Stefan Fatsis » On the Games: A Game We Ought to Play

On the Games: A Game We Ought to Play

The Wall Street Journal
August 25, 2004

By Stefan Fatsis

Athens—Now that we apparently stink in basketball — the U.S. men have lost as many Olympic games in the last two weeks as in the previous 2,800 years combined — it’s time to do to the rest of the world in one of their sports what they’ve done to us in one of ours.

The empire strikes back, baby: It’s time for Dream Team Handball.

We’ve got a long way to go. Most Americans confuse team handball (explanation later) with the game played against a wall. The U.S. didn’t qualify for these Olympics, or the last ones. The men’s team has never finished higher than ninth, the women no better than fourth, and that was in the boycott year of 1984.

“They just don’t have a feeling for it,” Olafur Stefansson of Iceland, one of the world’s best players — he’s on a pro team in Spain; his brother, Jon, is on the Dallas Mavericks — said yesterday after his country beat Brazil, 29-25, for ninth place in the 12-team tournament. “It takes years.”

It’s just not acceptable for Iceland — Iceland, for the love of Gudjon Valur Sigurdsson, who threw in eight goals against Brazil — to be in the Olympics in a rock-’em, sock-’em team sport and for the U.S. not to be. Iceland has 300,000 people. We have 300 million.

Team handball was invented in Europe around the turn of the last century as a counterpart to, obviously, football. Exporting sports is tough — why soccer remains alien to many U.S. eyes and baseball to European ones — and we’re more resistant than other countries to things we didn’t invent. But this game is just so dang American.

“It’s totally American,” says Dawn Allinger Lewis, a former U.S. women’s team player who’s calling handball for NBC. “Very fast, very tough, not boring like soccer,” hair-bleached, nose-ringed German star Stefan Kretzschmar said after a game. “Our sport is very much speed, blood — all the things Americans love.”

Originally played outdoors, team handball is a seven-on-seven court sport now. The idea is to wing a ball the size of a cantaloupe past a masochistic goalie into a net the size of a couple of refrigerators. Handball combines everything we love and do well: the leaping, dribbling, passing, off-the-ball movement and shot-blocking of hoops (the ideal player is about 6-foot-5, 210 pounds; Germany has a 7-foot cross between Shawn Bradley and Randy Johnson); the hard throwing of baseball (shots fly up to 70 mph); the body contact of hockey, soccer and lacrosse (defenders grab, push and slam the guy with the ball, who tries to shoot over, under or through a defensive fortress).

It’s nonstop, fast-breaking, simple to understand and high-scoring. We should rock at it.

And yet. U.S. handballers have tried to spread the sport beyond small pockets of affection. They’ve lobbied high-school and college coaches to add it, and tried to persuade all-around athletes who aren’t likely to make it in the pros to join national training programs.

It’s been a tough sell. “You’re not going to make any money, you’re going to be sore, you’re going to stay in three-star hotels,” says Tom Fitzgerald, a 38-year-old New York accountant who’s been on the U.S. team since 1989. “There has to be some kind of other internal drive, whether it’s for your country or you want to be in the Olympics.”

Now’s the time for action. NBC is showing the men’s gold-medal game Sunday, CNBC the women’s. Every future Turkish-league power forward, Double-A shortstop and arena-football quarterback should watch. Some Olympics-loving wallet should donate a few million bucks to build a handball center, seed youth programs and replace the salaries of would-be bush leaguers.

We pay a few late-career Kretzschmars and Sigurdssons to come over. Start a modest U.S. pro league. Handball is a better TV sport than indoor football — as I type this, a Croat is getting absolutely mugged while flying into the lane against Greece — and it’s not as if ESPN doesn’t have slots. Fans file in. Kids quit Little League. We win gold in 2012.

At a postgame news conference the other day, to the amusement of the European reporters present, I asked why the U.S. isn’t very good at handball. France’s head coach, Claude Onesta, answered in perfect, dismissive French: “As far as I am concerned, there are a lot of games at which the United States does not excel.”

You’re right, coach. We’re not good at korfball. We don’t have a pro badminton league. And we may go home with less than gold in hoops. But if I get my way, we’ll be waxing your derriere in handball someday soon.

On the Games: A Game We Ought to Play

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