Codes on paper: the A.A.U. rule books and the gym game

On Tuesday, 24 April 1923, the Laramie Republican printed an item under the heading Rules for Handball and Size of Court. It said the new rules for handball described a standard court as "four walls approximately 24 by 48 feet in size, with ceilings 25 feet at the front wall," and that championships might be held on other courts for the time being. The item names no issuing body, but Rule 1 of the Amateur Athletic Union's four-wall text in Spalding's Official Handball Guide of 1923 gives the same court in nearly the same words. The paper took the figure as a sign that handball was becoming more popular. The rules were called new, though a Union handbook in force on 1 January 1922 already printed that court. For thirty years the A.A.U. was the main publisher of American handball's rules.

The text in force on 1 January 1920 was new. The Union's legislation committee had put "an entirely new set of handball rules" to its Boston convention in November 1919, by the News Scimitar of Memphis on 13 November, and the handbook whose title page says it was in force on 1 January 1920 printed thirty-five numbered rules for handball. They set four walls of approximately 24 by 50 feet with ceilings at least 25 feet at the front wall, allowed other courts for championships for the time being, ordered a ball played over when a player was kept from seeing it until too late, a covered ball, and left every hinder to the referee without appeal. A comparison of the transcriptions finds almost nothing carried over from the Union's rules of 1903, so the code seems drafted afresh rather than revised; where its wording came from is not known. The New York Herald of 5 January 1920 reported that amateur handball had come onto the Union's program for the first time, with a metropolitan championship at the Annunciation A.C. in New York that drew thirty entries in singles and fourteen in doubles.

By the handbook in force on 1 January 1922 the court had been cut from 50 to 48 feet, the definition of the covered ball and three of its uses had been deleted, and one rule still told the referee to decide all "hinders and covered balls," an orphan the revision left behind. The deletions can be seen in the two printings; that the leftover was a slip is inference. No report of the meeting that adopted the revision has been found, and the annual meeting of November 1921 is only the probable date. The Wheeling Intelligencer serialized rules for handball on 17 and 18 May 1922 in the older text, covered ball included; where it got them is not known.

The Union's handball committee was at work in the same months. On 16 November 1922, by the New-York Tribune, it ordered the final of the metropolitan four-wall championship replayed within thirty days. The final, begun the previous spring between Dan Shea of the Pastime A.C. and William Sakman of the Trinity Club, had stalled when Sakman hurt his arm and Shea refused the title by default. Sakman won the replay on 10 December, three games to one, by the Herald, which calls the ordering body the metropolitan association's committee.

The Union's championships ran beside the rules. In April 1920, by the Tribune of 8 April, the Union notified its associations that a junior national championship handball tournament by the Detroit A.C. was not sanctioned. The Milwaukee Leader of 10 April reported that Dr. Carl Haedge of St. Paul had become the new national singles champion by beating William Sackman of New York in the final of a national invitational tournament at Detroit on the Friday; the two reports seem to describe one tournament. The Union's own singles final, at the Los Angeles Athletic Club in May, went to Max Gold over George Klawitter, in the Sun and New York Herald of 31 May, after Bill Ranft, the holder, lost to Klawitter in the semifinal. When Haedge beat Sackman again at the Union's Detroit nationals in March 1921, the Herald wrote that he had retained his title. At St. Paul in March 1923 Joe Murray of San Francisco beat Maynard Laswell for the singles, by the San Antonio Light of 25 March.

In November 1923 the Detroit convention awarded the 1924 nationals in more than one code, four-wall, one-wall and hard-ball, by the lists the Seattle Star and the Washington Times printed; those are announcements, and no report of a one-wall or hard-ball national of 1924 has been found. For four-wall, Spalding's guide of 1928 lists the singles champions as Laswell in 1924, 1925 and 1926 and George Nelson of Baltimore in 1927. The annual meeting of 20 November 1927 adopted a set of one-wall rules, five years to the day after the first, that moved the short line to 14 feet from the wall; the 1923 text had said at least 13, and the printing of 1931 gives 15.

The guide for 1928, edited by Robert L. Ripley, combines an earlier work, James I. Brokaw's How to Play American Handball, and prints the Union's four-wall rules at page 31, its one-wall rules at page 34 and the Irish rules at page 37. Rule 1 of the four-wall text gives the standard court as "22 feet in width, 46 feet in length and 22 feet in height." The 1923 text said 24 by 48, so the standard shrank between the two printings; neither states when, and the step from 22 by 46 to the modern 20 by 40 court is undated, though the Y.M.C.A.'s four-wall rules of May 1915 already gave a court 40 feet long, 20 wide and 18 high. Of seven changes suggested in the 1923 guide, under Ripley's name as editor and from players' opinions, four appear in substance in 1928 and half of a fifth, but the guide prints no adoption date, and the unread guides of 1926 and 1927 could show when.

Four-wall hard-ball was not the Irish game surviving in America under a new name. The hard-ball rules printed in O'Connell's book of 1931 are thirty-seven rules for a four-wall court about 65 feet long and 25 wide with a back wall of 12 feet, a length and a back wall like those of the court Phil Casey opened in Brooklyn in 1887, though his was narrower and its front wall higher. A comparison of the transcriptions finds a run of its rules repeating the Union's four-wall text of 1923 almost word for word, down to the allowance for smaller championship courts, while nothing is taken from the Irish rules the American guides had printed since 1903. The code has no championship result in the record, and the national awarded for 1924 has no report. A second claim fares no better. The USHA's magazine of December 1971 salutes O'Connell as "Author of first printed book on handball rules" and dates the book 1930; its copyright date is 1931, and the record holds printed rule books and guides of 1893, 1903, 1916, 1923 and 1928, so the claim can hold only for a book of his own.

Charles J. O'Connell's How to Play Handball was registered for copyright on 28 January 1931 as Spalding's Red Cover No. 114R. Its title page gives the author as vice-chairman of the Union's handball committee, whose chairman, J. Rogers Flannery, is named in the book, and its sections carry the Union's name, which is why its rules are taken to be the Union's. It prints three codes: soft-ball four-wall, with a ball specified at 2.3 ounces, a half ounce either way; one-wall; and hard-ball. The four-wall text uses the short line, a term already in the serving rules of 1920. The book reports that at the national championship at the New York Athletic Club in March 1929 the players met and voted unanimously to require each player to make an honest effort to give his opponent "a clear and unobstructed play of the ball." It also sets four-wall partisans, who find their game more scientific, against one-wall partisans, who call theirs faster.

After 1931 the Union's rules survive mostly as titles. The Library of Congress catalog of copyright entries lists registrations of A.A.U. handball rules for 1932 to 1936, 1939 and 1942, the last with the Union as claimant. The entry for 1934 is the first found that names four-wall, one-wall and four-wall hardball in its title, and library records list a printing of 1949 with the same codes. An entry gives a title, not a text, and none of these books has been read. The nationals went on. The USHA's list puts those of 1930 to 1939 in cities from St. Louis to San Francisco in a venue column that names no source, and gives Platak the singles seven years running, 1935 to 1941.

The Union's rules traveled. H. C. Buck's Rules of Games and Sports, published by the Y.M.C.A. Publishing House in Calcutta, prints in its 1943-44 edition a section for the one-wall court: about 20 by 34 feet with a wall 16 feet high. The wording reads as the Union's of a date between 1922 and 1927, not the revision of 1927; which printing Buck copied is not known, and nothing in the record says the game was played in India.

The Y.M.C.A. kept rules of its own. A table in the Converse Rubber Company's handbook of 1946, which the record knows only from a seller's photographs, lists winners of the national Y.M.C.A. four-wall tournament from 1925; the names were not read. The Y.M.C.A.'s General Board registered two leaflets of rules on 7 June 1929, for the four-wall and single-wall courts, and the entries give titles only. A seller's photographs of a booklet of the National Physical Education Committee show a cover saying it was revised on 15 February 1940 with seventeen changes, and a booklet of 1952 under a National Y.M.C.A. Handball Committee, also from a seller's photographs, opens its four-wall rules in the same wording.

A letter in the USHA's magazine of August 1972, from the Irish-American Handball Association, says its yearly four-wall tournaments at Broderick's Court in the Bronx were first held in 1934. The Converse handbook, again by a seller's photographs, says that a glass-enclosed court made by the president of the Town Club of Chicago was used for the A.A.U. national championship play that opened on 21 April 1945. The USHA's magazine of June 1972 credits its president, Bob Kendler, with inventing the glass court at that club in 1945, so that handball "need not be sold, merely seen."

No newspaper text of 1924 or later is held. The Chronicling America list for 1924 was fetched and its 321 pages came without text, and no later year was swept, so the champions of 1924 to 1950 are known from lists and the 1924 hard-ball national has no report. The books of 1932 to 1949 were searched for in catalogs and found only as entries, as were the guides of 1926 and 1927, and no American rule text between O'Connell's book and the USHA's of 1990 has been transcribed. The Y.M.C.A.'s national tournaments have no results, dates or venues in the record, and no one-wall national of the Union before 1959 has a recorded result.

On the USHA's list of national champions the entry for 1950 reads A.A.U. four-wall at Chicago and A.A.U. three-wall at Detroit, then, in parentheses, "All future years are USHA." The Union went on printing rules, with volumes of 1955, 1957 and 1960 on record, so on the list's labeling the Union's code outlived its championship by about a decade. The USHA's rules page of June 1972 dates a Players' Fraternity, formed under Bob Kendler to give the game its own identity, to 1950, and other USHA pages count the Association from 1951.