Best Balls

Even if Ben Stiller's Dodgeball hadn't come out this summer, it would have been a busy season for the Kansas City Dodgeball Association. But now everyone and their rubber-ball-wielding mother has challenged founder and president Dennis Bourg to a game. In addition to the usual Sunday, high-noon faceoffs at the Roanoke Park tennis courts, the team has scheduled a match against its longstanding rival, the Los Angeles Dodgeball Society. (That team's president, Michael Costanza, called Bourg out on Fox News.) In August, the KCDBA twentysomethings took care of business at a tournament organized by Brush Creek Recreation Center Director Chris Cotton. Greg Carlew demonstrated his mastery of the "grudge shot" against one particularly mouthy member of a high-school-aged team dubbed the Cobras. "The kid bent down to get a ball," Bourg recalls, "and Greg bloodied his nose and blasted his eye." On the sidelines, Bourg and Carlew proceeded to discuss the intricacies of playing Japanese pan flute, proving that you cannot truly know someone until you see him play dodgeball.