Casey's court and the Sun's rules

On Sunday, 17 March 1889, the Sun gave a feature on page seven to handball, headed with Casey's name as the man telling how the games should be played. The article asked how many of the paper's readers had ever seen a game, put the sport's arrival in this country at some fifty years back, and set a diagram of the court beside Casey's advice on waiting for the ball to drop and hitting it low. It closed with "the set rules of the game": twenty-one aces to a game, a ball about two inches across and an ounce and a third in weight, one ace line across the middle of the court, a hinder played over, and a referee chosen by the players. The paper named no club, committee or author for them. The Wichita Eagle reprinted the article on 9 April, crediting the Sun, and added nothing about where the rules came from.

The court Casey spoke from was then less than two years old. On Tuesday, 29 November 1887, he beat John Lawlor of Dublin, the Irish champion, in seven games without losing one, in the Brooklyn Handball Club's new court in Degraw Street. The match was twenty-one games for the championship of the world, by the Sun's report of the next morning; the first ten had been played in Ireland, where Lawlor won six, so Casey needed seven before Lawlor took five. Casey, an ex-alderman, was the club's president, Thomas F. Cook was the referee, and the court, finished only a short time before play began, was sixty-five feet long and twenty-four wide, with a front wall thirty-five feet high faced in white marble and a back wall of twelve. The Tribune of the same day agrees on the place. The Sun dated the court's opening to "three years ago to-day" in a note of 29 November 1890, which also said the two men had put the finish off until Casey's court was ready; the plan to finish elsewhere is the Irish chapter's business. Casey was no newcomer to court-keeping: by December 1875 he had described a Brooklyn court of his own to the Herald.

The court stayed the center of the game through the next winter. The Evening World gave its address on 21 December 1888 as 297 Degraw Street. In May 1888 a New Zealand paper, the Evening Post, had printed among its American mail news that J. A. Keenan, handball champion of Australia, had offered to play Casey for the championship of the world; no report of a match has been found. In December the World announced that William Courtney and Lawlor would play fifteen games for $100 at Casey's court, and the Sun reported the first seven there on Christmas Day, Courtney winning four of them. The rest were to be played on New Year's Day. The paper said the next morning that Courtney, ill, had forfeited. In March 1889 the Sun gave notice that a club tournament would begin the following week, in three classes, each winner to receive a gold medal from the club. I have found no report of who won.

Then the Sun set about changing the game. On Monday, 27 October 1890 it printed an article headed "A Change in the Style of Playing Demanded by Experts." It argued that hard serving had taken over, the man who drove the ball hardest off the front wall so that it could not be recovered being counted a wonderful player. It proposed either a line on the front wall four or five feet above the floor, which every serve would have to clear, or a rule that the server stand at the ace line. By the paper's later reports Casey was heartily in favor, and an exhibition at his court on 20 November was played under the new service rule. On 1 December the paper said that Edward J. Sweeney, who kept the Murray Hill court, and William Courtney, who kept the South Brooklyn court, were both praising the rule, and that the old-school players had raised a great outcry. On Sunday, 4 January 1891 the Brooklyn Handball Club met in Degraw Street, Casey presiding, and resolved unanimously that every game in its court would be played under the new rules, the Sun reported next morning; Murray Hill and South Brooklyn had already fallen in. Every report of the adoption that I have found is the Sun's own, on the fortunes of its own proposal.

On Tuesday evening, 1 March 1892, about two dozen men met in Casey's parlor to reorganize the club. Casey proposed Major John Carmody for president and he was elected, with Col. Thomas Meehan vice-president, Frank J. Prendergast secretary and Casey treasurer. By the Sun's account of 3 March the club meant to be so thoroughly organized, and its rules of play so perfected, that others would follow it, and the president named a committee on the playing ball. Six months later the same paper, reporting a doubles game at the club's court on Thursday, 8 September, wrote that the service was "done from the short line." It is the earliest use of the term I have found. Whether that line is the second line of the 1893 book's rule is not shown.

The book came next. On 31 October 1893 the Jersey City News announced that the next number of Spalding's Dime Athletic Library would be The Game of Handball and How to Play It, by Maurice W. Deshong, with articles on the construction of a regulation court and on the rules. The rules in the book call for a ball an inch and seven-eighths across and an ounce and five-eighths in weight, smaller and heavier than the Sun's of 1889, and for service from within two parallel lines. They are followed by a passage on the ball the Brooklyn Handball Club used. Spalding's official rules for 1894 reprinted them.

In January 1894 the Sun reprinted from the Chicago Herald a letter from Casey to a correspondent in Chicago, written after a match there fell through over the rules. There had been no rule in his court for five years, he wrote, "except The Sun's rules, as they are called," and six courts within ten miles of his own played under them. He had learned under the old rules and played Lawlor under them; he said no match would be played in his court under any others, and that the courts of any account in the country, as far off as St. Louis and San Francisco, kept the rules of the Brooklyn Handball Club. Five years back from January 1894 reaches roughly to the Sun's printing of March 1889, not to the service reform of 1890, though Casey may have been speaking in round figures. In 1895 the Sun reported a Cork paper calling for a world conference on a code, and in April 1896 it reported a convention planned at Cork for July that would probably adopt its own; those belong to the Irish side of this record.

The A.A.U. did not write the rules it played its first championship under. A Washington paper noted on 9 November 1896 that the Union now exercised jurisdiction over amateur handball. In the small hours of Tuesday, 17 November, after a session that ran past midnight, its board of governors created a handball championship on the application of the Jersey City club and, in the Sun's words of the next morning, "adopted THE SUN's rules of competition." Which text the board meant, the code the paper printed in 1889 or that code as reformed in the service rule of 1890 and voted in by the Brooklyn club in 1891, the printed sources do not settle, and the reformed text has not been found in print. The 1889 printing repeats the code of Ed. James's Manual of Sporting Rules of 1873, in the form Spalding's Hand Book gave it in 1886 with a scoring rule added, and differs from that form only in the weight of the ball and a few trimmed words; who added the weight is not known. The evidence is the Sun's single report of the board meeting and a collation of the three printed texts made for this record, and the report's wording leaves open whether the board meant the playing rules or only the conditions of the tournament. Whether the club's committee wrote anything of its own is a separate question: on 27 December 1896 the Tribune said the ball the club had adopted and the rules its committee had formulated were recognized as standard wherever the game was played, and no committee text has been found.

I have not found who put the code in the Sun in 1889. It was not the club's composition, since the text is James's, but whether Casey, a club member or the paper's handball writer supplied the copy is unknown. The reformed text of 1890 and 1891 has never turned up in print. The only full printings read are of the code before the reform: the Sun's of 1889 and a Houston daily's of 13 March 1898, which printed twenty-three numbered rules for readers who had asked for them and agrees with Spalding's 1886 form rather than with the Sun's page. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle for 1887 to 1896 has not been read for this record, and its pages are where a club rules committee, or a vote of the members, would most likely show up.

The application had come from the Jersey City club, which I take to be the club of John Egan's handball court at 223 Mercer Street; the link is inferred from the place and the names, and no paper read states it. The court had been announced by the Jersey City News on 29 August 1893 as opening that night, with Casey and Lawlor among the experts invited. The board's tournament was first set for 12 December. On 27 December 1896 the Tribune announced it for 7 January 1897 at the Jersey City Handball Court. Within three weeks the Brooklyn club lost its president: Major Carmody died on 15 January 1897, the Sun reported the next morning.