Racket courts and saloon alleys

On Thursday, 3 September 1874, two men played a rackets match for $500 a side at McQuade's racket and handball court, 404 Madison Street, New York. The New York Herald, reporting the score the next morning, called the court "the only place of the kind now in the city, and in fact the only one of any importance in the country." The paper added that a racket court opened some years before in Thirteenth Street had lost its patrons and closed. The court carried the name of Bernard McQuade, a player himself, who would be secretary of a players' committee in 1876 and would play a match at Sweeney's court in 1884 that the Sun called a championship.

On 10 April 1860 the front page of the New-York Daily Tribune carried an advertisement for the New York Clipper whose list of contents included "Hand Ball in Philadelphia." I know that report only from the advertisement's one line. In May 1861 the Herald announced a handball match at the Bowery Racket Court, 333 Bowery, admission twenty-five cents. In April 1867 the Chicago Tribune, describing the racket court in Thirteenth Street, explained rackets to its readers as handball played with a racket instead of the hand. In October of that year a letter in the Irish Republic, a Fenian paper in Chicago, named handball among the games young Irishmen should form clubs for. In December the Public Ledger of Memphis announced a Christmas Day game between two pairs at Pendergast alley on South Street. In June 1872 the Chicago Tribune, reprinting the New York Clipper, announced a championship match for $1,000 between two Brooklyn players, Phil Casey and James Everett, and two from Chicago, James O'Brien and William Foley, with the first five games to be played in Chicago in an alley the Chicago pair would choose.

The Herald printed Casey's account of the game on 9 December 1875, calling him the American champion. He spoke from his court in Brooklyn, built mainly of brick and lit from the roof and sides, 65 feet deep, with a gallery seating about two hundred. A game, he said, was "usually 21 points, or aces." The server bounded the ball off the front wall over an ace line about thirty feet out, or about halfway down the court, and three failures to clear it put him out. The regulation ball was two and a quarter inches across, cork wound with rubber and worsted under a cover of kid or calfskin, and a match for a purse ran to the best of several games. Casey then went through the courts he knew. Around Brooklyn he named his own, one in Centre Street that he said had stood for twenty-five years, and a new one at Hunter's Point; in New York, McQuade's and the private courts of a company of gentlemen; five in Philadelphia; four in Chicago, with another at Bridgeport near the city; one in Troy. He cited no printed rule.

In February 1876, on the evening of Washington's Birthday, New York's handball and racket players met at McQuade's court and elected a provisional committee, by the Herald's report of 5 March. James Dunne of Brooklyn took the chair, the surname inferred from a scan that cuts it short, McQuade was secretary, and Casey sat for Brooklyn. The committee invited clubs in the United States, Britain and Canada to an international tournament on Easter Monday, 17 April, and said it hoped within a fortnight to announce "the permanent national organization." The Herald later reported the tournament put off to 1 June. I have found no later report of the tournament or of a national body. The papers of the 1880s spell the Brooklyn alderman who partnered Casey both Dunn and Dunne; this record keeps Dunne.

Several of the matches that left reports in the next years were played for stakes. In November 1880 the Sun reported a match for $100 a side between Jimmy Burke of Philadelphia and William Courtney of New York. Burke won four of six games in the first series, in Philadelphia; Courtney won the closing series at a handball court in Madison Street. That court was probably McQuade's old court under a new keeper, Patrick Regan: the name on the Sun's damaged page is too damaged to read with certainty and may be Regan's, and later reports put Regan's court in Madison Street. In Chicago on 18 September 1881 two pairs played the first part of a match at Lynch's court, 181 West Harrison Street, for a stake and, in the words of the next day's Chicago Daily Tribune, "the amateur championship of the United States."

The Sun of 27 October 1880 described Casey as "a well-known handball player who is the Alderman for the Tenth Ward of Brooklyn," arrested the day before on a federal warrant charging that he had registered fraudulently as a voter. On the night of Sunday, 10 June 1883, Patrick Regan was shot dead by a policeman in his liquor store in Madison Street, which the Sun of the next morning placed at the same number as the handball and racket court he kept. The next New York matches I found in the papers were set for Sweeney's Murray Hill court, 159 East 35th Street. There, by the notice in a Wilmington paper, the Society News, Casey and Jim Dunne of Brooklyn, spelled Dunn in the notice, alderman and former alderman, were to play Courtney and Frank Reynolds on 13 December 1883, and in March 1884 Casey and P. H. Smith of St. Louis played Dunne and Courtney, with Casey billed by the Sun as champion of the United States. In October 1884 Dunne played McQuade there for what the same paper called the championship, and Casey, now champion of the world in its columns, beat Dunne in an exhibition.

A printed code was older than the matches of 1874 and after. In 1873 Ed. James, a New York sporting publisher at the New York Clipper Building on Centre Street, printed twenty-three numbered rules for handball in his Manual of Sporting Rules. They set a game of twenty-one aces with a ball about two inches in diameter, service from inside an ace line "supposed to be in the centre of the court," a hand out after three short serves in a row, a hinder played over, a minute between games in a match for a prize, and a referee chosen by the players. Spalding's Hand Book of Sporting Rules printed the same rules, in the same order and almost word for word, in 1886, with one rule inserted and numbered four and a half. The date of 1886 for the first sanctioned American rules, repeated in a modern encyclopedia, goes back to a 1938 journal article that called the Spalding text only apparently the first; the A.A.U.'s code of 1897 is later still. The correction rests on the book itself, whose two pages of rules have been read from scans of the Library of Congress copy. Who wrote the rules is open: James published from the Clipper's building, and the Clipper may have printed them first, but no earlier printing has been found.

No newspaper report found for these years mentions James's rules. Casey's account of 1875 agrees with the book on the twenty-one aces, the ace line at mid-court and the three failed serves, gives the ball as two and a quarter inches where the book says about two, and does not say where his rules came from. Spalding's preface of 1886 hoped its rules would be "adopted by common consent." In the courts the nearest thing to a governing body seems to have been the keeper whose name the court carried, McQuade, Regan or Sweeney, and a champion, as far as these reports show, was a man the papers called one around a match for money. My reading is that later institutions grew out of the need to settle such matches between players who each brought their own custom to the court.

No issue of the Clipper, the Herald or the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from before 1860 has been read for this record, so the advertisement of April 1860 is the earliest witness found and not a beginning; Casey's word in 1875 that a Brooklyn court had stood for twenty-five years points earlier. The newspapers of the 1870s were searched only in Chronicling America. The Eagle, the paper of Casey's own city, has not been read for any year from 1860 to 1885, and no report of what became of the 1876 committee has been found. Each court named outside New York and Brooklyn, from Pendergast alley in Memphis to Lynch's in Chicago, is known from a single report. The Eagle for 1874 to 1885 is the next place to look.

In November 1885 the St. Paul Daily Globe reported that Casey had beaten Ed W. Carner in Cleveland the week before, by a score of 84 to 33. On Thanksgiving Day, 26 November, the Sun reported what it called the annual Thanksgiving Day championship matches at Sweeney's court, Casey and Smith against Dunne and Courtney, the same four surnames as in March 1884. Five years later, on 29 November 1890, the same paper put the opening of Casey's new court in Brooklyn at "three years ago to-day," the night the first international match was decided in it: the court opened on 29 November 1887.