When I was in fourth grade, I came down with a nasty case of Nintendinitis.   

   

Now sore thumbs, sweaty palms, and constant blinking does not register very high on the scale of horrific sports injuries.  And the suggestion that this condition belongs on the list at all probably makes Joe Thiesman want to kick me with the metal rod in his surgically repaired leg. 

 

But video games came out of nowhere to offer my friends and me an exciting new way to saturate ourselves in sports.  And most of us were far too young and impetuous to resist.

 

However Nintendinitis had an after effect which proved far worse than strained eyes or the early onset of Carpel Tunnel.  It had become nearly impossible for me to distinguish between what was only "virtually impossible" and what was possible only virtually.  And the more I played, the more Mario marred the line.

 

Once I tried to jump kick a bee, a move I had already perfected on the second level of Kung Fu.  I was no karate kid however, and disappointment was not the only sting I felt that day.

 

In a Little League game I baited myself into a rundown in an attempt to steal second.  It was a maneuver that had never failed in RBI Baseball.  But in retrospect, I was no Vince Coleman.  

 

Another time I was supposed to fight a much bigger kid on the playground.  The confrontation never happened, which was fortunate for me as my only exposure to boxing had come from a few afternoons worth of Mike Tyson’s Punch Out.  Had I faced that bully, my teeth (much like the NES) would have been reduced graphically into eight bits.

 

Nintendo was not, however, the first or last cause of virtual sports injury.  In the early 1980's, physicians reported a national outbreak of Atarrhea.  Thousands of children suffered from abdominal pain and frequent sitting, unable to pull themselves away from Pong.

 

When Playstation hit in the late 1990's kids became wimpier than ever.  Some stopped playing outside altogether.  Others became hunched over.  Most lacked the backbone to put the controller down and do anything active at all.  Some doctors misdiagnosed the phenomenon as scoliosis.  A few of the more savvy recognized it for the Sonyosis that it really was.

 

I guess I am success story of sorts, a medical miracle.  While I caught all three of these diseases, none proved terminal to my physical fitness.  I never lost my love of the real thing.  And sports video games even helped my athletic career in some subtle ways.

 

Maybe it was my mastery of Pitfall that inspired me to shatter the gym class rope climbing record.  Powerpad-powered Track and Field had to have played some role in my junior high presidential fitness award.  Arch Rivals taught me that sometimes you have to get rough to win a game of basketball.  And the player select screen from Ice Hockey taught me that people of every shape and size can contribute in a team setting.

 

Yet despite ambassadors like myself, many parents remain concerned that video games are ruining the youth of our country.  And while the automated afflictions in this column are for the most part fictional maladies, an upswing in childhood obesity and violence have indeed been clinically tied to television and electronic overexposure. 

 

Safeguarding kids with effective boundaries is the duty of any discretionary parent.  And this is a huge responsibility as the ways that each child spends their free time probably does have a massive influence on whether they will become more like Bill or Antonio Gates.    

 

Of course the overwhelming majority of us will never grow up to become computer billionaires or NFL superstars.  As for myself, I would guess that I land exactly in the middle of that spectrum.  In hindsight maybe there is no absolute right or wrong answer as to what the best emphasis is.  While my advice is to always choose stimulation over simulation, I suppose I never would have come to that conclusion without that childhood inflammation of Nintendinitis.

Born in Chicago and raised on a steady diet of Harry Caray game-calls and Michael Jordan Nike commercials, Scott Larson recalls this as a magical period, one which peaked during the Bears ’85 Super Bowl season. 

A steady stream of older cousins’ Notre Dame and U of I sweatpants kept him clothed throughout adolescence.  Every pair of which was perpetually grass stained at the knee from trying to beat the Brubaker twins at various playground sports each afternoon.

He did not make the seventh grade basketball squad, but got his revenge by simulating the entire season on a Nerf hoop in his bedroom, shattering several school records and the plaster on the dining room ceiling in the process.

In short, he loves sports.  A young lifetime of playing them and watching them at every opportunity has left him with no regrets – except for those sweat pants.   

He can be reached at scott.larson@atomicsportsmedia.com.