into the finals and we accomplished that.” With the USA snabbing the gold, Malaysia went home with the bronze.
The Hong Kong men also performed well, winning the bronze medal. Canada came first while long-time rival USA came second, in a game that featured aerobatic pirouettes and physics-defying jumps several feet high. The Hong Kong men’s team actually won the gold in the first world championship, back in 2012. Though Li claims that was a bit of a “fluke”, it gave the sport a credibility and morale boost in the city, helping it to grow further.
This year’s championship was intentionally scheduled to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the release of Dodgeball: The Movie. It’s unclear whether or not the cast is aware of their part in creating a new sport and a global phenomenon, but sadly it seems that star Ben Stiller is less than enthused about dodgeball. When he was asked what he thought about the sport in a June 13 “Ask Me Anything” session (a live Q&A with readers) on popular social news website Reddit, he said: “I actually don’t love the game of Dodgeball, I find it very stressful and violent. […] It doesn’t bring out the best in people I don’t think.”
Li might have a retort to that: “Once [people] try it they say ‘I can’t believe it took me so long to try it!’ It’s like vegemite. They think it’s ugly, that it’s a joke, but once they try it they realize it’s pretty great.” With the next world championship being in Las Vegas, and the distant dream of a non-windsurfing Olympic medal for Hong Kong (that’s the last and only gold medal we won. In 1996.), perhaps it’s not such a bad idea to take a sip of that dodgeball Kool-Aid.
Photos: Laurel Chor
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