courts … fives to pickleball

Games. The allure of playing anything is timeless, universal. Play, in the game or activity sense (as compared to a theatre play), is indefinable – there are no synonyms. We can play cards, monopoly, a piano, sports, lotteries, and so forth; however, one cannot point to something, as you would a fork or a tree, and say, “there, that’s play.” Play, as I see it, is an attitude. In an earlier blog – Jeu…what if… I discussed the more esoteric and perhaps academic-oriented meanings attached to play/games/sport. What I seek to do in this blog is to ruminate about my new-found fascination with a rapidly growing and very popular game/sport with the rather curious name of pickleball. In doing so, I also want to reflect on the meanings I have derived from playing all manner of court-based, racket sports and their antecedents and my experiential connections to pickleball.

For some years, I have longed to find a new sport to play, something that would cater to my need to move physically, challenge my athletic abilities, and mostly to feed my mind and/or my lifelong interest in being in the attitude of play. A sport junkie in many ways, I cannot remember ever being inactive. And yet, watching sport or observing others play has very little appeal to me. It is the experience of play that magnetizes me. More than any other forms of play, games, and/or sport, it is racket sports that have balmed my soul. Something there is that transforms me when I hold a badminton/squash/paddleball/racquetball/tennis, even table tennis – and now pickleball – racket. Courts, racket courts feel like home – their boundaries are clear, their lines are defining, and the creative possibilities once their games have begun are infinite. They place a premium on tracking, whether ball or shuttlecock, on hand-eye coordination, and most elegantly on touch – soft hands, quick wrist, shot preparation, service, stroke execution, and deception – all of these roll into decisions that become non-conscious – what some call unconscious competence – in  the seconds or fractions of seconds that flash inwardly in the quality of making – and not-making – shots.

Does it matter, this business or craft or profession of playing games? After all, “it’s just a game!” Is it? Better than anyone else, William Hazlitt (1778-1830), an English writer now considered one of the moste eminent critics and essayists in the history of the English language, eulogized about his friend John Cavanagh, the greatest fives – handball – player of Hazlitt’s era:

“It may be said that there are things of more importance than striking a ball against a wall — there are things indeed which make more noise and do as little good, such as making war and peace, making speeches, and answering them, making verses, and blotting them; making money and throwing it away. But the game of fives is what no one despises who has ever played at it. It is the finest exercise for the body, and the best relaxation for the mind. The Roman poet said that ‘Care mounted behind the horseman and stuck to his skirts.’ But this remark would not have applied to the fives-player. He who takes to playing at fives is twice young. He feels neither the past nor future ‘in the instant’. Debts, taxes, ‘domestic treason, foreign levy, nothing can touch him further.’ He has no other wish, no other thought, from the moment the game begins, but that of striking the ball, of placing it, of making it!”
                   ~ The Death of John Cavanagh, by William Hazlitt, published in the Examiner in 1817

Indeed. When captivated within and by any game, nothing else does matter. Does playing at fives – presumably denoting five fingers of the hand – or any other racket/sport make a difference in the world? Are such games just a toy-world universe? When in the attitude of a game, when playing, there is an engagement, a thrall that is all-consuming, as Hazlitt so eloquently wrote in his homage to Cavanagh above.

A brief description or characterization of fives is important, if not merely for game- and game-evolution context. One of the oldest, if, arguably, the oldest fives’ court is that of famed Eton College (Berkshire, England), pictured below:

There is no back wall, sort of a  3-sided squash court with an odd structure on the left side-wall; both the game and the derivation of that unique structure are explained in this clip, What is Eton Fives? The game is still played and can be seen in a more modern iteration and court – doubles’ game in progress – illustrated below:

John Cavanagh, an Irish Catholic by birth, was a house painter, so adept at fives that he played for wagers, sometimes for dinners at various courts throughout England. Hazlitt, an avid player himself, described Cavanagh’s play in this fashion,

Whenever he touched the ball there was an end of the chase. His eye was certain, his hand fatal, his presence of mind complete. He could do what he pleased, and he always knew exactly what to do. He saw the whole game, and played it; took instant advantage of his adversary’s weakness, and recovered balls, as if by a miracle and from sudden thought, that every one gave for lost. He had equal power and skill, quickness, and judgment. He could either outwit his antagonist by finesse, or beat him by main strength….[he] never volleyed, but let the balls hop; but if they rose an inch from the ground he never missed having them. There was not only nobody equal, but nobody second to him. It is supposed that he could give any other player half the game, or beat him with his left hand.                                   ~ extracted from Hazlitt’s essay, The Indian Juggler (full text here).

My point is not to proclaim or laud either Cavanagh or Hazlitt. Instead, I seek to find words to express the meaning of being enraptured, totally enveloped by a game, in Cavanagh’s case, to be so good at it, so aligned with his game that no one could beat him at his craft. Modern, 20th century handball, played in 4-walled, often wooden courts became popular in singles’ and doubles’ versions at private sport clubs, universities, and other venues. Like its fives’ ancestor, handball requires one to be adept with both hands, each of which can be gloved. As an Undergraduate, I tried handball on wooden courts in the PE building, Thames Hall, at Western University. My hands were always swollen from the ball impact on un-gloved palms for a few days after playing handball; regardless, this non-racket, court game held very little appeal to me. The game can be and still is played on one-wall courts, outdoor 3-wall courts and its devotees proclaim, ‘all you need is a ball and a wall.’ I remember handball as a 4-wall court game, somehow its courts buried in the bowels of athletic facilities; it was a taxing, sweaty game, played by men – and by women too – who looked like gladiators in their attire and hand/arm-ware – the image of Jerome Leibling below is representative of my mind’s eye recollections about the sport:

Handball is still called fives with one of the most prominent venues located at the sports-venerated Rugby Public (= private school, in North America) School. Below is an image of a recent British Nationals’ Fives championship hosted at the Rugby courts:

And, although he used a baseball and glove, the movie scenes of Steve McQueen, in The Great Escape (1963), repeatedly incarcerated for his failed prison escape attempts, seated in ‘the cooler’ playing catch with himself , throwing the ball against the cell-wall portrays so demonstrably, the riveting call of ball-to-wall play/games:

For me and many, many others, there is something about a court game with or without walls that enchants its devotees and players. Pictured below is a real or royal tennis court:

The modern game of tennis is derived from this indoor court game played by the elite on English and French courts. Reputedly, the oldest real tennis court was commissioned and built by King James IV sometime early in the 1500s; King Henry VIII played real tennis – he “held court” then in more ways than one. Royal tennis is complex in its rules and scoring with use of the walls, the roof of the small gallery, and even the windows deemed in-play. The racquet was/is more pear-shaped and lopsided, likely to impart spin on the balls, themselves typically manufactured from cloth, by hand.. Note the height of the net; serving has to be done underhand. Wall-free tennis, lawn tennis was not ‘invented’ until the mid- to late-nineteenth century:

The outdoor court game could be played on almost any surface and women, at least those from the upper class in Victorian society, did play the game. In some caricatures and daguerrotype (camera forerunner) renderings of early lawn tennis, there is evidence that serving was underhand, as it was in the royal/real court game and that serving may have been done from a diamond shaped area marked out in the middle of the court, not at the baseline. In the latter regard, some images show the service-return areas to be in the back two-thirds of the courts rather than extending from the net for the front two-thirds of the court as is the case today. It is interesting that in the early forms of both real and lawn tennis, the net is low and volleying – hitting the ball before it bounced – seemed to be the norm in shot-making. Personally, I have never played lawn tennis; instead, I took to its hard-court version in high school, playing on tarmac courts during spare periods and mostly for long hours on hot Summer days, quaffing 26-ounce bottles of Coca Cola after matches with my friends.

Two other court racket sports evolved either from the indoor tennis game or perhaps from the example set in fives’ courts – racquetball and squash.

Above is a very modern, glass backwall image of a racquetball court. Of all the indoor court games, my personal experience is that racquetball is the most demanding physically, with hand-ball a close second. While the court width is about the same as a squash court, a racquetball court is almost 10 feet longer and the ceiling is very much in play. Most shots are up and down the side walls, either driven hard along those walls or lofted high in the air. Players spend most parts of rallies hitting the ball “safely” such that they hit it off the ceiling so that it then bounces off the front wall and then ricochets off the floor bouncing high along either side wall; a well-hit ceiling shot is usually retrieved near the backwall, high above a player’s head. Thus, the power-demands of hitting the rubber-ball with a kind of sawed-off tennis racket are considerable and the longer court means players build up a lot of momentum in repeated accelerations, pivots, and stops.