When I was in high school there weren't girls water polo teams. So we used to get matched up with teams that had girls on them. I used to know a lot of these girls from swimming. We all grew up playing grab@$$ with each other. Well, they were all docile and coy during swim practice but they were ruthless with their underwater game. When guarding against another guy there's an unspoken understanding that the jewels were off limits when battling underwater. Kidney shots with the knees, elbows in the rib, and the occasional head butt were all and acceptable part of the game, but no one ever went for the balls on purpose. If a dude hit another dude in the nuts it meant all out war. Someone was going home to pee blood. So if an occasional grape got grazed it was usually an accident followed by a very heartfelt and sincere apology. But the chicks never played by any such understanding. It was ALL fair game to them. Some of these chicks were ejected quite regularly for making the player they were guarding scream in agony.
But a few of them got off on playing rough. It was very common for standard underwater jabs to turn into a full on grope session with a mean flavor. But the worse was my friend Kari, who later went on to marry a buddy of mine. She was ripped with double-D gigantors and she would reach right down your suit and latch on. Well we were playing a varsity game my sophomore year and her junior year and because she was a fast swimmer I was usually put on the task of guarding her because being that I was the sprinter for the team I was pretty much the only one that could keep up with her.
I remember it distinctly. It was the fourth quarter and it was getting down to the wire. She had her hand down my suit and I had my hand down hers. This was beyond nipple twists, this was all out war. She wasn't letting go, and when the ball was passed to me, she promptly inserted her finger right up my starfish. Because I had the ball, I didn't have a free hand to manage the situation. She had it jammed right past the monkey knuckle. It was like kryptonite. Suddenly I had no strength. I just has this weird uncomfortable tingling numbess that just sapped any kind of muscle strength I had left in my body. It was like that feeling when your foot goes to sleep but over your whole body. I managed to weakly toss the ball inside, and broke free, but it was game on. She we both got a few fingers for the rest of the quarter and it was ugly. The final minute my team was up by one point and they had possession. We were locked in a vicious game of uncle. I'm pretty sure she was using just one finger but it felt like a fist and I know that I also had multiple digits committed the cause. We were staring each other eye to eye and trying not to let the other person see tears of agony. The game ended, they didn't score, and we went our separate ways. But for the rest of our lives since then we have always shared that moment, even if it was nothing more than occasional head lift to say 'I'm watching you'. We both knew that we had thoroughly violated each other and somewhere in there we had earned a deep mutual respect for each other. Saw her last year and we had a moment where we both passed each other in the kitchen. Neither one of us would let each other see our backs, just in case. We laugh about it now, but we still sleep with one eye open.
