CALL ME SNAKE

About 15 months have elapsed since I sent out a distress call in the form of a letter to the Cambridge Chronicle, alerting an unwary populace to the looming handball crisis. I don’t write letters to the Chronicle often and believe that was the first and only time I’ve taken such a drastic step. Yet desperate times call for desperate measures, and this surely qualifies.

In case you’ve been living in some sort of bubble or time warp and don’t know what I’m talking about, allow me to explain: Handball is a dying sport, especially here in Cambridge where it’s positively moribund. There’s only one place where the game is still played–the Cambridge Family YMCA–and the number of players has dwindled steadily over the years. There are now just six of us left, none younger than 50 and some considerably older. In the past 10 years, only one new player has joined the group and stuck around, while many others have fallen by the wayside.

That’s a far cry from the “good old days,” a couple of decades back, when the Y was brimming with handball players and court time was so hard to come by you had to bribe a front-desk worker to get a reservation.

Which is why I issued my SOS call last year, straightforwardly entitled: “Cambridge needs handball players.” To my surprise, that simple, heartfelt appeal created quite a stir. For once, people on the streets spoke openly about handball, rather than referring to it obliquely, furtively, or not at all. Total strangers embraced me without warning, claiming they hadn’t read such a stirring call-to-arms since Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense.”

I appreciated their kind words and wholesome embraces. We all need support to carry us through hard times. But looking back, 15 months later, one has to ask whether my 400-word treatise achieved its stated aim: namely, to save a dying sport.

Soon after the letter’s publication on April 20, 2006, an almost miraculous thing happened. I was in the YMCA locker room, changing after swimming, when a lifeguard (let’s call him “D”) stopped at a locker nearby. “Do you swim competitively?” he asked.

“No,” I replied. “I don’t think my shoulders are up to it.”

“That’s too bad. There’s a game I like to play but with shoulder problems you’d probably never uh…”

“What game?” I asked, suddenly curious.

“Well, I play handball,” said D. “I  used to play a lot in New Haven but haven’t played much since moving here. Though I sometimes hit it around with another lifeguard.”

I was dumbfounded. And even flabbergasted, which is not a word I invoke lightly. It seemed like divine intervention, as if an angel had magically appeared to answer my call. D and I played a few days later and a couple more times over the coming weeks. His game, a bit rough around the edges, clearly needed some seasoning. On the other hand, he was solidly built–a pugilist in fact–and hit the ball with raw power. Twenty years my junior, D represented just what we, and the sport at large, needed–some new blood.

But luck was not on our side. D’s buddy E lost his lifeguarding job, leaving the Y before I’d ever seen him on a handball court. D fared even worse: He ruptured his Achilles tendon, while playing a lesser game (basketball), and has undergone surgery three times since. I doubt he’ll be joining us for handball anytime soon. Nor should he.

Which leaves us, once again, at a half dozen–barely enough to keep things going. Looking ahead, it’s hard to see how the local game will survive over the long haul. One of the guys (“D senior”) likes to travel too much. R, who recovered from Achilles surgery a few years ago, has gimpy knees. W (who’s 30 years older than Curt Schilling) has shoulder problems that give him difficulties with high balls in the corner. J’s back acts up at the slightest provocation. His partner, also called J, works so hard at his university administrator’s job, I only see him once or twice a year. And then there’s me, the youngest of the lot and arguably the most injury prone. On top of all that, I’ve got to juggle multiple, competing demands–obligations to volleyball, for instance, and, if time permits, to my family as well.

In view of the above, it’s not easy to get enough bodies to field a handball game every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And the future, with the demise of D the younger and his sidekick E, only looks bleaker.

So consider this a last-ditch recruitment effort. Metaphorically speaking, we’re shaking some branches to see if any able-bodied handball players fall off and make their way to the Cambridge Y, hopefully with their limbs intact. We’re looking for a few good men but will settle for a few mediocre men if need be. Not to sound alarmist, but the future of a dying game is at stake.