I grew up in South Philly,…
I grew up in South Philly, in the 70s/early 80s … I STILL HAVE A PIMPLE BALL !!! I kept it knowing that one day, people all over would be looking for one — wish we could still buy em. I remember learning ‘Chink’ on the corners. We simply called it ‘Chink’ and it was the most simple, fun, yet competitive games ANYWHERE !! We played it on the corner, and we played to 11, or 21 if you played doubles and allowed ‘slams’ – meaning the ball could go PAST the curb and into the street, provided there wasn’t a parked car in front of that curb.
My memories from the neighborhood also included:
– Halfball (of course)
– Handball
– Running the Bases
– ‘Atlantic City’ — which was a variation of Chink AND Running the Bases – very fun game
– Jailbreak (surprised I haven’t seen this mentioned elsewhere – you had teams of people and you had to ‘free’ the person in ‘jail’ — which was someone’s front step – you would grab the railing, yell ‘jailbreak’ and all your teammates could leave jail. If you got caught by the other team, you were ‘dragged’ into jail. We usually had a member from each team ‘guarding’ the jail area!)
– Wireball
– Stepball
– Fastball (a variation of stickball/halfball where you pitched a tennis ball into a ‘strike box’ painted on a wall and played with out and runs rules similar to halfball)
– Wall/Suicide (simply throwing the ball against the wall, and having someone catch it – if you missed it you had to run to the wall and touch it and yell ‘Wall/Suicide’ before someone picked up your missed ball and BEANED it at your ass!
– Dodge ball (played with the big red ball!)
– Street football (we actually had an entire street block spray painted with yard line markers, logos, out of bounds markers, end zones, etc!)
I’m sure there were plenty of others but this is all I can think of right now !!!