Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for April 30, 2020

Don’t waste your time with these jerks, Calvin.

Well, Calvin’s career was a “natural athlete” sure was short-lived.

Even better. His tiger taught him how to play.

Mr. Lockjaw is the worst character in the entire strip, bar none. At least with Moe and the other bullies, you can argue they were just kids who didn’t know better.

This guy is straight-up verbally abusive, and I think anyone who talked like that to a six year-old in this day and age would quickly lose his job. I wish Hobbes would maul that fatso and eat his internal organs.

What’s the point of all these freaking school activities?! I mean does anyone realize they’re getting so bad, it’s getting them arrested?

Well, there’s no “i” in team, Calvin. You can go and play with Hobbes til you’re 20, ’cause no one else will.

I was 11 and I met my Italian mr. Lockjaw : he refused me because I wasn’t as good as his existing team , but I needed to make sport (Athletic) for my health like my doctor told me .It was frustrating .

I can see why Bill never gave those other kids names, they only appeared in two strips yesterdays and todays, while that walking blimp of a coach only appeared in 3 panels and they NEVER came back. That puts them in the category of Red Shirts aka Extras, if there was a zombie outbreak in this strip they be the first ones to die. If there was a behind the scenes look like “Garfield Gets Real” after this arc ended I could see those three kids and that walrus with hands being really mad at Calvin and Hobbes, cause while Calvin and Hobbes are the stars, are well loved and appear in EVERY strip, they would get mad cause those are the only parts they ever had and they were made to be jerks to the star and never have names, making people hate them for being nameless jerks and one timers. Also it’s not like this was a major for the season it was just a normal school game, at least when the Simpsons did an episode where Bart blew the game, they forgave him. I’m glad they were never used again or had names, cause they are not worthy of names or another appearance, they deserve to be forgotten like the extras they are.

A long time ago when I was just a dumb kid in grade school, we were divided into two flag football teams.Somehow I was out there and before I realized what was going on, someone threw me the football.I just reacted by instinct and ran with it toward the first goal post I could see and crossed over it.Little did I realize that I had run the wrong way and made a score for the other side we were playing against.I felt bad and was roundly yelled at which I had never forgot about to this day. I was just plain stupid and didn’t knowany better. It sort of ruined any passion I ever had to even play that sport again. And I never did. I soon became quite a “loner”and would hardly ever talk to anyone. Years later I started to get a little sense and responsibility and finally got intoAmateur Radio which turned me around and eventually changed my life for the better !

There’s no crying in baseball!

I want to smash those two kids’ heads on a brick wall so bad for taunting Calvin…

Is it to any wonder Calvin quit, Coach? For one thing, he was PUSHED into the game without the proper training so he didn’t know what to do (and neither you nor his team mates took the time to give him any instruction on how to play the game properly). For another, neither you nor his team mates gave him the encouragement he needed.

I just loved that “team spirit” blather. I never could understand where I was supposed to get that. It certainly didn’t come from the team.

Mr. Lockjaw, you’re a bad coach. You and your team should be taught some manners.

No win situation. Calvin only signed up to play because Moe threatened to beat him up if he didn’t. Now he’s trying to play and still getting threatened.

This reminds me of how rarely Watterson drew other children besides Calvin & Susie. And Moe, I guess (who barely looked like a kid). Their unibrows, odd head-shapes (Susie looks more like Calvin), freckles and more kind of mark them as “different”.

Being yelled at for not being good and being kinda crushed by it… that’s a lot more “real” than even Charlie Brown.

Sniff, I thought it was supposed to be a funny strip.

For a brief moment, Calvin started to like the stupid game…

I thought this was supposed to be a recess game. We never had a coach at recess. It was just free form mayhem.

Good for you, Calvin! If it isn’t fun, we don’t do it!

I had the same issues when I was that age. Everyone took games way too seriously. The coach is no help either.

Yep, this takes me back to so many memories of childhood, I was the short fat kid, forced to play UK football, the teacher told me in front of both teams, in the middle of the field and game, she wanted to replace me with “A sack of potatoes” to the laughter of the whole class, I said “Ok” and for the rest of the game stood in one spot and made no attempt at all to the point of watching the ball sail pass me on the way to to “our” goal, never played again…..

I grew up in a family with a negative interest in sports, and didn’t soak up the rules of games the way kids usually do. I played on one little league baseball team, and even flag football during the summer, but I was in my teens before I found out that you couldn’t pass the ball beyond the line of scrimmage.

But I never had those problems on the chess team.

You can tell the kid has ability from his speed (he was way out in left field) and great catch! He just doesn’t know the rules! Just teach him the game, and he will help you win!

The coach sure is a bonehead.

Calvin didn’t really want to play, his “teammates” didn’t want him, and the coach probably couldn’t be bothered to care. So it probably was best for Calvin to quit. No sense continuing to pretend for the sake of pleasing no one.

And the one lesson for all of us is to model the behavior we want to see. The two lessons, and see the world through the eyes the child we once were. And model empathy. The Three lessons….

My brother in law was like that. He would ask me to play tennis with him then proceeded to serve aces all the time. I got so fed up I stopped playing with him. He never understood why.

“Games are only fun when you win.”

That explains a lot in today’s world.

This is accurate. All 4 panels.

Hey, Calvin told them he didn’t want to play. They knew he didn’t want to play. They put him in a position where he wasn’t expected to have to play. Then he actually did make a play, the wrong way. They still don’t want him to play. He officially says he dosen’t want to play. So, of course, he is a quitter. …sigh (Usually, when we get roped into things we get hung out to dry. Same rope.)

This is a TRUE STORY: Guy I know coached youth league sports for years. The man was a legend. Great guy, wonderful coach. Then as a new season was getting ready to begin, he told the league officials he was retiring. They begged him to return. He finally said he would, but on one condition: “Find me a team of orphans.”

This arc is a perfect example why all the kids playing in a team sport gets a trophy at the end of the season regardless of skill level.

I had the same problem in school, I lack that competitive gene, and it made playing sport terrible for me. However, in highschool I took bowling and the gym teacher had me on the bowling team with the special needs students or those who couldn’t bowl. It wasn’t that I was a bad bowler I did it almost every weekend with my dad and was good, I just wasn’t competitive. I didn’t care about who was winning just having fun. It didn’t matter if you got a strike or got gutter balls, I cheered everyone. I offered tips on improving the game like how to release the ball or if you move over the ball will go into the gutter less. This is what my teammates needed not someone to tell them how bad they were or it was their fault the team lost.

I had a similar experience as a kid. I didn’t know how to play the sport that my folks singed me up for when the other kids had been playing for years. I didn’t know the rules and nobody bothered to actually coach me about them. I attribute that experience to my avoiding all team sports after that.

You’ll be fine.

I didn’t know Moe had that many cousins. (I used to play the outfield/watch butterflies too.)

I said it yesterday, and it’s even more true in today’s strip….that was SO me back then…I was so tormented for my inability to perform athletically that I can’t even stand to watch sports to this day.

Way to build one’s self-confidence, “coach”…..

When I taught , kids like Calvin were my favorites full of moxie and soul.

There’s so much right and wrong about this particular story. I suppose it was Watterson’s commentary on how competition is evil, but then again, as the creator of one of the world’s most successful comic strips, he won the competition against a lot of other artists/writers we’ll never hear about. Not sure how he’ll reconcile that. Two other points. The first is that while we can expect kids to be mean to each other, the coach should (and in real life probably would) have told the players to settle down and not be mean to Calvin (although as a kid, I met more than one coach who lacked perspective. The other point is that in the 1980s, when this strip was produced, everyone got “participation awards,” which meant doing your best to win or to do anything meant nothing.

There’s your typical school coach. Only interested in kids with “natural talent” and never even tries with the rest.

If you don’t do well at team sports, take up individual sport. I took up water sking and long distance bicycle.

I would probably have enjoyed sports more if someone would have bothered to teach me to play. You hear famous sports figures talk about these great coaches who were like fathers to them, but most of us don’t experience coaches like that. The only competition I ever got good at was in the Marines where you understood that verbal abuse was helping toughen you up to fight effectively when people are shooting at you. On top of that, I got schooled in using a wide range of weapons and target identification.

Well, I see a lot of repressed anger here. As my dad told me so many times,, get over it. It’s history. My godson wanted to play hockey so his dad got him into Tim Horton’s hockey. The ONLY rule was have fun. Two years later they teach them about winning and losing. Same with Tim’s soccer. A summer sport he also got into to keep fit for hockey. He played hockey until it wasn’t fun any more and moved on. He still keeps up soccer with the high school team but as he will grad out this year that too has gone by the way side. His future plans are to help out coaching depending where he goes to uni. You see sports has changed, at least in Canada.

That bullying stuff can come back on kids if they aren’t careful. When I was in HS, there was this skinny kid on the frosh FB team who was picked on and abused by some of the other players. I would never join in and actually stuck up for him a couple of times. A couple of years later, I’m walking down the street one night when this car full of kids who I knew were bad news and known to the police pulled up and asked me if I “had any weed”. When I told them no, they piled out and accused me of insulting them and proceeded to describe how they were beat the crap out of me….then this last kid gets out of the car and vouches for me…its the kid from the FB team who got picked on…once he vouches for me, the thugs apologize, ask if I’m ok, (one kid had sucker-punched me), etc. and get in their car and leave. I shudder to think what would have been the result if I was one of the bullies on that FB team

All of this is the adult’s fault. He screwed up and hurt Calvin in so many ways.

Hmmmmm !!!! ForonceI actually feel sorry for Calvin!!! He’s right it’s just a game!!!

Calvin is so brash that I rarely feel sympathetic toward him in his self-created plights. This is a different matter.

Unfortunately this is still too true in kids sports

This was 50% of my sports experience as a child. The other 50% was being bullied as the “new kid”. I think “sportsmanship” is only taught in seminars by administrators. Most physical education courses were “supervised” along the “Lord of the Flies” model. At the “better institutions” I was bullied by the coach.

This one breaks my heart.

There’s always Calvinball!

Something like this DID happen to me once when I was a kid, it wasn’t baseball, but I was invited to play a game and someone got incredulous that I didn’t know the rules so I replied “of COURSE I don’t know the rules, I never played this before, do you think everyone is just BORN knowing game rules or something, stupid?” I ended up walking away, but even though I don’t remember exactly what they were playing I’ll never forget the gobsmacked expression on his face, I sort of independently stumbled across a version of the “don’t assume” line.

If you’re not first, you’re last.

If I had to listen to that crap, I’d leave as well. In addition, Mr. Lockjaw is a POS. Calvin’s no quitter. No one told him to come in.

Moe Lockjaw??

I think someone once wrote that it’s always pleasant to hear the sounds of children at play, so as long as you stay far enough away to not hear what they’re actually saying.

Just a wild guess: Not every kid on every team in Calvin’s league gets a trophy for participation.

If Calvin caught that difficult fly ball the other day, it shows he has some potential to be a decent player. Just needs a bit of encouragement and guidance, a better coach and a real position. He must have been the 10th man if he was so far out there was no other left fielder.

I don’t often feel sorry for Calvin — he usually makes his own trouble — but I do today.

Coach Lockjaw seems like a real d***. Probably because he hasn’t played a sports since he lost the sight of his toes…

The poor “quitter” is better than the stupid coach any given day!

“Games are only fun when you win.” To be fair, Calvin gets really worked up when he loses at board games. Typical first-grader thing.

Perhaps the saddest of all C&H strips, and yet also the most accurate and true-to-life in every aspect. This could have been me 50 years ago, and I have had a loathing for all team sports since. This reinforces the human need to build yourself up by tearing others down.

I think this is my least favorite C&H storyline.

“C’mon guys, it’s just a game! this is supposed to be fun!”

Exact same reason I stopped playing.

I’m glad I didn’t play team sports in grade school, based on all the negative experiences so many of you have had. I am disgusted there are so many ass#$#& coaches out there.

i don’t like those buttheads

P 4: “…it’s not quitting….it’s saving my sanity…”

You kids stop calling Calvin names!!

I’m on Calvin’s side.

Since Hobbes didn’t want to eat Moe because as he put it “fat kids are high in cholesterol”, I doubt he’d want to eat Lockjaw either.

Ironically, Susie Derkins is probably way off on the other side of the playground, sitting on the seesaw, just hoping that “stupid jerk Calvin” would join her.

This story line is not humorous to me to close to real life

Ppl leaving all sorts of comments but I’m sure I’m not alone when I say this exact same thing happened to me. I join the local team when I was in 6th grade. Knew nothing about the game but wanted to have fun and learn. They wound up sticking me in Left Field and ridiculing me. It still makes me feel bad.

Glad to see that everyone is with Calvin on this. Been there.

Welcome to “Facebook”!

Where is Hobbes when you need him!!

Calvin is much more than what these bunch of naive boys have made him.

My dad taught me how to play draughts (same as checkers in USA) when I was about 8 or 9. When I finally managed to win a game against him he never played draughts with me again. Great lesson in sportsmanship…

mr. lackpaw go kys (kill yours- I mean keep yourself safe) you fatso