Don't Cross the Handball Men
298 words. Letter to the editor.
I read with great sympathy Jane Gamble’s letter of April 24 regarding the painting of pickleball lines on youth tennis courts that had been funded in part by the USTA. This action not only rendered the courts unsuitable for USTA regulation play, it made the whole facility ineligible for future USTA grant money.
This incident reminds me of one from my own sporting past. I grew up playing handball in the city because we had no money for racquet sports and besides, there was a handball court at the local public park so you naturally would not show up with a racquet even if you had one. Along came a group that wanted to erect racquetball and squash courts in the same space. This was before “gentrification” was a commonly-recognized term, but looking back I see that’s what it was.
Or I should say that’s what it would have been. Handball is a blue-collar sport, played mostly by men. Tough men. The fancy folks held an organizational meeting to discuss the plans for their nice racquet sport facility. Boy were they surprised when my dad and the other handball-playing men from the neighborhood showed up. They brought us kids too. Our job was to hog the refreshments, which we would have done anyway, but we were not expected to take part in any rough stuff. I was caught up in the punch and soda and cake and cookies and I honestly don’t know what went on at the front of the room, except there was a lot of shouting and maybe some shoving. End result: the handball courts were not touched. Which is fair, right? Sport facilities should not be a zero-sum game.
I hope the pickleball and tennis crowds can find a peaceful way through their issues.
-30-
This work was published in The Paducah Sun on May 8, 2021.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.