Why is every sport today for extremists — at least of the athletic variety?
I just finished watching a fascinating NYTimes.com video about “wall trampolining.” If you haven’t heard yet, wall trampolining is the NEXT BIG THING in extreme sports. What is it? Well, it is a sport in which trampoliners(?) jump off a high wall, and while bouncing back to the perch from which they jumped, bound off the wall doing flips and other acrobatics. It is sort of like extreme skateboarding, without the skateboard or BMXing sans BMX.
Let’s face it – most of us are not extreme athletes and there are even some of us that don’t desire to be. The problem is that the sports relegated to the rest of us are out of vogue and get no love — not from the media, and even not from once enthusiastic players.
Take for example, racquetball. When growing up in Houston, our entire summer break was spent swimming and playing racquetball — in equal portions. You could find courts everywhere — not just at the JCC or Y. There were Racquetball Centers – entire free-standing, state-of-the-art buildings dedicated to the sport — as well as community, city-wide, regional and national tournaments. The rivalry between Charlie Brumfield and Marty Hogan was legendary — and those names were bandied about by the amateurs — all of whom aspired to be one or the other. We saved our summer earnings to buy sweatbands and — if we earned enough – a new Ektelon racquet.
And today?
Sure you can still play racquetball — and there are those that do — but the sport’s heyday is gone, perhaps forever. No more will you stumble upon racquetball centers, and if you do, they are certainly not state of the art.
Racquetball is a great sport — but it is nearly dead. What happened? Racquetball became irrelevant to most people because 1) its not extreme and b) its not a celebrity sport (tennis, for example thrives on international tournaments and pomp).
For better or worse, racquetball is destined to be a sport for die-hard enthusiasts only, at least until someone can figure out a version of it that will capture the imagination of the extremists. Then again, maybe real athletes appreciate a good sport regardless if it is trendy or not. Who wants to hit the courts?
