Calvin & Hobbes – Author Sarah Angleton

It was one of those long boring afternoons in 1965 when thirteen-year-old Frank Pritchard and his siblings were in a pickle. They had nothing to do and were getting a little cranky. That’s about the time their dad, then a Washington State Representative, Joel Pritchard arrived home with his buddy Bill Bell after an afternoon of golf, and made sportsball history.

I suspect every great sport has a vaguely ridiculous origin story. Image by Nils from Pixabay

The two men jumped in to solve the problem by suggesting that the kids make up a game. Frank, apparently a typical 13 year old, turned it around and challenged them to make one up themselves. The two friends readily agreed and set out to see what they had handy.

The property had an old, little-used badminton court, but a quick search of the family’s sportsball equipment yielded no rackets or shuttlecocks. What they did find were some ping pong paddles and a wiffle ball.

The ball bounced surprisingly well on the asphalt court and once they’d lowered the net a bit, the two men got the kids playing a made-up game that was a little bit like badminton, a little bit like tennis, a little bit like ping pong, and at least at first, a lot like Calvinball from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip that two decades later would introduce the world to the greatest game to never have the same rules twice.

Also, this new made-up-on-the-spot sport was evidently pretty fun.

The family played the next weekend as well, and Pritchard and Bell introduced the game to another friend named Barney McClallum. Together, the three of them decided to write down some rules to their new hodgepodge sport that made Joel’s wife Joan think of pickle boat races in which the leftover or mismatched rowers team up and race just for fun.

It was probably only a matter of time until someone decided a wiffle ball would be more fun to try to hit with a racket. Image by 기석 김 from Pixabay

So the game became pickleball. Whereas most sports that fall into the category of made-up-because-someone-was-bored fade into obscurity after a family reunion or two and someone has inevitably broken an ankle (which could maybe, possibly be an absolutely true story from the depths of Angleton family lore), pickleball became an official thing in 1972.

That’s when its inventors established a corporation to protect the integrity of their burgeoning, accidentally-kind-of-super-fun sport. By 1976, the game started getting some national press, and in 1978 it was included in a book titled Other Raquet Sports.

By 1990 pickleball had made it to all fifty states, and in the mid-nineties, it was my favorite sport to play in my high school P.E. class, even though I was pretty sure my P.E. teacher Mrs. H. had made it up one afternoon when her kids were bored.

Of course now, nearly thirty (thirty?!) years later, it seems like everyone plays pickleball. The United States Amateur Pickleball Association boasts more than 70,000 members, there are organized leagues and tournaments, and there’s even a restaurant in my part of the world called Chicken N Pickle where you can, get this, eat chicken and play pickleball. Brilliant.

Move over tennis. There’s a new game in town. Stephen James Hall, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The hubs had a birthday recently and he got a couple of rackets, so we decided to hop on the bandwagon and give it a try at a local park converted in the last few years from a baseball diamond (because who would ever want to play baseball?) to generally busy pickleball courts. Neither of us remembered precisely how to play, but after a YouTube video or two we were ready to go.

I vaguely recall being pretty good at the sport in high school. It turns out that thirty (thirty?!) years is plenty of time to get a little rusty. The hubs hadn’t played the sport in several decades either, but he does have a much more impressive background in tennis than I do, which gave him a definite advantage. Still, the game really is super fun.

Like the kind of fun one might expect to have on a long boring day when the family goes searching for something to do among the sportsball castoffs in the garage. And a great game is born.

John_Calvin_2 — John Calvin, the father of Presbyterianism, and maybe sometimes kind of a controlling jerk.

In the summer of 1536, a young philosopher and theologian named John Calvin, having recently gotten himself into trouble in his native Catholic France by writing about his unique brand of Protestantism, arrived at an inn in Geneva, Switzerland. While there he was approached by a local church leader who begged him to remain in Geneva to help him organize the new Protestant church there.

Suspecting that it may have been predetermined by God that he do so, Calvin agreed and spent much of the remainder of his life (after being thrown out of Geneva for a few years because he kind of acted like a controlling jerk) preaching and teaching, setting in place a theocratic system of pastors, doctors, elders, and deacons, each dedicated to over-seeing different aspects of running Calvin’s idea of a perfect society.

He was remarkably influential, his ideas in some respects giving rise to capitalism, individualism, and democracy. Still, today, we’d probably call him a controlling jerk, and so did many of his contemporaries. Loudly. Sometimes over the sound of his preaching, and for many years after.

The English philosopher Tomas Hobbes, writing in his controversial Leviathan nearly 100 years after Calvin’s death, was critical of the Presbyterian political design. Sometimes considered the father of modern political philosophy, Hobbes was pretty sure that not only had Calvin been a jerk, but that so were all the bishops ruling within the Church, and, well, basically everyone else, too.

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Hobbes promoted the idea that humans were little more than machines, designed to act only in the interest of the self and this informed his political views. His words were influential, often as a starting point for debates by more reasonable philosophers, who mostly thought Hobbes was kind of a pessimistic jerk.

But about three hundred years after his death, and more than four hundred years after the death of John Calvin, both men were honored in the personalities of two of the most beloved philosophers of modern times, when the world was introduced on November 18, 1985, to a six-year-old boy with spiky yellow hair and a stuffed tiger, who was the best friend a kid could have.

Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, explained in his 1995 book celebrating the tenth anniversary of the comic strip, that he’d chosen the names from these two historical men. He doesn’t offer a great deal of explanation as to why, only that Hobbes the tiger seems to express a certain mistrust of human nature that shows up from time to time as his apparent pride in not being human himself. Calvin, Watterson claims, is based more or less on his adult self, as he grapples with big questions through the metaphor of tenacious, bratty childhood.

Though the strip ended in 1995 and Bill Watterson makes it a point to remain private and with very few exceptions, irritatingly aloof, the characters of Calvin and Hobbes have remained in the public consciousness, because between the laughs, the strips are really about friendship, imagination, and growing up. In the midst of funny childish games, Calvin and Hobbes speak to certain human truths.

My seven-year-old philosopher's last birthday cake, in which Calvin & Hobbes look a little bit like jerks. — My seven-year-old philosopher’s last birthday cake, on which Calvin & Hobbes look a little bit like jerks.

Right now, in my home, the largest truth they speak to is that a little boy with spiky yellow hair and a wild imagination really can provide profound wisdom disguised as disarming charm, sometimes without even knowing it.

My youngest son, a spiky-yellow-haired seven-year-old philosopher, is a huge fan of Calvin & Hobbes. He spends hours poring over the various collection books and I think he knows every strip by heart, turning over each one in his mind, sharpening his already impressive wit and gleaning some very useful advice. The day he marched into the kitchen and asked me for a chainsaw, and in lieu of that, a cookie, I knew I was in trouble.

He stood there with his clever grin, assured of his predetermined success. Tucked under his arm was his constant companion, a small stuffed rabbit named Bunny (because my son, though wickedly clever, can’t name many 17^th-century philosophers). I suspected Bunny might be the real mastermind behind the great cookie plot; that she somehow played on my son’s greedy human nature and put him up to it. That would be just like her. As thoughtful and devoted as she is, sometimes she’s kind of a jerk.

I gave him the cookie.