As an often unsupervised kid, I did a lot of dumb and risky stuff….

…like BB guns wars at Camp Belzer, popping my spanish teacher in the behind with a BB (which I got caught by bragging, suspended for 3 days and henceforth dubbed El Pistolero by said teacher upon returning to his class) and playing tackle football 🏈 often with no protective gear.

One Saturday, a group of my friends were playing another in a pick-up game that got rather intense you might say.

I tackled this dude and we smashed heads, face to face. I immediately noticed my front tooth 🦷 was chipped.

Then my opponent looked 👀 and his front tooth 🦷 got knocked out and he found it in the grass.

As I recall, we both continued to play, just a bit more carefully.

A lil spilled blood 🩸 wasn't just a stigma back then (pre-Aids, Covid, etc)

The cool thing is though are teams where evenly divided between whites vs blacks, as a diverse school and though it was rough, we actually bonded in weird way and respected each other a lot more. It developed a friendship we didn't have before.

Go figure…sports of sorts.