Kevin Rivoli, Associated Press Kickball is so big they're playing it in Syracuse, N.Y., as these guys demonstrate. Part of the fun is you get to chuck the ball at someone as hard as you can!

A real kick

Yes, we're aware of Steelermania, but the game that more and more Pittsburghers love is played with a round ball. We refer, of course, to kickball, which is not a reference to the Pirates infield but the age-old game that separated the athletes from the rest of us on the school playground. You'll now find more bouncing balls in Pittsburgh than you see under the lyrics of a Sesame Street song. The game experienced a resurgence with the dawn of the new millennium. The Pittsburgh Sports League organized in 2002; now there are 24 adult teams. You can see the kickball renaissance in action tomorrow morning at 11 at Mellon Field in Shadyside. It's a charity tournament to raise money for girls in trouble -- the 3rd Annual Kickball for Hope. The Morning File suspects that young professionals are drawn to the game because you can chuck the ball at opponents as hard as you can.

In case you've blocked out this part of childhood, kickball is basically baseball without the bats and gloves. Its explosive popularity produced a World Adult Kickball Association, which organizes games, provides umpires and encourages socializing for 17,000 players in 18 states and Fallujah. But WAKA isn't the only game in town, if the town is Washington D.C. When DCKickball, a rival league, appeared on the scene, WAKA's Web site urged visitors "not to be fooled by copycat kickball clubs," according to the Wall Street Journal.

Picture the quiet New England town of Danbury, Conn., with a cozy Main Street and well-manicured lawns. It has ice cream stores. It has Little League games. It has neighbors who borrow each other's lawn pruners. But it also has 100 Ecuadorean immigrants playing volleyball in its backyards. Not just any volleyball, either. We're not going to sugarcoat this: We're talking volleyball with Ecuadorean balls and nets. Code enforcers raided the games last month, citing the hosts for selling beer and chicken and having nets that rose more than 20 feet (to keep the ball from bouncing into other yards), according to the New York Times. Now the City Council wants to give police the power to regulate "repetitive outdoor activities." Wonder if that would include lawn-mowing and golf?

You probably thought croquet was a made-up game in Alice in Wonderland played with flamingo mallets. But, in fact, the sport, sometimes called "chess on grass," can be competitive, brutal and downright dirty. Few know this better than Pennsylvania's own Kenster Rosenberry, a Penn State computer programmer ranked 112th in the world going into this week's -- deep breath here -- 10th World Croquet Federation World Association Croquet Championship in England, which ends Sunday. He's facing competitors, such as -- and since we're doing the color commentary, we'll supply the nicknames -- England's James "This Game Will Bore You To" Death and Rutger "Just Try Spelling My Last Name" Beijderwellen from the Netherlands. Sadly, he did not make it to the quarter-finals.

While wearing all white and being all male -- at least for tournament play -- are required for proper croquet, extreme croquet is drawing people of all sexes who want to cheat, imbibe, wear plaid or scuba dive on the croquet field. From Seattle to Sweden, these extremists endure rugged terrain to put the ball through the wicket. Don't think they're not sticklers for rules, though. For example, the Lakewood Croquet Club of Seattle, which hosts a prominent league, mandates: "Win if you can, lose if you must, but always cheat." "Distract the opponents." And "Striking of the Ducks," in which a player who inadvertently hits a duck with a mallet is penalized.

From the AP
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Surely you watched the X-Games last weekend, in which young and seemingly indestructible "athletes" competed in extreme sports, such as turning back flips on motorcycles, skateboarding across 70-foot gaps and running into walls at full speed to see who stays conscious the longest. Well, not the last one -- yet. But it still wasn't pretty. One participant told the L.A. Times, "Actually, I felt sick at one point just because people were going down left, right and center." But these X-Games weren't that dangerous. Only one person was hospitalized. At the winter games, it was 17. Maybe the toughest competitors quit to play extreme croquet.

Most people know that the Italians invented spaghetti, ravioli and prompted the Atkins diet. And most people say they invented bocce. In bocce, or Italian bowling, players take turns rolling four small balls towards a marker ball called a pallino. The Morning File was pleasantly surprised to find that bocce parties abound in Pittsburgh, from the well-known Frick Park games, to those in Bloomfield on Tuesday nights with a crew of older Italian gentlemen. Who says that Pittsburgh doesn't have a singles scene?

Not all popular games involve balls, though. In New York City, a NYU programmer started Pac-Manhattan, in which a player dressed as Pac-Man runs around the city collecting dots and escaping the four people dressed as ghosts who are trying to eat him. (Uh, apparently you have to be there.) In Toronto, people are organizing games of Capture the Flag, Manhunt (a kind of hide and seek) and the board game Scotland Yard (detectives track a Mr. X through the streets of London, in this case, Toronto) in real life. Wake The Morning File up when someone starts a citywide real-life bingo game with manhole covers as markers.