April 13, 2001 – As an ex-field goal kicker who hates hunting and can't fix cars, I am probably the last man on the planet who deserves to call anybody a Zima-drinking, pastel-wearing, rice-cake-eating sissy.

Yet such a group of people has emerged in southern Florida, an area previously known for manly pursuits such as marlin fishing and random gunfire into traffic. According to a Knight Ridder Newspapers report, many schools in the Miami area have outlawed dodge ball from their physical-education classes and recesses.

Dodge ball was an absolute staple of the day some 20 years ago. In its most basic form, kids split into two teams and stood on either side of the centerline on a rectangular court. You took a ball and threw it at members of the other team, trying to hit them. If you were hit, you were out, and the game ended when an entire team was eliminated.

Creative gym teachers of the era mutated the game to increase the excitement and the welt potential. In one version, players who were hit stood beyond the back line on the opposite side to form a trap with their teammates, and if they put someone out they got to go back in. Some teachers distributed five balls at a time, and then heightened the complexity by creating a center zone in which both teams could roam.

While on the surface dodge ball might have seemed like a sadistic vehicle for sending slow kids to the nurse's office, it in fact taught essential life skills: The rules are constantly changing; superiors like to see you suffer; you can get nailed when you least expect it and make sure the best players are always on your team, just to name a few.

Yet the National Association for Sport and Physical Education is encouraging its 18,000 member teachers to no longer use the game.

"We take the position that dodge ball is not an appropriate instructional activity because it eliminates children and it does not respect the needs of less-skilled children," said Judith Young, executive director of NASPE.

Educators are also concerned that dodge ball lowers the self-esteem of certain kids. In fact, research showed that – surprise! – less athletic kids were hit most often. (These same researchers, in a separate survey, discovered that college students are more likely to drink heavily and engage in dangerous sex practices.) So now, kids in South Florida schools engage in neutral, non-competitive, confidence-building, pastel-wearing activities, like balancing a beanbag on their heads. This logic, however, conveniently ignores the likelihood that the less athletic kids who got bombed in dodge ball also will have less success actually keeping the beanbag on their heads, making them even bigger targets for ridicule. It is one thing to get lit up with a half-inflated synthetic volleyball thrown at mach 3 by Dirk Testosterone, it is entirely another to be unable to walk successfully.

At the risk of goose-stepping through this column, at what point do we stop trying to shield our children from every tiny little shred of failure? Many youth sports leagues have quit keeping score, and grammar-school children in many districts don't receive letter grades, all in the name of building "self-esteem." But failure comes with invaluable lessons – prime among them, that everybody fails, and the only way to overcome failure is to keep trying. We are raising a generation of kids unable to deal with the slightest adversity, because they don't get enough practice.

Most will get a whole truckload of failure when they start dating, of course, unless we carry this protective bent to extremes and insist on arranged marriages. I wouldn't be totally against that – as long as my daughters don't start marrying men with permanent dodge-ball welts on their arms.