Racquetball State Championships: Fill & Download for Free

My sophomore year of college I broke and dislocated my pinky playing basketball.When I took off the brace, I noticed it healed weirdly, almost like a claw. I lost all my grip strength in my right hand.When I went back to the doctor, they told me they didn’t set it right, and it had healed at a 45 degree angle. For that reason, I couldn’t really use it because my muscles and tendons couldn’t function at that angle. I needed surgery to re-break my bone and set it straight.I realized that if I got my bone re-set, I wouldn’t be able to play college intramurals. I was obsessed with intramurals. I played both co-Ed and girls leagues of basketball, flag football, volleyball, racquetball, sand volleyball, ultimate frisbee, indoor and outdoor soccer, and even tennis.Instead of getting my pinky fixed, I learned how to play sports without one so I wouldn’t have to miss a season. It was particularly hard relearning how to shoot a basketball.I finally got it fixed my senior year of college. I had surgery and they stuck a metal pin in my pinky. I still couldn’t wait to play intramurals, and I ended up playing flag football and soccer with a cast.Unfortunately, after 2–3 years after not being able to use my pinky, my muscles had atrophied. Even after getting the bone straightened out, I couldn’t fully use it and I still can’t.But, I did win 14 intramural championships at Oklahoma State. So for me, it was worth it.

When I was about 10 we lived in a house with a basement. My dad converted part of it into a rec room, complete with a ping pong table. I watched him and my older brothers play for a while and then was finally given a chance to try my hand at it. Within a few weeks no one in the family could beat me. The following year I won a state championship in the under 12 division.Until recently slowed by a variety of ailments, I enjoyed all racquet sports — tennis, racquetball, badminton, squash — for about 50 years.

“Abolished” is an interesting word.Abolished implies that the sport is actively ended—that its governing body decided to fold and no longer sponsor official competitions. This may be due to lack of popularity, or because the federation finds it to be too flawed in some way.It’s slightly different than a sport dying. A sport dying means that its popularity has waned and that very few people play it—eventually, there will be no one that plays it. I can think of a few sports that will die out, real tennis being one of them. However, a sport dying would eventually see its governing body fold, meaning it would be “abolished.”Real tennis is vastly different than what you see on the ATP and WTA tours. The courts, which are generally indoors, are smaller and allow for closer viewing. From pictures, the courts look uncomfortably confined, almost as if a racquetball court and tennis court were combined. The ball is smaller, made of cork, and has fabric tightly wound around it. Unlike modern tennis, real tennis balls can bounce more than once, though I haven’t read enough to accurately say when this can happen and when it cannot. The ball can hit the wall and then returned. The video[1] I watched was short, but the racquet swings reminded me of slicing in tennis.Melbourne Cricket ClubModern tennis is often described as an “elite sport” because of the cost and the association with country clubs. Real tennis takes this further, with only have 43 courts left in existence. More than half are in the United Kingdom, so access is limited. They are almost all located in private clubs.The most recently built real tennis courts were in Wellington College in 2016. It’s a private high school (I think that’s what a high school is called in England) that costs anywhere from £9,680 to £13,250 per term. Not exactly accessible—even if it was, I doubt there are actually many students looking to play real tennis.Eventually, no one is going to be playing real tennis. It will be a museum memory like jeu de paume, the prototype to all racquet sports.A2AEDIT: If any of you Brits are wondering where I got the term “private high school” from, I got it by following links on Wikipedia.Call me a dumb (or perhaps stubborn) American, but that was the equivalent I could come up with at the time. “Public School” may be the correct term, but it sounds too odd as an American, because that phrase is the equivalent of “state school” in the US. Private is private, no matter where you are.Footnotes[1] Real Tennis World Championship 2014