Gothamist: Please Explain: Handball

Alma Mendoza

Tue, 29 May 2007 10:41:39 -0500

hi im a senior in arroyo grande high school and i have been playing handball for the past 6 years.my school has handball tournaments every year and they give out 1st 2nd and 3rd place trophies and the first place and gets their name written on the handball court. we play singles and doubles. Its really fun and i always wanted to makehandball a school sport too and have the chance to play against other schools. i enjoy plaing handball and i recomend other people to try it out and im pretty sure they will enjoy it too.

tien

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 17:03:05 -0500

people people, please be aware that jake knows nothing about sports. handball is actually an olympic sport. and the athens site has a nice summary of its history.

Rance

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 09:34:46 -0500

What is this crap about "handball played on a racquetball court"? Four wall handball (not be be confused with the Olympic sport called Team Handball) was around for years before racquetball was invented. Racquetball is a direct decendent of paddleball (not paddle tennis). Paddleball was developed by a Michigan State University Phys Ed. instructor in late 50's early 60's as an alternative to handball. It seems that there were wusses who didn't like to hit the ball with their bare hands because it hurt. So handball isn't a game played on racquetball courts, racquetball is a game played no handball courts. Jeez, does no one ever do any historical research?

DCist Jason

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 00:34:22 -0500

The diagram depicts the "handball" played on racquetball and squash courts. It's played pretty rarely, but my pops was a racquetball playa growing up and he'd take us kids to watch the action every so often. There were rare occasions where I'd see court handball being played. It's usually mano-a-mano, and quite painful looking to watch. To oversimplify, imagine replacing your squash racquet with the balls of your hand. Team Handball is, as the name suggests, a team sport. Seven on a side, I think? It's usually encountered in your gym class and quickly forgotten about. We basically played it on a basketball court with a volleyball. I seem to remember that players could advance the ball only a certain number of steps before having to pass. On either end, there was a goal (usually rendered in gym class by a taped out rectangle on the walls), and in front of the goal, a large trapezoidal goal box. Players could not STEP inside the goal box, but the ball could be possessed by a player in the box as long as the player was airborne. In high school, the game degenerates into a bunch of kids winging the ball as hard as they can at the poor schmuck playing goalie. The game has a following abroad, and it's an Olympic sport, but you're not likely to see a second of coverage of the sport in this country. I remember when I was a first-year in college, me and my dormmates had recently won the university intramural soccer championship. Flush with success and feeling a little too full of ourselves, we entered ourselves in the Team Handball Tournament. There were many, many teams entered, and the hook was that the single elimination tourney began Friday night and went on without interruption until there was a champion. My roommate and I were the only ones in the entire dorm who had ever played the game. So it fell to us to teach everyone the rules (from misty, water-colored memories) and prepare ourselves as best we could for our first match, Friday night at midnight. We showed up, and we weren't very good, but because we drew another first-year dorm as the opening round opponent, one that probably had half the institutional awareness of the game that we had, we managed to win pretty handily. Sadly, our next match was crack of dawn the next day, and it was against Delta Tau Delta. To a man, they were a foot taller, a horsehead heavier and a metric ton meaner than we were. They basically beat the crap out of us from whistle to whistle...'bows to the face, lowered shoulders, stomps to our heels. And because our goalie somehow pulled a hamstring during the first half, I had to go in goal and that shit was like the opening battle scene from Saving Private Ryan. You don't mean many people who've been utter humbled and humiliated playing a game no one outside of Europe's ever really heard of, but count me among that unlucky posse. Sometimes, late at night, I can still feel that ball zinging past my face and the flashes of lusty hate in the eyes of a DTD behemoth.

Daniel

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 20:44:26 -0500

Aah, I remember it well, playing team handball in Europe. I loved it! It's pretty fast and brutal, like a combination of basketball, lacrosse, and dodgeball, with a ball almost the size of a volleyball... Boring? Only if you lack imagination or prefer your sports interrupted every fourteen seconds, so that the refs can bring out a ruler to slide underneath a man pile of steroid mutants.

jb

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 18:42:05 -0500

My high school had a few handball courts. I kind of liked it, actually. We always called "the game you play in a schoolyard with a litte blue ball" wallball, except we just used those big, rubber bouncy balls.

Modern

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 17:55:35 -0500

Let the world have their Handball. Ever seen this in the Olympics? It's like playing no-dribble basketball with a softball. Or water polo without the swimming. Or lacrosse without a stick. It's downright boring. And for the record...the word Soccer is very English, as in a contraction of the word association, Association (Rule) Football being the real name of the game, as opposed to Rugby (Rule) Football. And it isn't just us dirty Americans who call the game Soccer. Let's see...the evil Canadians, the nasty Kiwis (NZ), and the bruttish Australians. And more. And the Italian call it, of all things, Calcio. (From the verb to kick.) One more note, just in case you were going to argue that football should involve more ball kicking, unlike American Football. The foot in Football refers to the game being played on foot, as opposed to on horseback.

Brightliner

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 17:33:24 -0500

Handball. Pfeh. You won't find me repeatedly smacking balls with the palm of my hand. I need my hands too much to risk damage to the radial and ulnar nerves, not to mention the arteries near them. Now, jai alai's a different matter.

Tom

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 16:37:53 -0500

Back on topic, team handball is a sport that's quite popular in Europe. I remember playing it in high school. It reminded my of water polo quite a bit, with the throwing motion and pump fakes. The coolest is when they an attacker jumps from behind the arc and has to shoot before landing. Very cool game, but dodgeball is ultimately simpler and nostalgic for many who grew up in the US.

Eric

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 16:20:30 -0500

The GAA (the governing body for Ireland's traditional games) conveniently provides background on not just the Irish version, but the US version and others as well: http://www.handball.ie/newsite/start.php?do=history

fayzex

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 15:50:25 -0500

The handball most of us remember playing growing up (AKA One-Wall Handball) is more prevalent in NYC. The handball the diagram depicts (Four Wall) is more prevalent on the West Coast, in places such as LA.

T$

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 15:28:01 -0500

http://ushandball.org/ Yes its a US, adaptation....In NYC, it was played by many industrial blue-collar workers back in the early 1900s. After work, they would play against 1 wall with a hard ruber ball as a way to alleviate the stress of industrial work. It eventually evolved into the (what I like to call) "street" handball. Yes it is also played by "people in jail" (but then again so are other sports)...There exists 1wall(played mostly in northeast), 3wall(played out west) and 4wall handball(indoors). For further in sight please refer to http://ushandball.org/onewall/.....

Gari N. Corp

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:58:13 -0500

It is a sorry and bastardised version of the mighty sport of Eton Fives, a game played in all the best English boarding schools. It has suffered a sorry dilution on its way down the social spectrum and across the Atlantic, much as Rugby football morphed into the sorry spectacle that is the NFL.

cm

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:32:18 -0500

They started making spaldeens again a couple of years ago: Jonathan Lethem will be so pleased.

hr

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:20:51 -0500

handball is generally learned in prison.

dude

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:19:51 -0500

They started making spaldeens again a couple of years ago: http://www.spaldeen.com/wheretobuy.html

Bob

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:09:24 -0500

"American Handball" isn't strictly speaking American in origin; it's actually over 500 years old. I believe it has origins both in Gaelic Handball, played in Ireland and Scotland, and an unrelated game in Precolumbian America. It predates other similar wall games such as Racquetball and Jai Alai.

Tim N.

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:05:50 -0500

Wow, I always thought handball was something else... something not involving a court...

Andrew J. Lederer

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:00:31 -0500

So, they can call our game "New York handball". It's the only handball I've ever known. (My uncle was an enthusiastic player. I remember watching him at the Brighton Beach Baths.)

Dmytro

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 13:54:52 -0500

Er... welcome to the world outside of the US. Actually, the NYTHC version of handball IS the actual handball, the game played all over the world. It's like a cross between soccer and basketball, in the way that there are goals with a goalkeeper instead of baskets, but players use their hands, not feet. Looks like the game with a little blue ball reappropriated the name of handball, in a similar way as football reappropriated the name of, well, British football, also known as soccer in America. But all over the world soccer is what is known as football, and the kind of football played in the US is known as American football.