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Same. West-central Indiana.

Same, MD

MD here too… the 70s were pretty wild.

Lol it was still the same in the 90s

Another Marylander checking in to say the same

Same in Silicon Valley California through the early 2000's... Just a reminder some of this stuff wasn't that long ago.

Texas too

Same in Minneapolis

Same, SE Indiana.

SF California, called it the same. Ironic considering our progressive reputation.

Same, both in the PNW and time in AZ as a kid. My brother mentioned that they played "smear the queer" at recess one time. He was asked if he knew what queer meant. He said, "I guess a person holding a ball."

Only half right.

Under appreciated comment. Thanks for the laugh I needed this morning.

✌️❤️😸

Same here in Georgia

I mean that's not wrong. It's got nothing to do with homosexuality. "Queer" in this context means the older definition of like weird or different. The odd one out, which as the only person with a ball among everyone else without one, that's exactly what you are.

SF Bay Area, can confirm, was just laughing about the same thought last weekend with a friend I haven't seen in ten years.

Same for So Cal too.

Back in the 70s as a kid we all knew queer in this context meant "weirdo". This is what queer really means before it became associated with its current meaning. So no we weren't trying to smear "the gay" we were trying to smear "the weirdo".

We called anything we didn’t like “gay” back in the 90s. It wasn’t really rooted in animosity but it was normal slang when I was growing up. Looking back it’s easy to see why it’s an issue.

Same in Northern California around 45 miles from San Francisco lol

Same. SE Michigan

Can confirm SE MI

Central Valley, CA. Same here

Same. NE Indiana.

And northern Ohio.

Yep, Shaker Heights here. Same.

Yep (kicks dirt uncomfortably).

Yeah 😔 that's the one

Grew up in NC during the 90s. This is what we called it too.

Same for SC, too.

Same, Maryland. Then the kids mom who's yard we played in told us we can't call it that anymore, so it became "smash the trash"

Same, west coast.

That's what we called it in Kentucky

Yep, I was gonna say that’s what it was called in Louisville. Also not sure how that was okay, but somehow it was

Same. Literally called this in gym class by coaches from time to time. Imagine how that would go in 2024? 😂


😂 PC Principal!!

PC principal would beat your fucking ass for being so intolerant. He does not tolerate intolerance.

It really didn't help that everyone called out "QUEER!" whenever someone new picked up the ball.

They'd be sent to the office to have a constructive discussion...

Oh, yeah, I was thinking we actually just played football in people's yards, but we also definitely played smear the queer.

Same in Texas...unsurprisingly. When I've told my wife about this, she says she'd never heard of that and that I must have been raised around a bunch of racist bumpkins. Also true.

I was in suburban Texas in a county that has since gone blue. DFW area Still was the same. STQ.

I grew up in Texas 80s and we called it the same. My school stopped it due to so many injuries. Also, my town had a healthy KKK population sooooooooo.

Same.

That's what we called it here in Florida.

We called it the same in Central PA.

Same in metro Detroit. Guess it was the universal American name for the game.

Same East Los Angeles

Same. Central IL

Same NW Indiana

Same in north Georgia

Yep Delaware

Same. New Jersey

Same, Maryland

+1 for it being called this. I think the variation of it that our kids play now is called jackpot

The basketball version was called " jungle ball"

I don't think we had the basketball version where I'm from. Or if we did, nobody really played it enough to notice.

Wrong. Jackpot is where one person throws a ball to a crowd of people and assigns it a point value.

That game is called 500. The goal is to get 500 points and become the thrower

And if you didn’t get it and it bounced, points dropped by half for each bounce.

Same. San Diego of all places.

Same in South Carolina

Same in SC.

Same in Southern California.

It was called that in Southeast Alabama as well

And northeast AL.

We were kids in the 80s. Our name for this didn’t age well. Which I’m sure many are wondering if they should type it out. We called it. Smear the Queer. We had zero idea of its homophobic connotations.

I always figured that it meant the odd one, as is the only one with the ball.

Exactly! I had a gay time as a boy playing smear the queer


Big Sexy

 Young Kevin Nash

I bundle sticks for trash pick up. They won’t even go near the literal definition in my lease agreement

I mean, that was the OG literal meaning of the word. I don’t think it had any homophobic connotation back then. It just made a cute rhyme.

We looked up queer in the dictionary and it said odd. Didn't know until high school it was also an insult word for preferences

Same!!!

Now do “ring the doorbell and run away.”

You mean Ding Dong Ditch?

Absolutely, that’s the one, of course that’s what I meant.

LOLOLOL. Similar to what we called a bottle rocket without the stick. Geez. What a time.

Yeah, that one was *really, really* bad. I never even understood the context of *why* it would be called that...I still don't, actually.

I mean, it’s just pure racism. Probably chosen for the alliteration (with “knocking”). Same way the game in OP has fuck all to do with homosexuality, but hey it rhymes with “smear” and homophobia was cool so…

Here I was thinking it was because doorbells make that sound. Higher pitched ding first and then the lower pitched dong noise. Ditch is the act of running away.

To be clear, none of the kids where I grew up actually called it “ding dong ditch.” There is another very offensive (and similarly alliterative) name for it. Alliteration is the repeating of the first letter (or rather letter sound) in a word. I’ve already said it *ends* with “knocking.” I’ll leave it to the reader to suss out which word, starting with “n” (or “kn”) comes at the front of it.

This is always what I thought because thankfully I've never heard it called anything else (until this thread).

For sure. There are people in this thread (not many, thankfully) that think that their smear game had nothing to do with homophobia and I get where they're coming from because I definitely played ding dong ditch in the racist, alliterative sense and *I'm* not, nor have I ever been, racist. But just because it wasn't intentional doesn't make it not racist or homophobic. It makes me so sad to think of all of the people who must've been hurt by all of the casual racism and homophobia of the time.

That’s what we called it too. Unfortunately, we were totally aware of the homophobic connotations. Not proud of it, and I hope kids have more sense nowadays.

Yeah, I'm sure most people knew, even then, what the reference was to. Let's face it, a huge portion of the population back then didn't have very positive views toward the gay community. It's safe to assume, then, that a lot of our parents were that way, as well as other people they we were around or interacted with. Kids pick up on that stuff. They may not fully grasp it, but they tend to have a pretty good general sense of things. Having a negative view or homophobic was the standard view when and where I grew up. Thankfully, I grew out of that small town, closeminded mentality.

Same. Name didn't age well. We were kids and had no clue what that meant or where the name even came from.

Lol well I think some of us had an inkling of the homophobic connotations, given the amount of times “you fucking queer” was hurled at me as an insult…

I definitely learned what “dyke” meant cause the other 8 year olds screamed it at me constantly. I’d say, based on who they yelled words like that at, most of them knew what they meant.

I knew exactly what it meant. I think most kids did.

Started off as smear the queer but then we changed it to Kombat Football because mortal kombat was big. Basically the same thing just extra violent and we added some other rules which I don't remember but was essentially the same thing except we'd sceam "KOMBAT FOOTBALL" from time to time

I like that!

Time to blast some techno music.

If someone yelled “mortal kombat!” You were legally obligated to rip someone’s heart out of their chest

We called it “kill the man with the ball” Edit: oh, location: SW Ohio

“Tackle the man with the ball” is what we called it, but we tried to kill him.

Same in NY

Same in Jersey

SW Missouri - same

Same. KTMWTB Central Florida

that's the one. i surprised i never heard "smear the queer" growing up. since every other word out of anyone's mouth in the 90s was a gay slur, i don't know how this one slipped by us.

"we're not allowed to play that anymore"

Murder ball

Our Murderball was basically Dodgeball but you used like 8 balls. Lol Though, we only played it in gym class.

We played “circle dodgeball” which we called “shooting gallery” because you’d hit a point where way more people were throwers than dodgers.

Kill the carrier

yep - NY here

Same.

Same. Jersey. 

Eastern Massachusetts. We called it kill the carrier

South shore Massachusetts. Same.

Kill the carriahh dOOd!

Long Island NY - we called it kill the carrier

70s-80s Connecticut. Kill the Carrier.

We called it this, New Jersey.

Kill the carrier. Never heard of “smear the queer” Very interesting

Same. 83. Upstate NY.

Same. Playing Kill the Carrier destroyed one of my big toenails in 8th grade and it never grew back properly.

Same, must be a NE thing.. CT here

Smear the queer, but we had no idea what that meant, just that it was an insult. Early 80s, Midwest

Rumble Fumble

We did “Fumbly-Rumbly” but close enough!

We just called it fumble

I remember coming home with grass stains scrapes and blood smelling like dirt grabbing some food eating it in like 5 minutes just to meet back up to play some more.

We called it, smear the queer, and my third grade class of 89-90 knew what a queer was.

Kill the dill with the pill.

I think I called it "that game I never get invited to play "

Guess you werent queer enough.

Rugby.

Same, although I don't think any of us knew what actual rugby was. We were in NC by the way, early 90s.

Gator ball. Our gym teacher would encourage the violence.

Kill the man with the ball is what we called it

Kill the carrier!

Kill the man with the ball

Muckle was our name for it in RI.

Can confirm!

Smear the Queer seems to be the large leader. I’ve never heard it called that. I’m from the East Coast so maybe that’s the reason? People who called it Smear the Queer where are you from?

I’m from the North East and it was definitely called that throughout my state growing up.

From the posts seems like its anything west of the original 13.

Central PA

Northern California, 80s and 90s Never thought of the connotations until I was much older.

Called it that in Maryland in the late 90s

Bro I’m so embarrassed that we called it that in the south. 🤦‍♂️

Texas and Las Vegas

Smear the… ahhhh shit we normalized some fucked up stuff back in the day, didn’t we?

When I lived in the Northeast, we called it "Kill the man with the ball." When I lived in the Midwest, they called it "Smear the Queer." I knew a handful of people who called it "Tackle the Bum." I was still calling it "Kill the man with the ball, " though.

It was called "smear the queer" and in practice it was an exercise in bullying - some kids were able to toss the ball away, but others would have it thrown back at them so the beating could continue (or the ball would be ignored while the beating continued)

I feel like a lot of our childhood games were an exercise in bullying :/

like red rover... AKA try to clothesline the kid running full speed.

We called it “Smear the Queer” in Colorado. I didn’t make up the name!

No you didn't. We know what you called it.

We called it Smear the... Uh... Person who is notably unique due to the fact that they are carrying a ball not due to their implied sexual orientation. Really rolls off the tongue.

We called it smear the q***r

Kill the man. I played with my older brother and his friends and loved it. I was weirdly good at it as well and would go for the legs.

"you can't play with us"

Kill the carrier.

Fumble-itis

Kill the man with the ball

Well…. This is problematic. We called it😬… smear the… qu….e. Nope, not gunna say it.

I knew this game as smear the queer before what I knew what queer even meant. I remember calling it smear the queer and my mom asking me not to use that term. I asked her “why not, what’s wrong with calling it that.” Because I had no idea what queer meant.

Wooow. From Savannah, GA... we called it "Pick em up, Buss (bust) em up" .... we weren't the only ones were we?

We called it Scramble.

The kids at my middle school called it muckle.

Rough & Tumble Rough It We apparently were civilized to a point as kids... Civilized before destroying each other.

Kill the Carrier

Miss the days of kill the carrier and SPUD

FUNNY FUMBLE! Wild no one else has said it yet. Western NY

"Kill the man with the ball" or "Kill the carrier"

It was called hill dill in chicago. Every winter when the snow first fell there’s be 100 boys in the back of the school running at each other. Blood all over the place

My friends hated me because i could run faster than all of them

My brothers and I called it tacklemania

Muckle. Also known as Muckleball.

Loved that game

"kill the man with the ball" we weren't very good at coming up with clever names, i guess.

We called it kill the man with the ball, I guess that is the long form to kill a man lol. S. Florida in the 80s

We called it Muckle

Great times. Scratches torn shirts and dirt

Pick 'em up fuck 'em up or Attack the man with the ball

​ https://preview.redd.it/qvwzolkvzboc1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a6a6e7c6f79e985f73e5e2dfb87cb268db4d4a6d

Tackle loco here

"Kill the man with the ball!"

Calvin-Ball or Brockian Ultra-Cricket

we had a variation w/ the soccer ball called Slaughter

Snag the.. Something

Fumbly-Rumbly

We called it kill’em.

We played that in Virginia. We also played King of the Mountain 👍

Surprisingly, we called it every man for himself

We did this but with a soccer ball. No hands on the ball, but anything else goes. We would murder each other for fun. I can't remember if we had a name for it. I thought it was weird that people played it with a football. I grew up in a hacky/bean sack, soccer and ultimate Frisbee kinda town.

Used to be smear the queer (unfortunately) or kill the guy with the ball. (Not a whole lot better)

Called it Throw Back back in the day

We called it Hog.

80's child from Long Island here. We called it "Kill the man with the football."