losing the perfect game
In the bright basement locker room at the Catholic Club of Buffalo every Sunday morning in winter a dozen men–most between the ages of 65 and 90–are trading their heavy boots for gum-soled court shoes, tenderizing quads and calves with knobby plastic muscle rollers, and emerging from the steam room or the sauna moist and naked, save for the modesty afforded them by clouds of vapor and wilting copies of The Buffalo News.
The same happy, groaning chorus greets every new arrival: “There he is”–this followed by familiar jibes about sleeping in or pre-game pit stops at Paula’s Donuts orTim Hortons. The mood is light but their purpose here is serious. The same players assemble here each week because they are the only athletes left–at least in Buffalo–who play the game of American handball. And with every injury, every retirement, and–yes–every funeral–they know the game they love is getting a little closer to disappearing altogether.
It’s easy to describe the sport to noninitiates as racquetball without a racquet, but it would be historically accurate to say the reverse, that racquetball is handball with a racquet–and a larger, softer ball. Besides the ball, the only equipment required for official play are small protective goggles and deerskin gloves. Two players (or four, in teams of two) stand facing the same direction in a rectangular walled room 40 feet by 20 feet, and strike the ball with either hand so that it hits the front wall and returns over the service line. You hope your shot will be irretrievable, bouncing twice for a point. Every surface, including the ceiling, is in play. Only the serving side can score, and games go to 21.
During the sport’s early 20th-century ascendance a promoter coined a tagline: “The Perfect Game.” The superlative branding of American handball speaks to its ancient origins–tied to Gaelic and Welsh handball, to international frontón, and even, some have speculated, to games depicted in Mesoamerican art and Egyptian hieroglyphics. It also speaks to the disproportionately fierce pride that even amateur players take in their vocation today. Like soccer–“the beautiful game”–you only have to watch a few minutes of high-level play to understand the claim. The perfection of handball lies in its grace of movement and simplicity of focus–a sport naked and unaided, free from padding or sticks or hoops or nets, even free from referees.
Bodily punishing and physically counterintuitive, handball makes beginners, even athletes accomplished in other sports, appear like they’re drowning in empty air. But, while professional play demands a level of mental and physical chiseling out of reach for all but 20-somethings, highly competitive play is possible for athletes approaching the triple dig its, and their decades spent attending to the ball’s beguiling, unforgiving, sometimes capricious behavior gives them an immense advantage over even experienced players a generation or more their junior. Handball athletes three-quarters of a century old, for example, may know how to serve a ball so that it travels a millimeter away from the side wall, all the way to the front wall and all the way to the back, making a strong return impossible, and any return difficult and even dangerous. These players can’t run much, but on their home court they know the exact location of every “dead board”–spots on the floor where a ball will take an odd bounce, or lose its momentum and simply drop–and they know how to hit them consistently.
I encountered the game first in 2013 when my father started playing at the Catholic Club of Buffalo. He was hooked, I saw, because the game had given him access to his own father’s generation. My grandfather, Michael Ryan, passed shortly before I was born, leaving my dad to enter fatherhood in something that might have felt like a free-fall. Mike hadn’t been a handball player, but his younger brother Tom Ryan–a Buffalo Sports Hall of Famer, then 78 years old–was. My dad started playing because Tom and his contemporaries, with their vivid memories and dated catchphrases, brought his own father back to him. I could understand that. But I was in college, thinking little about ritual and living memory, and stood at a further emotional remove from the club and the sport that the old men played there. I didn’t pick handball up until I had left town and then returned three years later, finally ready to take my father up on his invite to visit the club.
And the sport hooked me, then, too. I played doubles Saturday and Sunday mornings. I caught singles games Tuesday and Thursday nights. And sometimes I found myself in the club alone, before sunup, running drills until my hands rang, trying to get lower, hit harder. In my office at work, on conference calls, I would put myself on mute and practice serves tai chi-style.I played for four years straight–until the second week of March 2020.
On April 17, 2020, I watched snow fall through the windows of the spare room I’d turned into an office to accommodate working under New York’s closure orders. I was on the phone with my friend Sam, who, in Norwich, England, was five hours ahead of us by the clock, about a week ahead of us by the new and already commonplace method of measuring time according to the global progression of the virus. We meant to talk about writing, a new manuscript of mine that Sam had read, but we spent the first half hour catching each other up on life in lockdown. Sitting in an abused leather chair and watching the unseasonable fat flurries out two windows at once, I had the feeling of being on a fast-moving train, with no sense of a destination.
The club had closed in the second week of March, on the eve of our annual Can-Am tournament, when our crew of about sixteen regulars would swell to three times as many because of competitors driving in from Syracuse, Albany, New York, Cleveland, and Toronto. Not this year. After almost a month without handball I could feel the changes underway in my body and mind–a slackening of the muscles holding in the gut after meals, stiffness in the legs, an enervation in the shoulders and the arms. Worse, my attention was fuzzy, increasingly attuned toTwitter. I started to mix Manhattans at five o’clock simply to signal an end to the workday, even if most nights I returned to the laptop to grind away well past dark. The forecast showed no end to the cold; the all-important metrics of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths only moved in one direction.
Tournament cancellations across the country were quick to follow ours. In an official press release announcing the indefinite postponement of the 2020 Four-Wall Nationals, U.S. Handball Association President LeaAnn Martin closed with the following message:
While the USHA continues to serve and promote its mission during this challenging time, please know that when handball is able to be played again, we will be even more ready To Organize, Promote and Spread the Joy of Handball: The Perfect Game.
She signed:
Yours in Handball.
I had already attended the funerals of too many of the players who had taught the game to me .Now I had a very real fear of losing them all–and living to see the end of the Perfect Game in Buffalo.
The months of Ma y through October 2020 will stand out forever in my memory for the horrors that our nation and our world endured together. I would see my entire family catch the coronavirus and see my father bed-ridden and exhausted; I would see close friends, near and far away, tweeting numbly about surreal Zoom funerals.
But I’ll also remember those months for some of the most beautiful mornings I’ve ever spent, and some of the best games I’ve ever played.
Although handball soon appeared on county and CDC lists of low-risk activities–think high ceilings, individually ventilated courts, no contact–the age of our population was still a concern, so the club remained closed.
But one-wall handball–played outdoors–was another story.
Players in other parts of the country had to lobby for the reopening of outdoor courts. I stumbled across one petition, from Saliyim Lanzot, asking New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to unchain the gates of the more than 2,000 handball courts peppered across the five boroughs. The city had moved into Phase 2 of reopening, and playgrounds were again accessible; the petition argued that unlocking the courts as well would open more space for socially distant activity. Even though the New York Handball Newsletter Facebook page promoted it, the petition received only 81 signatures–but handball’s proponents didn’t lack for passion. “Im [sic] signing this because we need this type of exercise for some people that do not play other sports,” Omar Santisteban wrote. “We need handball,” said Miguel de Jesus. Andrew Caceres pleaded “Handball saves lives!” On Facebook, players vowed to bring bolt cutters and “do it ourselves.”
In the City of Buffalo in 2020 you will find only two handball courts: one in a pocket park off Lawrence Place on the West Side and one, no longer even recognized as a court, on the East Side near Cheektowaga. We never had anywhere close to New York’s 2,000, but once there were courts in Shoshone Park and Cazenovia Park, courts in downtown Buffalo and courts in the Old First Ward, but they’re all gone–seeded for baseball diamonds or torn up for parking. And the remaining courts are in such poor condition as to be essentially unplayable.
But when the weather turned we found a single wall, comprising two playable courts, just northeast of the city on the University at Buffalo’s suburban campus, and we claimed this from a few stray student lacrosse players who practiced there.
Only a few of us showed up that first week, sweeping the court clean, stretching against the fences, smiling at each other from behind our masks. But our numbers grew. Fathers brought sons, old hands brought first-timers. The group chats lit up again, filled with the old jokes and insults, but now also with weather reports and the latest USHA guidance on safe play. We came from as far south as Orchard Park and as far east as Batavia. Only our friends in Ontario couldn’t join us as the border remained closed. We even picked up new members, a pair of resettled Buffalonians who had grown up playing on the plentiful courts of Brooklyn and Queens. When the students started moving back, more New Yorkers, and some international students who had learned the game in China and Shanghai, worked in, too.
We played every Saturday and every Sunday; we snuck out Tuesday and Thursday afternoons; we played Mondays and Wednesdays until the sun dropped behind the trees; we sweat shirtless and crashed into the fences and teased each other and howled at every killshot.
It’s hard to imagine what the pandemic would have been like without the six months we had with that single slab of concrete off a parking lot in Amherst. It would have been all monotonous news, doomscrolling, Zoom happy hours, all atrophy and claustrophobia.
And that, of course, was the reality for many Americans.
Reporters and researchers have written much, and not enough, on the many ways that the pandemic has deepened inequities. Access to health care is the most obvious–but we also saw unequal impacts meted out in the job market and classrooms and so many other areas of our lives, falling along well-worn lines of race, class, and geography.
But the fate of handball offers another lens on the way we apportion privileges and direct public investment in the U.S.–and how this can have powerful effects on shared experiences and individual outcomes.
Most players knew that the game was in retreat even before the pandemic. Outdoor walls have been torn down and indoor courts replaced by more profitable rows of treadmills. Youth leagues are rare. The pain of learning makes few who casually try the game want to earn its calluses. Just scheduling weekly matches in Buffalo requires texting trees to pressgang the faithful of the Niagara Frontier, many of whom will drive over an hour each way for a few games.
But it took the pandemic for me to see just how far the game has retreated–and just how much public disinvestment, rather than lack of interest, is to blame.
At the end of October, just as it was becoming too cold to play outdoors in Buffalo, I visited my old friends Steve and Erin in Los Angeles. Our plan was to spend a long weekend in the desert, but before we did, I insisted on making a pilgrimage to the three-wall handball courts at Muscle Beach, having read reviews online from LA’s active handball community.
What I saw shocked me and sank my spirits: All three courts were filled wall-to-wall with elaborate encampments of the unhomed. This was not like the tent towns visible along the sides of LA’s freeways, or taking over sidewalks in DTLA and medians up Abbot Kinney: The inhabitants of the handball courts had clearly made camp here for months, with an expectation not to be molested. They had cordoned off bedrooms and sitting rooms and workout facilities, complete with heavy furniture, free weights, and, paradoxically (it seemed then) both MAGA and ACAB tags. We were confronted with the state and local governments’ choice to ignore a sprawling humanitarian crisis in plain sight.
But the scene spoke to more than just California’s housing, mental health, and substance abuse challenges. When these issues spill over into spaces set aside for public use, who sees it, and who suffers? Not the handball players with memberships at LA Fitness. At Muscle Beach, I saw the sport’s distinct accessibility and unique place in American public life being erased in real time.
Handball, particularly one-wall handball, has always been a working-class sport. It’s soared on popularity with laborers in the 1880s and latchkey kids in the 1980s. It’s a game with no price of admission that you can play on public property; in theory, all you need is a wall and a palm-sized ball.
I remembered this when I was in Denver on the first day of the new year, where I encountered a scene that stood in stark and heartening contrast to the camps at Venice Beach. I was staying with my sister-in-law for the holiday, and, finding the first morning of 2021 clear and warm, we took the dogs and our tennis racquets to City Park, where her boyfriend Zach, aware of my habit, promised I would see the neighborhood’s handball courts. After a few volleys, not terribly talented at tennis, I pointed out that we could, in theory, use the tennis ball on the handball courts. Zach obliged me.
Past the tennis courts and beside a restroom facility we found a fenced-in area with two walls, pale pink like the first blush of the sunset we’d seen over the Rockies the night before. They were shorter than I was used to, and the asphalt was in rough condition–the back courts were covered in leaves, branches, and human detritus, leaving only two usable playing areas. These, in front, were cracked and pitched, so that ice and water pooled around the rear. But we kicked the chunks of ice off to the sidelines and I showed Zach how to serve. Soon we were scrimmaging, and suddenly we were playing a set of three games to 21, shirts off and sweating under the cool winter sun.
A few other players appeared to take the court beside us. Though they spoke only Spanish, they resembled in all other ways our Buffalo regulars: old friends, fathers and sons, experts and first-timers. Two picked up a dirty wooden pallet and used it to scrape slush off the court–swiftly and with evident practice. I imagined that, over the past nine months, they had treasured and protected this court in City Park the way we had cared for the university’s court in Amherst.
Later, searching for more information on the Denver handball culture, I found an article from Colorado Public Radio on the sport’s popularity with Denver’s Latinx community. The story sounded much like what I’d learned from my teachers in Buffalo.
“The villages we came from, some of the villages are really small so they don’t have the resources to play other games,” Miguel Perez, a concrete layer originally from Mexico, told the station. “This game is easy to play, you don’t need equipment, you just need a handball.”
Handball games draw huge crowds in Whittier and other diverse neighborhoods in Denver, and tournaments sometimes even draw visitors who drive up from Mexico.
Some of the villages there don’t even have a wall–players use the smooth sides of buildings. This is true in Mexico as it is in Ireland, where most of today’s world champions reside: For centuries, Irish farmers and herders have played on one-wall and three-wall courts that dot the countryside–originally hay-shelters, or ruins from old farmsteads–while city kids learned three-wall in the long stone alleys of Galway and Dublin.
In Denver, in the heart of a pandemic and with a new variant of COVID-19 just then appearing in the state, we wanted to keep a safe and respectful distance, and didn’t speak to the other players. But we returned stray balls, exchanging knowing nods, and watched one another in between serves, sometimes exclaiming at an excellent shot. It was a moment of fragile communion that I’ll never forget.
I remember thinking the USHA president’s first communications after the pandemic closures to be corny and inflated. Now–after losing handball, reclaiming it, and losing it again; after seeing public courts both defiled and sanctified by very different marginalized communities–I share Martin’s uncomplicated belief, if not all of her optimism. We have so many urgent tasks ahead of us, and preparing “To Organize, Promote and Spread the Joy of Handball” is nowhere near the top.