The secret was to let everyone else go first, so it would become obvious who the Bulldog was going to go for. Classic game, came away with a few scraped knees because of it.
The secret was to let everyone else go first, so it would become obvious who the Bulldog was going to go for. Classic game, came away with a few scraped knees because of it.
Tripup bulldog on the grass was cool, sliding tackles only! Although from peoples responces that was the norm on the playground too!
Brilliant stuff. Can't believe anyone would even consider calling it 'International Poodles'. Surely that has to be a joke? If it's not then these 'politically correct' idiots need to be deported.
Bulldog was a smashing game back in my school days, even after someone got seriously injured playing it (more to do with the playground being unsafe though) - he jumped over the 'home' log, caught his foot on it and face planted the floor, whole face was red with blood, luckily he turned out all right, although I guess the salt water face bath he had wasn't much fun
Ack. As a kid who got bullied right the way through primary school I'm not much in favour of this. I was physically as hard as anyone in my year but I got constantly targetted, so I did far more than my fair share of fighting.
Lets face it, many kids are nasty little ****s. If you allow games that allow physical takedowns then you are giving carte blanche to bullies to hurt weaker kids. It's all very well to complain about PC gone mad and kids being mollycoddled etc. but....I got bullied, and if I'm honest, you never quite get over it. Be careful what you wish for, because the next victim might be your kid.
Indeed Rave, me old cocker, but you don't stop bullying by letting the PC cretins ban Bulldog, and Football, and school sports day because 'we can't have winners and losers', because that doesn't prepare a kid for the real world.
Wrap them up in cotton wool with this no winners and losers crap, and they get a big shock when they suddenly realise in the big wide world there are winners and losers, and his doesn't change because some Guardian reading prat decided the egg and spoon race was too much pressure.
Boys need to climb trees, play bulldog and scrape their knees. Always have done, always will do.
Bullying can be stoped by parents, teachers, etc, but its completely seperate from sports and activities at school.
British Bulldog is not, and AFAIK never has been, an organised sport at school. I suppose if you had teachers to ensure there was no unfair targetting of weaker kids then it would be fine, but at the end of the day the idea if you're on the catching team is to stop people crossing the field- so are you going to try and stop the big hard kid or the little geek?......And is everyone else on the catching team likely to have the same idea? Most probably.
Were you ever bullied Stewie? I'm certainly not in favour of raising a generation of fat, spoiled, playstation addicted kids, I just don't think that British Bulldog is the fun, harmless game that various naive ******s would have you believe.
Nobody said Bulldog was a harmless game... indeed, far from it, but surely getting into a couple of rough-and-tumbles is better than having it soft your whole childhood? Like Stew said, if you go into life with no preparation, you're going to fail hard, whereas if you have a pre-taster of what real people are like, you don't expect everyone to be teletubbies or whatever.
Sure, bullies may use rough games to their advantage, but then anyone in a position of power, who has little to no morals, is going to abuse that power somewhere down the line. In the end, they won't really win, because they are the idiots.
In case you were wondering, yes I was bullied in school, quite badly, but I managed to get over it because I knew I was the one more likely to get somewhere in life, and also because I knew what life was about, even if I do tend to spend a lot of my free time gaming (always have, always will).
Remember also, it's not only the fat, spoiled, obnoxious idiots that play games, a lot of normal people are serious gamers too (by serious I mean play a lot, not serious as in a lack of humour)
No I wasn't ever bullied, when my crowd from junior school went to senior school, we were the biggest group, and we knew the most people, and had peeps who had older brothers at the school, etc, so we were bully-proof.
Regardless, I played Bulldog a million times, at school, at a youth club, all over the place, and it was always a laugh, it wasn't a sneaky way to bully people.
If its played with adult supervision there is no reason why it should decend into bullying. It could actually bring the weaker, quieter kids out of their shell, because its a chance to run and grab and roll about on the floor without starting a fight.
Bullying is just as emotionally painful whether you're being picked on/left out in bulldog, football or vandalising the bike sheds because you aren't allowed to play normal games. Teachers/parents can try to stop bullying, but IMHO it will continue until the person in question learns how to take it so it isn't 'funny' any more to the bullies.
Join in and make fun of yourself before they get a chance to. Confuses them, and you get to have a laugh into the bargain. Sort of like that final scene in 8 Mile.
Can't remember who it said it, but it's vaguely (? that doesn't look right...) relevant, so i thought I'd put it here.I used to get tormented by bullies at school, calling me names and such, until my aunt told me this advice: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me". So I told the bullies, and you know, it worked! From then on, it was sticks and stones all the way!
No- I went into adult life expecting that nobody would like me, and I did fail hard- right out of university, in fact.
Bullying has pernicious longterm effects, and for all that I don't agree with wrapping kids in cotton wool, I simply cannot agree with the idea that rough-and-tumble is harmless, and that the school of hard knocks prepares kids for adult life. I felt the effects long into adulthood; if I'm honest, I'm probably still dealing with it now.
I don't want to be a humourless PC killjoy, I just can't condone a careless return to 80s playground culture, because that culture did me a lot of harm.
We used to play a version called hack-a-billy. Same as bulldog, but you were allowed to get someone on the ground by hacking them over (kicking them). Once they were down that was it, no more kicking and a pile on was the end result, especially if it was the last person standing who had to make it across the field against the rest in order to win. This lead to cries of, "hold him up!, hold him up!", by those who were further away before he went down so the victim could be kicked a few more times! Vicious little buggers we were.
Everyone got kicked. If you were the weedy kid you normally got caught first and went down easy so got fewest kicks and therefore you could do more of the kicking and the stronger ones were the ones trying to win it and beat the field. BB got banned when one of my brother's mates (2 years younger) broke a leg. They just called it something else and carried on.
At that primary school there was also a holly bush which was about 3 or 4 feet in height and about 5 foot in diameter that stood at the end of the football field (where we played BB) on a slight slope, which also had another slope just after it onto another field. The aim was to jump over it without landing in it as it was quite big for a 7 year old. Everyone would line the approach route as each jumper ran up. Then some smartarse had the idea of tripping whom ever was running up so they ended up ploughing through the holly bush. People then jostled for the best tripping position and you then had to avoid people trying to hack you. After that you'd quietly move away and target one of the hackers close to the bush. Because they were concentrating on their next victim you could sneak up behind them and push them into the bush! Great times.
The bush is still there and it's about 25ft high and 10ft wide. (it's on google maps too!) I guess they didn't keep the tradition of pruning.
"Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be." Frank Zappa. ----------- "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." Huang Po.----------- "A drowsy line of wasted time bathes my open mind", - Ride.
Actually I'm pretty sure once of twice the teachers may have organised playing bulldog at our school...having said that I don't think H&S was really taken too seriously at our school
Twigman
We were banned from using hammers, but that was about it.
(Thanks Evilmunky)
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