What do you get when you cross a competitive racquetball league with a bunch of guys hanging out on their lunch break and add in some industrial-sized ping pong paddles and gratuitous shit-talking? The Paddleball League of the YMCA of Saginaw, Michigan!
While I was back home in Saginaw for the holidays, my dad invited me to come out to play some paddleball doubles with him and his friends during his lunch break. I decided to show up since I like racquetball a lot, so paddleball is probably cool, too, right? Plus, as some of the guys in the league and I decided after a not-so-lengthy debate upon my announcement of their impending fame on this blog, paddleball is weird. “If you want to find the strangest cast of characters,” says Jim, the paddleball league’s so-called Social Media Expert, “go to a paddleball tournament”.
Before I go any further: what, you ask, is paddleball? Even Google isn’t quite sure! When I googled images of “paddleball”, I got things like this:
(not quite)
and this…
(almost accurate)
and this:
courtesy of leapfrog-entertainment.com: “Hurry! Hurry! Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. It’s Bouncin’ Dan — The Paddleball Man with the greatest paddleball show on earth!”
Even Wikipedia asserts that paddleball is “a one-person game played with a paddle and an attached ball.” No, no, no!
Paddleball is an indoor racquet sport with rules that are very similar to those of racquetball: either two (for singles) or four (for doubles) players lock themselves in an echoey four-walled white room and use racquets to try to hit a little bouncy ball to the front wall of the room before it bounces twice. If they succeed, it’s the other person or team’s turn to take a swing. When a player or team fails to hit the ball to the front wall before it bounces twice, they either lose their serve (if they served for that point) or the other team gets a point (if the other team served). I’ll explain the rules in more detail later so you can try playing if you want to! The main differences between paddleball and racquetball lie in the equipment that is used; a paddleball is less bouncy than a racquetball, which causes the game to be played further up in the court since the ball won’t bounce as far when it hits a wall, and a paddleball paddle, instead of a misshapen tennis racquet on a leash like you use in racquetball, is basically a ping pong paddle on steroids, often wrought of kevlar.
That’s more like it! (paddleball doubles courtesy of npa.paddleball.org)
Paddleball, the guys were pleased to inform me, was actually invented at the University of Michigan. In 1930, Earl Riskey, a physical education teacher and Director of Intramural Sports at the university, wanted to provide the tennis team with a way to train with racquets during brutal Michigan winters. So he put the handball courts and ping-pong paddles that were lying around to use and invented this bizarre sport.
Brutal Michigan Winter. I took this photo in October.
Michigan is still the de facto headquarters for the sport, and Bay City is its mecca, according to the guys in the league. I believe them; the Wikipedia article about actual paddleball (hint: search for “Four Wall Paddleball”) contains a list of Mens’ singles and doubles national paddleball champions across the ages, most of whom are indeed from Michigan.
In a nod to its DIY, midwestern roots, paddleball is an exceedingly friendly and inclusive sport. In fact, most indoor racquet sports played on a handball court are this way. This makes sense because they all kind of go hand in hand; people often switch from paddleball to racquetball to handball and back again as the times change. My dad didn’t always play paddleball at the YMCA; when I was a kid he and his friends played racquetball. He took an extended break from racquetball and… well, from exercise in general… for a while, and when he went back to the Y nobody was playing racquetball anymore. They all had gone back to paddleball, which was invented first but fell by the wayside for many racquet-sports-enthusiasts in the late 1970’s when racquetball was invented and became a popular novelty. In fact, my dad started off playing paddleball right around 1971 before racquetball was even a thing. So he gladly picked up one a paddle and jumped back into the past (which is also the future).
A big part of the reason for the switch at the Saginaw YMCA from racquetball back to paddleball is the fact that paddleball is less strenuous on a person’s body than racquetball is. It’s easy to play doubles in paddleball because the ball isn’t wildly ricocheting off of everything it hits at 120 miles per hour with four moving targets–I mean… people–crammed onto a court, so there’s less running and jumping and dodging and sliding than there is in racquetball. All the guys in the league, who are mostly retired or at least in their late 50’s, agree: paddleball is much easier for old farts like them and it’s still an incredibly good workout that requires a lot of skill to be good at.
And some of these guys are good at it. Take Tom Mudd, for example, a long-time veteran of racquetball, handball, paddleball, and the US military who has some hilarious stories and, according to my dad, “hits the ball like a surgeon”. Like the one about how he started smoking in his youth: while he was in the military during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the commander would periodically say, “if you’ve got ’em, light ’em up.” This meant that if you wanted to smoke, you could do so leisurely out of formation. If you didn’t, you’d have to stand at attention while everyone else had a smoke break. Obviously, everyone was a smoker by the end of training.
Tom, who was, he claims, “a pretty clean kid until (he) joined the military”, is a long-time sports-you-play-on-a-handball-court enthusiast. He started out with handball in the 1950’s and ’60’s, moved on to “dabble in racquetball” in the 1980’s, and started the paddleball league at the YMCA in 2005 or 2006 with his buddy Karl, who is also a stand-up guy. The two of them told me a great story about Karl’s first doubles tournament when he called up Tom (widely regarded as one of the best players around) and asked him to be his partner in the tournament. Tom “forgot” to call him back, which hurt Karl’s fragile feelings. Tom’s explanation for his evasive behavior? He “wasn’t trying to diss Karl but he had some… um… improvements that might’ve helped.” Now Karl is a seasoned player with some serious paddle-chops and gets the respect he deserves… sort of.
These guys are hilarious together. They send emails back and forth, which my dad gave me a privileged glimpse of, that basically consist of shit-talking and jokes and sometimes some logistics and actual information. In one email thread, Tom, who signs his emails as “Assistant Director of Transportation” and “Associate Director of Court Rules”, outlines his gratitude to Larry (another player) “for voting me as 2014 Player of the Year. However, I agree with Mitch that he is most qualified due to his great comeback from hip replacement surgery. Well, maybe we could have a separate category like Greatest Comeback Player of the Year for Mitch, and I could still qualify for Larry’s likely one-only vote for me for Player of the Year….” Karl replies,
“Gary, Tom is having a rough time handling all the fame and fanfare that comes with being an overnight STAR. He was last seen drag-racing his car down Washington Avenue, doing at least 15 MPH!! My first thought was, I just created another Justin Bieber (Yikes). Would you be willing to provide some counseling to help guide Tom through this maze of success? Heaven forbid he ends up like the Bieb’s:)”
Did I mention that one of Tom’s hobbies is drag-racing awesome old cars? Renaissance man.
Tom Mudd: Player of the Year 2014.
This paddleball league impressed me a lot and I was overjoyed to get to play with and learn from these guys; they’re accommodating and knowledgeable and welcoming and more. But most importantly, they have helped my dad get back into sports after a loooooooooooooong hiatus (by his standards), which, according to him, saved his life. “I was literally dying when I was taken in by the Saginaw YMCA paddleball club. They welcomed me in my sorry state and… doubles paddleball with these human competitors awakened my desire to live. I especially thank Tom Mudd for being the perfect example of how to age without being old…. A classy group of people. A weird sport in our current world of self-centeredness.”
He’s not exaggerating when he says he was dying when he came back to paddleball. A few years ago, my dad’s blood pressure was so high after long enough of neglecting his inner fitness junkie that his doctors warned him that he could have a stroke at any time. I was understandably freaked out and really hoped he’d get back to his former self. A bit about his former self: my dad is one of the main reasons I am a personal trainer. He started me off playing racquetball, running, and lifting weights at a pretty young age and encouraged the hell out of me when I was on the swim team throughout middle and high school. I have images of him coming home from long runs in the middle of a brutal Michigan winter (see above) when I was a kid, his beard covered in icicles and his cheeks rosy with the joyful glow of a 13-mile run in below-freezing conditions. He ran several marathons a year in those days, lived in Big Dog t-shirts and running shoes, lifted weights in the basement while blasting Neil Young records, and made me protein shakes for breakfast on lazy weekend days. He claims that there was a time when he played so much racquetball that he would dream he was still playing it while he slept. I believe him, because I once went through a time like that, too. So did some of the other guys in the league; my dad’s comment about the Racquetball Dreams was met with hearty murmurs of agreement.
Anyway, my dad went through a tough time in life with a nasty case of plantar fasciitis as the super-shitty cherry on top and kinda fell off the workout wagon, which for him meant a total lifestyle upheaval complete with depression, weight gain, and a lot of potato chips. But since rediscovering the paddleball league, he’s been slowly morphing back into his old super-fit self. He’s lost weight and has a new lease on life, so, yeah, the paddleball league saved him. It’s weird how a little obscure sport played by some guys at a YMCA somewhere in the great white north can make such a huge impact on a person’s life; this group is a community that stays active regardless of their age, supports each other, and makes each other laugh, and that is one of the most valuable things fitness can provide. It’s what makes it worthwhile.
So get out and play some paddleball! Or go running with your friends! Or play Ninja Tag on a playground (that’s gonna be another entry…)! Or go for a walk with your family! Or get a game of basketball or soccer or ultimate frisbee going! Doing something active with the people you love is a beautiful thing, and I can say from experience and from observing this awesome group of paddleballers that there’s nothing quite like the feeling you get from sweating out a crazy workout with other humans.
Some of the Saginaw paddleballers in front of the courts, December 2014.
THE RULES OF PADDLEBALL
If paddleball sounds like fun to you, give it a try! The guys in the Saginaw league usually play doubles, which involves two teams of two people brutally battling it out on the court, but for simplicity’s sake I’m going to share the rules of singles paddleball here. If you’re interested in learning the rules of a different kind of paddleball, check out the National Paddleball Association’s website here.
TO START:
Decide who serves first. A traditional way to do this is to “lag”, meaning that both players stand about an arm’s length from the back wall and hit the ball off of the front wall, trying to make the ball land as close to the second line of the service box as possible. Whoever accomplishes this serves first. Or you could, like, flip a coin.
THE SERVE:
For all serves, the ball must hit the front wall first, not hit the ceiling at all, and land somewhere between the dotted line bisecting the court and the back wall. The ball also can’t hit more than one of the side walls before it hits the floor. The ball hitting one side wall, hitting the floor, and hitting another side wall is okay, but the ball hitting one side wall, another side wall, and then the floor is not and the serve has to be redone. If the ball hits the back wall before the floor, the serve is “long” and the server gets one more try. If the ball lands on the floor before the dotted line, the serve is “short” and must be redone. If the ball hits the ceiling, the serve must also be redone. The server gets two tries; if they fail to serve properly twice, they lose their serve and no points are given.
PLAYING:
After the ball is served, it’s the other player’s job to hit the ball to the front wall before it bounces twice. At this point, all walls are fair game; the serve is the only time where you’re not allowed to hit the ceiling and have certain parameters about where the ball can go. The only rule is that the ball cannot hit the floor before it hits the front wall.
If the other player successfully hits the ball to the front wall before it bounces twice, it’s the server’s turn to hit. Players take turns until someone misses. If the non-serving player misses the ball, the server gets a point and serves again. If the server misses the ball, they lose their serve and no points are scored. You cannot score a point if you did not serve the ball for that point.
HINDERS AND SCREENS:
If a player is going for the ball and they would’ve totally been able to get to it but the other player gets in their way and prevents them from hitting the ball, it’s called a “hinder”. Just shout “HINDERRRR” really loudly (kidding, or not) and play stops. In the event of a hinder, re-do the point. The server serves again like it never happened.
A “screen” (if it happens, yell, “SCREEEEEEEEN!”) is when a player serves the ball and it passes within an arm’s length of the server, obstructing the other player’s view of its path and making hitting it impossible. If this happens, the serve has to be redone.
HOW MANY POINTS DO I NEED TO WIN:
npa.paddleball.org says that you should play to 21 points, but the guys in the league seemed to usually play to 15, which might be a residual effect from all the racquetball they all used to play; in racquetball, the standard number of points needed to win is 15. So just play as long as you want and have fun!
Weird Fitness 