Off the Front Wall

The rubber balls buzzed like black bees. They slithered along the walls, caromed in crazy zigzags, whupped out of the corners at speeds over 50 m.p.h., or died on the floor in tiny, whirling bounces of reverse English. Flailing away with either hand, the scurrying players ricocheted shots off all four walls and the ceiling. At the staid Los Angeles Athletic Club, the ninth annual championship of the U.S. Handball Association was in full swing.

In principle, handball dates from the first time that a boy bounced a ball against a wall. Most authorities credit Irish immigrants of the 1840s with introducing the formal game to the U.S., where it found an early fan in Abraham Lincoln. In the modern, furiously fast sport, the ball can be hit with either hand (hand-ballers consider rackets sissy stuff). The most difficult shot is a "fly kill." in which the player takes the ball in the air off the front wall, hits it against a side wall at a sharp angle so that it has lost nearly all its forward speed by the time it reaches the front wall, skitters off it and drops dead.

"Run & Sweat." At first popular only in the East, handball was taken up by the Y.M.C.A.s, got a big lift in the '30s when the Federal Government's make-work programs built hundreds of outdoor courts. Inexpensive to play (a good pair of leather gloves costs only $5), the sport now claims some 5,500,000 participants. "When you're young, you play singles and run and sweat," says one handballing Chicago doctor. "Later you take up doubles, and when you're 70, you pick a strong partner and just putter around."

Running or just puttering, U.S. hand-ballers compete on courts ranging from a single concrete wall in a Brooklyn park to the four-walled, all-glass, air-conditioned, $32,000 pleasure dome given to an Aurora, Ill. Y.M.C.A. by Robert W. Kendler, founder and president of the U.S. Handball Association and chief evangelist of a sport of evangelists. Kendler lives for handball; on the side, he is a Chicago millionaire (building construction). Kendler bristles at the imputation that his game is a lowbrow cousin of squash, can point to such distinguished handballers as Literary Critic Lionel Trilling and television's Art Linkletter.

The Champ. In Los Angeles last week, the fans that clustered on the seats above the backwalls of the courts had eyes chiefly for Kendler's protege, a baby-faced Army private named Johnny Sloan, 23. The defending champion, Sloan can curve and whistle a handball like a major-league pitcher. Before entering the Army, he worked for Kendler in Chicago. In the U.S.H.A. finals against Bob Brady, 36, a fireballing San Francisco cop, Private Sloan was at the peak of his methodical, calm game ("I'm a controlled kill player"), won going away (21-20, 21-9) to become indisputably the nation's handiest handballer.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.