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Before Pickleball Existed, US

Before Pickleball Existed, US

Illustration by Tyree Taylor

Tyree Taylor



In addition to boasting Arthur Ashe’s tennis legacy, Greater St. Louis, Missouri now has the largest indoor pickleball and paddle tennis complex in the world. It’s been a big deal: local press, enthusiasts and amateur players of both sports have all heaped praise on the facility, calling it nothing less than world-class, a rival to anything in the country.

And to make it clear, the building, called Padel + Pickle, is impressive, with its 14 lavishly decorated indoor courts and facilities such as a bar and pro shop.

For me, as a resident of the city’s Northside, wonders like these send my memory back to my youth and a past when games—touch football, kickball, and dodgeball, to name a few—had less glamour. The trappings were modest. They were often fueled by nothing more than imagination, scraps, and ingenuity. The facilities we had and the equipment we used were makeshift, while the scope of the competition was as broad or narrow as the mind’s eye.

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What we didn’t know is that the games that filled the days, in the sunlight and shrouded in stifling humidity, were memories.

Over time, our parents and grandparents lovingly shaped these games as cultural vehicles to be passed down. Each was a precious hue filled with essential lessons about how our predecessors understood and navigated life. In a quiet, enduring way, the laughter, the excitement, the smack talk, the boastful flaunting, and even the hangdog grumbling shaped our prospects for the years to come.

Illustration by Tyree Taylor Tyree Taylor

Anthropologists like to say that games—and sports, too—are rooted in intention. Societies invent them to simulate life in miniature. Social scientist Johan Huizinga put it this way: “It is through play that society expresses its interpretations of life and the world.” Extend his thinking: Whether we are players or spectators, competition serves imperceptibly as a stage on which we test our strength, will, courage, and limits. Guidelines, boundaries, and rules, both explicit and unspoken, reflect the challenges we feel and the skills needed to overcome them. The lessons we learn from winning and losing teach us how to seize destiny and shape it to our own design.

On the North Side of St. Louis, every block had its own modest coliseum where all sorts of competitive sports were played: it was simply the alley that ran behind the houses where we lived. A modest, even battered surface, the alley stretched along our backyards, away from the rumble of streets like Hamilton, Labadie, Kossuth, Marcus, or Margaretta. North St. Louis gamesmanship was anchored here on a universal surface that we shaped into a versatile playing field for every occasion. City planners wanted it to provide access to the garages where the family car was parked. Meanwhile, in neighborhoods like the Ville, Penrose, Fairground, O’Fallon, the kids of my kind had other purposes in mind.

The dangers are damnable. The surface was less than ideal and often uneven. The sidewalk was pockmarked and uneven. The footing was questionable. A steady stream of water flowed down the center of the alley—runoff from rainwater or lawn sprinklers. Every now and then it would swell to a small stream, channeled by a gully near where I grew up. Between the craters and holes lay hazards—scattered gravel and the occasional shard of broken glass. Weeds sprang into the cracks to take root, not only where the edges met the backyard gates, but sometimes in the middle.

But despite all its imperfections, the alley was better than the street, because cars drove through it infrequently, especially on summer days when our parents were busy at work or home and we had to play until dinner. The sparse traffic meant fewer interruptions for the rough neighborhood warriors. Another big plus was how malleable the alley proved to be. For soccer, all we had to do was figure out which fence, gate, or garage marked the end zone and seven points on which lot. The only trick here was not to trip over metal garage doors that sounded like symphonic kettledrums when you tripped and bumped into them.

If the match from today was basketball, we could get the asphalt ready in no more than 30 minutes. For the section of our alley closest to Shreve, a few minor adjustments were all it took: One of us sawed the top two inches of a milk crate in half to make a quick ring. Another of us brought a ladder to climb, while the tallest of us nailed the crate remnant to a wooden telephone pole, sometimes 10 feet above the asphalt, but other times maybe 11 or even 9 feet high. No matter. Game on.

Illustration by Tyree Taylor Tyree Taylor

The most elaborate alley game on the Northside was called cork, short for corkball, a “formal” game that white St. Louisans were said to have started perhaps 70 years earlier. Corkball, the sacred, orthodox version, was the city’s equivalent of stickball, a combination of batting practice and fantasy baseball. Our version, simply called cork, had its fair share of quirks, as well as a comically long set of rules. It required small teams—a mere pitcher and catcher for a full two-man team, a far cry from the nine players needed in baseball or softball. Runners were fictitious; their progress and score were often determined by how far a batter hit a ball. The equipment was equally odd—the official version of cork had specialized equipment, shrunken copies of baseball paraphernalia, including a ball the size of a robin’s egg and a bat no thicker than a clothes rail.

In back-alley laboratories on the north side, our ‘cork’ underwent a number of mutations too, even as it remained fairly close to the original rules. My father’s generation saw fit to tinker with the sort of equipment they made from whatever was handy. Truncated broomsticks sometimes became clubs. If you had saved up enough to buy tennis balls, you had to prepare them for play, first wrapping them in newspaper, striking a match and burning off the fluff. This left a surface of rust-coloured stubble, sticky enough to make the ball spin drunkenly up or down in the hands of a seasoned pitcher.

For the bald, hardened enthusiast, a soda bottle cap served as a ball. I can still remember my father showing my brothers and me the proper throwing technique. The trick was to roll the pointed discus with a flick of his wrist from his index finger, sending it in a desperate parabola toward the earth, the waning flight of a cicada’s last throes.

North St. Louis residents were just as avid in formal sports, but to participate, they often had to overcome significant barriers to entry that came with segregation. One example: tennis. Richard Hudlin, a member of a famous family who grew up just outside St. Louis, was so successful that he captained the University of Chicago tennis team in college in the 1920s. He returned to St. Louis to teach at Sumner High and coach the high school team as a side job. To stay in shape year-round, Hudlin needed a place to practice indoors during the winter, but municipal tennis facilities like the Armory barred black players from playing. In 1945, however, Hudlin won a lawsuit that granted him access.

There are two gems that crown Hudlin’s legacy, both tied to his work with some of America’s greatest black tennis champions. Hudlin trained Althea Gibson, the first African-American to win the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open. Hudlin also coached Arthur Ashe, the only black man to win Wimbledon, the US Open and the Australian Open. Hudlin first met a young Ashe in the early 1960s. Ashe, a teenage prodigy, was barred from practicing on the indoor courts in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia, during the winter. Hudlin took the rising star in, and Ashe finished high school in Sumner while honing his skills on the fast wooden courts at the St. Louis Armory.

Sadly, there are few, if any, tributes to Ashe in St. Louis. The Hudlin family’s descendants include the tennis mentor’s second cousins, Reginald and Warrington, who are known elsewhere as film directors of House party And Boomerang. Their website has a page to honor Richard’s contributions. Still, it’s unfortunate that finding a physical marker to formally honor Richard has taken more effort than necessary — despite Hudlin’s direct connection to black tennis titans. A park outside the city in the suburb of Richmond Heights was dedicated in his honor in 2018 and features a plaque. Courthouses named after him once stood just south of a large hospital complex near Kingshighway. A parking complex has since swallowed them up, leaving only a plaque.

James A. Anderson is a professor at the Lehman College (Bronx) campus of the City University of New York, and a journalist, author, and editor who writes about economics, urban planning, sustainability, music, and finance. His work has appeared in Time Magazine, Next City, Barron’s, Savoy among other publications.