“”Dodgeball is a sport of violence, exclusion, and degradation.”

— Seven-time ADAA All-Star Patches O’Houlihan

Early on, life divides us into two categories: the hunters and the hunted. While social norms have organized us into a suit-and-tie army of middle managers, the raw animalistic urge to hit someone in the face with a red Olympia playball still lurks beneath.

There are precious few outlets for these underlying feelings, and they only grow scarcer as we get older. College is usually your last chance to play a competitive sport on a regular basis, unless you’re Josh Childress or you call recreation league softball “competitive.”

When I came to Stanford, I vastly outjumped my own talent in any particular sport. I played baseball in high school, but the only chance I would have of walking on to the team here would be if all members of SAE came down with Natty Ice-induced aneurysms in the same week. My innate need to beat people was going hungry, and I, desperate, resorted to punching babies and berating elderly women to get my fix.

Intramural sports weren’t helping either; I was robbed of a softball title last year by incompetent umpiring, and I’m not good enough at any other sport to organize a dominant team. As a junior, the possibility of graduating without an “Intramural Champions” shirt was becoming frighteningly real to me.

And then Zeus spoke in IM Commissioner Jay Jackson’s ear and told him to introduce intramural dodgeball this fall. For those of you unfamiliar with the competitive wet dream that is Stanford dodgeball, consult the IM website or the movie Dodgeball, which adequately sums up the rules. I vowed to my teammates — mostly former members of the disgraced softball team from the year before — that we would emerge victorious.

And thus, Dan Blatnik and the Electrical Engineering Grad All-Stars were born. We were an unstoppable juggernaut, from our name (carefully conceived to lull opponents into a false sense of security) to our stacked lineup of former high school baseball players. At this point, if the saga of Stanford dodgeball were a movie, there would be an elaborate Rocky-style montage showing our completion of an undefeated regular season.

Every Saturday night, we looked forward to pounding hapless opponents into oblivion. While other people were out drinking, we were pummeling freshman dorms and icing our arms . . . then drinking.

This was all, of course, just buildup to the real deal: the one-day, 16-team playoff tournament culled from the original field of 49 teams. After blowing through the first two rounds and defeating 680 in the semifinals in a grueling game that could be called “hotly contested” in the same way that the St. Louis Cardinals could claim they were the second-best team in baseball last year, we waited for our opponent in the finals.

On the other side of Ford Center, the Jort Warriors were facing Notorious B.A.L.L.Z. in an overtime shootout. If you don’t know what Jorts are, I’ll pause here to let you look it up, dry-heave at the thought of ten hairy, muscular grad students wearing them while playing dodgeball, and then resume reading. The match itself was complemented by about 100 people crowding the sidelines with enough Coors Light to get Sam Cassell laid.

Notorious B.A.L.L.Z., meanwhile, were dressed like the white love children of Carmelo Anthony and Missy Elliot. One of their key players was wearing a do-rag and a throwback Patrick Ewing jersey. (If you were going for a “good luck” jersey, wouldn’t you pick an athlete who’d actually won in the playoffs? Were his Chris Webber and Dan Marino jerseys in the wash?) Another guy walked around with a permanent scowl like he was Jon Gruden.

Word was circulating in the crowd that they were all business school students who had petitioned the IM office to add dodgeball as a sport. There was no doubting that they were douchebags, but it was also clear that they could play.

Anyway, Notorious won, the crowd exploded, and they started a victory lap around the gym. Having seen our team, they decided that the tournament was over and that victory in the finals was a foregone conclusion.

We swept them, four games to none. I’d like to say we won the crowd, but it was much more gratifying to win with a legion of unattractive girls and hangers-on rooting against us. Jon Gruden was the last elimination for the B.A.L.L.Z, in a moment that will live on in the echelons of Stanford sports forever.

So now I have an “Intramural Champions” T-shirt that says “Dodgeball” on the back. This means more to me than my house, my car, my forklift operator certification, or my potential BA in Political Science ever will and was undoubtedly earned with much more effort.

Dan Blatnik and the EE All-Stars, I salute you.

Dan McCarthy is a junior whose editor is too lazy to write anything cute here. E-mail him anyway at dmcc23@stanford.edu.