From The Vault Of Art Shay: My Hall Of Fame Racquetball Career
Here is the nucleus of the famous Fruit Juices in 1979. My daughter Lauren Shay photographed us first in front of a locker room Fruit Juice dispenser. \"That\'s your name!\" she expostulated.\r\nAnd it stuck. We now have more than 70 members and our annual tournaments are watched by wives and offspring all over Chicago.\r\n
Here, in a classic phony action shot, I attack the ball to score an easy point on my kid brother Stuart Shay, 18 years my junior. Stu, a serious golfer, now living on a Palm Beach. FL golf course, just retired as co-president of a Florida aviation company. His twin Barry was on the team that designed the communications system for the first Air Force 1, owned by Pres. Lincoln as I recall. They were both record holding NYC high school swimmers. When they were 16, Herman Wells, the president of the U. of Indiana told me, \"No, we don\'t have any academic scholarships for poor kids with good grades..What else do they do.?\" \"THEY SWIM? What are their times..?\"To his assistant he said, \"Get Councilman up here...\" The famous swimming coach (and channel swimmer!) appeared. Bottom line: He offered Stu and Barry a free trip to Indiana..They thought it over all night. In the morning they called to say, âTo swim for Councilman you\'ve gotta stay in the tank 6-7 hours a day...We want to be engineers!\" I never gave my kid brothers\' turndown another thought until preceding the 76 Olympics , ABC gave me a yellow jacket and Mark Spitz as a tablemate and I heard him tell two Boston reporters that what was happening in LA \"now\" was awful. \"They just passed a law raising the speed limit for older drivers.\" \"So\", asked one of the reporters. \"So,\" said Mark earnestly, \"the LA roads are gonna be clogged with old people who will cause more accidents.\" I only half-convinced them Mark was \"putting you on.\" He became a good dentist.
One of the racquetball equipment manufacturers (who bought it for an ad in the mid 70s) called this\r\n\"The best racquetball picture ever made.\" Its title: \"Killshot\" and depicts the often airborne Jerry Hillecher beating Ben Koltun in a Long Island, NY tournament. Camera fans: Nikon FM, 3 frames a second, \r\nTri-x film at 1600ASA, 1/250th, 58mm F 1:4 lens wide open. Through the glass back wall. Just a week ago at my Hall of Fame induction Hillecher thanked me again for the 30x40 inch blow-up his father bought from me. \"It\'s on my wall and everyone gasps as they walk in.â He still proudly remembered his left thigh aching for days after he landed. Look at that kill shot going in!\" He thanked me again... after 40 or so years!\r\n
For an article on safety glasses I recruited as cover girl the prettiest player on hand.
In 1978 for the national championship, Marty Hogan kills against Charlie Brumfield; these were the top two ranked players for years. It was Brumfield I quoted at my acceptance speech. \"Charlie had just watched me win the North American National Title. I thought he was coming up to congratulate me. No way. Charlie said, âI just watched you beat that pathetic stiff of a Canadian for the title.\' he said. \'Look Art- when I\'ve been dead for 6 months have them dig me up and I\'ll still spot you 10 points.\' He probably could-but graciously reminded the audience that the day I was shooting Steve Keeley for SI, Keeley had ODâd on four or five bagels with lox. But I had 2 hours before plane time so we went to Steve\'s club. Sick as he was he got on the court with me and I beat him 2 of 3 games. The highlight for me was an airline stewardess on the balcony running to get a crew full of sister stews to see, \"This chubby old guy beating the shit out of Keeley.\" Keeley looked like a marked down blonde Greek god and was a great favorite as a teacher in Lansing, Mich. He was also the co-inventor of paddle ball.
That\'s Keeley on the left, defending his title against a 17-year-old Marty Hogan.
Jean Sauser scores at McClurg Court against a high ranked competitor.
Pound for pound, modest Marty Hogan was the best racquetball player ever. He won the first big racquetball check- $30,000.
Shannon Wright, then a hippie but now a respected Minneapolis MD- winning one of her many titles. \r\nShe is now president of USA Racquetball and one of my sponsors to the Hall of Fame.\r\n
Southerner Davey Bledsoe winning the title in 1977- whose matches I covered with the then-new negative Kodacolor film that Gamma pushed a stop for the first time!
A 17 year old name Bret Harnett came from nowhere to win the Nationals in 1983.
Two Hogans and one Hillecher importune referee Chuck Leve.
Just two years ago I gave my giant grandson, Carter Harrison Lavin, a short lesson at a Fruit Juices tournament.
(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. In this week's look at his archives, Art talks about his recent induction into the National Racquetball Hall of Fame.)
The wildly popular game of racquetball had its modern roots in "fives" and Irish handball and also squash and tennis. You have to be careful about game derivations, because polo experts like to boast that their game evolved from competition between tribes—and the ball was often a human head propelled by soccer-like kicks or crotchy shepherd's mallets. (Ah there, golf.)
Racquetball is played on a 20’x40’ court with high ceilings, its bouncy ball related to the tennis ball, hardly a shrunken head, but with smooth skin. The top players achieve serving and kill speeds easily over 100 mph and as always, the sport is imminently being flirted with by Olympic committees. I myself, in 1977, pushed this rumor along, responding to a personal request by Hugh Hefner to write a Playboy article fleshing out a rumor he had heard while researching a shapely female player who had also swum around the island of Manhattan in training for a tournament. Heft regarded all female achievement as happy grist for the Playboy mill he had battened.
In 1819, a time that "handball” players were either socialites, royalty or debtors in prison banging out their hostility on prison walls, William Hazlitt, the English critic wrote: “It may be said that there are things of more importance than striking a ball against a wall-there are things indeed which make more noise and do so little good, such as making war and peace, making speeches and answering them, making verses and blotting them, making money and throwing it away. But the game of fives (handball) is what no one despises who has ever played it... He has no other wish, no other thought from the moment the game begins, but that of striking the ball, of placing it, of making it! It is the finest experience for the body and the best relaxation for the mind."
It was I who dragged Hazlitt onto the court of modern handball when I ghost-wrote the foreword for the first illustrated handball book in years in 1970. It was for Robert W. Kindler, the late panjandrum of Handball and later Racquetball, a real estate macher in the sour kindergarten mode of the Trump school. But he loved handball so much he hired a few of the early champions as real estate lawyers to have worthy players at his beck and call to the ancient Y courts in Evanston, Ill. I was an early recruit to their ranks, a Bronx kid who had grown up in one wall handball and now, as a fotog, ready to cover the pro tours of handball and racquetball.
So I got to play handball with Jimmy Jacobs and Paul Haber—the Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth of the sport—and (more to the point of this column, requested by editor Chuck Sudo) I potskered around on the same racquetball courts as Marty Hogan, Charlie Brumfield and Steve Keeley and did books with, all three the best and brightest of their time, with Bo Keeley famous for his renown as a 100-country hobo and the kind of player who often beat local hamps using a frying pan. (I've written about Keeley's living in a ten foot hole in the California desert next to Mexico, a mile or so from the Cocoa Mountain Gunnery range; and about his disappearance a few months ago.)
Sudo's request came when USA Racquetball announced that I was—along with Steve Serot, an early boy wonder in the sport—the latest inductee into the Racquetball Hall of Fame, and I made it out to Fullerton, Calif. to accept it with my daughter Jane Shay Wald and her boyfriend, LA County States Attorney psychologist Charles Kreuter, driving me the last four hours of the trip from LA.
Not for my having defeated 15 sweaty 60-year-olds for the North American Championship in 1982, nor for either of my state Master championships in the 70's- but for having helped build the sport with a succession of 30 SI type magazine covers and some ongoing SI story illustrations on the burgeoning sport.
If you can't wait until this time every Wednesday to get your Art Shay fix, please check out the photographer's blog, which is updated regularly. Art Shay's book, Chicago's Nelson Algren, is also available at Amazon.
