One-wall: New York's own game

On Monday, 26 April 1915, the sporting page of the Evening World described a tournament match played at Van Kelton Field, next door to the West Side Y.M.C.A. in New York. Fred Staddleberger, who had come forward as the West Side title holder, beat J. L. Verstraten of the Twenty-third Street branch, winning the three matches out of five that the tournament required and a silver cup. The paper's writer, explaining the game to readers, said the match was played outdoors on a one-wall court, the ball landing in the court "much in the same manner as tennis," with gloves instead of racquets. He added that handball had suddenly recovered its popularity and that clubs were installing extra courts indoors, on roofs and in vacant lots. The paper gives no date for the match itself. It is the earliest one-wall tournament report I have.

The Young Men's Christian Associations had a code for a court with a service wall sixteen years before. The Athletic League's handbook of 1899 printed a short set of rules, marked as approved by the Physical Directors' Conference in 1898, with a service wall, a service line and a tennis ball. A committee of the Conference revised the code at Thousand Island Park in June 1900, and the League's handbooks printed that text in 1904 (the Canadian issue), 1906, 1907 and 1910. The 1913 handbook headed its revision "Single Wall Court"; J. H. Scott revised it for that issue, and it recommended the Irish Ace ball, about an inch and seven-eighths across, in place of the tennis ball. The 1915 handbook printed the same text beside new four-wall rules. Whether the 1898 text is the parent of the 1900 one is not shown by the text read.

Open-sided play had also been written into a New York code. The Sun printed its set of rules on 17 March 1889, and rule 23 dealt with a court where "there are only boundary lines drawn, and no side walls": a ball rebounding outside the side line was foul. No report of such a court in the 1880s has been found, and nothing links the Sun's rule or the Y.M.C.A.'s code to the outdoor game of 1915. The Y.M.C.A. is the nearer neighbor, since Van Kelton Field stood beside one of its buildings, but proximity is all the record offers.

A book on the game appeared the same year. A copy of James I. Brokaw's treatise "How to Play American Hand Ball," in Spalding's Athletic Library, carries a copyright-office stamp of 18 December 1915. Its 55 rules call for a board 20 feet wide and 10 high, a floor 20x26 feet with the service line exactly midway between the front line and the board, which puts it 13 feet from the board, and a rule that gloves must be worn. The Sun of 9 August 1916, answering a correspondent, gave 26-foot side lines, 20-foot front lines and 13 feet from service line to board, figures that agree with Brokaw's floor (the same answer put the whole court at 60 by 40 feet), and told him not to confuse American handball with the Irish four-wall game. The column does not name Brokaw or his book, and no newspaper I have read does. How his numbers reached the Sun's columnist is not known.

The game appeared wherever there was a wall. On 17 February 1916 the Norwich Bulletin described the new Y.M.C.A. building at New London, Connecticut, whose street floor held a one-wall court. On Saturday, 26 February, Columbia beat Yale, 7-0, in the first match of the Intercollegiate Handball League on Columbia's own court; the Tribune headlined its report "One-wall court handicaps Yale," and said the New Haven men were used to four-wall courts. When Columbia took all seven matches at Princeton on 7 March, the Tribune noted that Princeton's courts had a back wall.

Handball was also reaching the schools. On 7 February 1916 the Evening World reported that 4,000 elementary schoolboys had entered a tournament, singles and doubles, played in school yards. The report does not say how many walls the yards offered. In December the Sun headlined that handball had been adopted as a Public Schools Athletic League sport. In February 1917 the Evening World reported the first tournament on the roof of the New York Athletic Club, where, the paper said, the sky was the ceiling.

By 1920 the papers were carrying announcements. In September the Washington Times announced an exhibition with the leather handball between Jim Kelly, who played for the Business Men's Club, and Pete Burke, from Phil Casey's old court in Degraw Street, Brooklyn. In October the Herald announced that entries were closing for an open handicap singles championship on the courts of the Van Kelton Stadium, 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, and listed Kelly, "world's champion," among the scratch men. I have found no report of either event, and neither notice says how many walls the courts had. In May 1921 the Tribune announced that the Brighton Beach Baths at Coney Island had built twelve regulation courts, to be opened free to the public, and the A.A.U. held outdoor tournaments there that summer and the next. The papers of those years do not state the walls. A 1923 Spalding guide article, undated in the lines read, says almost two thousand men used the one-wall courts at Brighton on a Sunday, but whether the twelve of 1921 were among them is not shown. The Herald of 12 December 1921 reported that Jack Byrne of the West Side Y.M.C.A. had beaten William Sakman of the Trinity Club, Brooklyn, in five games the day before, in the final of the Van Kelton championship, played under the A.A.U.'s auspices.

In March 1922 forty-two teams started play at the Crescent Athletic Club in Brooklyn in what the Herald called the first New York State doubles one-wall championship; Robert Powers Jr. and William F. Wigmore, an unattached pair, won it on 17 March. The national championships at the Milwaukee Athletic Club that month were previewed by the Tribune as four-wall, but the Tribune's year review of 24 December said the doubles, like the singles, had been played on a one-wall court. Which was right is not settled. In October the Evening World announced a Metropolitan one-wall singles championship under the Van Kelton Handball Club, and on 13 November the Tribune reported Jack Byrnes of the West Side Y.M.C.A. winning the 1922 Metropolitan title in straight games over Powers. That report does not name the type of court; the identification rests on the venue and the dates, and the Tribune's review of 24 December says the Metropolitan District decided its championship at four-wall, with William Sakman crowned, so whether Byrnes won on a one-wall court is open. On 13 December the Evening World ran a feature on handball played on roofs, in basements and on streets. Harry J. Kelton, who kept five public courts near Columbus Circle, put the growth at 300 percent in a year, and the paper wrote: "Nine years ago the sport was little known in New York."

The A.A.U. adopted its one-wall rules on 20 November 1922, and they are not Brokaw's rules revised. Spalding's guide of 1923 prints them under the line "Adopted at Annual Meeting, November 20, 1922." They share little wording with Brokaw's 55 rules and use other terms: the A.A.U. has a short line, a rear line, a tally and a hand out where Brokaw has a service line, a front line and a putout, and the two codes penalize a ball that strikes an opponent differently. They follow instead the Union's own four-wall text as revised in 1922, adapted to the one-wall game, with many rules carried over nearly word for word. The rule on a hinder called intentionally is word for word the four-wall rule; so are the coin toss, the 21-point game and the referee's final decision. The court is 20x34 feet with a wall 16 feet high and a short line at least 13 feet from the board, the same distance as Brokaw's service line, though whether the drafters took it from him is open. Brokaw's book may still be the game's parent; it is not the text's. A Y.M.C.A. code for a service-wall court is older than both. The evidence is the comparison of the printed texts; who drafted the rules is not known.

What the papers show of the revision is thin. An Associated Press item of 12 November 1922, printed in the Birmingham Age-Herald, listed "numerous minor changes" in handball among the amendments sought at the A.A.U. convention of 19 to 21 November. The Tribune's review on 24 December said that, with more than fifty new courts in the New York district, the present set of rules was to be revised and added to by the national committee on handball. The next year's guide printed seven changes to the four-wall rules suggested by the guide's editor, Robert L. Ripley, several of which match rules of the one-wall code, the two-fault hand out among them. That the younger game was already shaping the older one is plausible, but no adoption of the changes has been found.

Nothing in the New York papers on outdoor play between the Sun's rule of 1889 and the Van Kelton report of 1915 has been looked for, so the gap between them is unmeasured and not empty. The newspapers of 1917 and 1918 were swept thinly, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the paper of the boroughs where the game was played, has not been read. The minutes of the convention of 20 November 1922 and the names of the drafters have not been found. A tribute to Charles J. O'Connell in the USHA's magazine of December 1971 credits him with helping build the first one-wall court at Brighton Beach in 1909. That is earlier than any other one-wall date the record holds, and no source from 1909 has been found.

The A.A.U. convention at Detroit closed on 20 November 1923, and the Seattle Star reported that day that the senior and junior handball nationals had been awarded. A month later the Washington Times printed the Union's list of national awards, and among them was "Handball (one wall), at New York on dates to be announced later," beside the four-wall nationals at Los Angeles and Pittsburgh and a hard-ball championship at Brooklyn.