In last night’s Top Comments diary by brillig, remembering stuff that I thought would mark my age, I thought of a game that some boys played during recess at my elementary school. It was called buck-buck. When I mentioned it in my comments, brillig suggested I write a diary about it, so here it is.
The game runs as follows: there are two teams. One team forms a line where each team member links the the waist of the person in front of him or her. Members of the other team then jump on the line of the first team in order to make it collapse. Then the teams change roles. If you caused the other team’s line to collapse, but yours didn’t, you won. If there was a more complicated scoring system, I never learned it. I only played a couple of times, because I found the experience of getting jumped on to be unpleasant, strangely enough.
Not long after, I saw an episode of Fat Albert & the Cosby Kids that featured the game of buck-buck, and when I got older, I discovered that the whole origin of the character of Fat Albert was from a monologue by Cosby describing the game of buck-buck and the role the Fat Albert played in the game (and while I know that Bill Cosby has been cast into the outer darkness, I will include this anyway; you are free to ignore it):
Ever since having discovered this connection, I had assumed that buck-buck had African, or African-American origins. However, in my minimal research before posting my comment last night, I discovered that, according to Wikipedia, this is not so. In fact, it had European origins.
As early as the 16th century, children in Europe and the Near East played Buck, Buck, which had been called "Bucca Bucca quot sunt hic?".[2][3] Pieter Bruegel's painting "Children's Games" (1560) depicts children playing a variant of the game.[4][5]
Here is an example of the game actually being played. After seeing this, I now remember players calling numbers as they ran to jump on the line of opposing players.
From my current perspective, as a 59 year-old with a body that’s getting creaky, the entire idea of the game astounds me. Why would anyone voluntarily do that to themselves? I also suspect that the game is probably banned from modern schoolyards. However, it has survived into the age of youtube, so that says something about its longevity.
Now, on to the comments below the fold, but first, a word from our sponsor:
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Top Comments (September 19, 2018):