What Is the Origin of Racquetball?

Racquetball, a popular leisure sport, was invented in the 1950s by Joe Sobek. It is the most recently invented of a cluster of related sports, and represents a synthesis of many of the concepts of its progenitors. Through a brief overview of each of those four influences on racquetball--squash, handball, paddle ball and tennis--we can elucidate the origin of this sport, and, since it may be unclear what necessitated the creation of a game so similar to those already in existence, the rationale behind its invention.

  1. Squash and Racquets

    • So named because it employs a soft ball that squashes when it hits the wall, squash traces its origins back to Fleet Prison, a debtor's prison in England, in which a game called "racquets" developed. Racquets was created as an indoor alternative to tennis, wherein a wall replaces tennis's net.

    Handball

    • Irish immigrants brought handball with them on their migration to the United States; the precise origin of the game is unknown. In it, players take turns hitting a ball against a wall with their hands rather than with a paddle.

    Four-Wall Paddleball

    • In 1930, Earl Riskey was the director of intramural sports for the University of Michigan. In search of an indoor game to add to his roster, Riskey took the court and rules of handball and added paddles.

    Tennis

    • Today's tennis bears only fleeting resemblance to the game of "real tennis" played on French streets hundreds of years ago. That casual game, though, morphed through the years and became both today's standardized and codefied tennis and the other, parallel line of wall-based racket games.

    Joe Sobek and the Genesis of Racquetball

    • Racquetball represents the merging of many of these traditions. Using a small, stringed racket, a seamless rubber ball and a set of hybridized rules borrowing from both squash and handball, Joe Sobek--a tennis pro--invented racquetball in the early 1950s, because he was struggling to find enough squash partners, and handball hurt his hands.