Sports – Author Sarah Angleton

In 1903, David R. Francis, former mayor of St. Louis, former governor of Missouri, former US Secretary of the Interior, and then president of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, had a couple of big problems.

David R. Francis, whose impressive resume could include “Olympics Stealer” under Special Skills. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Under his leadership, the City of St. Louis was attempting to carry off the grandest world’s fair yet. It was set to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase land deal in which Thomas Jefferson bought from France the rights to be the conquering power in a gigantic territory that was inhabited already by quite a few indigenous people. It was a giant leap forward in the Get Really Friggin’ Big Destiny of the young United States.

But it turns out that pulling off the largest world’s fair in history is something of a logistical challenge and the whole project had to be pushed to 1904. That still worked because the famous explorers Lewis and Clark didn’t set off into the Louisiana Territory until 1804, so with some minor fudging, that was good enough.

Another big problem, however, was the fact that in 1901, the Olympic Committee in charge of determining the site of the third modern Olympic Games in 1904 had chosen Chicago. This would be the first Olympic Games on US soil and, though the Games didn’t yet garner nearly the attention they do today, it was still a world event that would compete directly with St. Louis’s moment in the spotlight.

Though founder of the Modern Olympics Pierre de Coubertin didn’t attend the St. Louis Olympiad which he feared “would match the mediocrity of the town” (ouch), in 2018 the IOC did finally allow the city to install Olympic rings (not a thing yet in 1904).

The two cities already had a strong rivalry going because the proud, historic City of St. Louis, Gateway to the West, on the bank of the Mighty Mississippi River had been usurped as the preeminent western city by some swampy upstart village to its north that became important only because someone decided to dig a ditch from the Hudson Bay to the Great Lakes. Whatever.

Francis wasn’t about to let the swampy upstart ruin his fair which, in case anyone is keeping score, was more than double the size Chicago’s little exposition had been in 1893. He saw to the planning of numerous athletic events and even managed to contract with the Amateur Athletic Union to hold their 1904 track & field championship as part of the fair. Presented with the very real possibility that this could spell failure for the burgeoning tradition of Olympic world competition, the Olympic Committee begrudgingly agreed to move the Games to St. Louis.

If you want to explore another, non-Olympic aspect of the 1904 World’s Fair, you can check out my newest historical mystery. https://sarah-angleton.com/paradise-on-the-pike/

Some Olympic historians have suggested that this was a blight on the history of the Games, but given that the whole concept of the Modern Olympics was still fairly new and in a bit of flux anyway, I’m not convinced that’s very fair. Yes, only twelve countries were represented and more than eighty percent of the athletes represented the United States. Yes, fair organizers tended to refer to every sport played on the fairgrounds as “Olympic,” which caused quite a bit of confusion. Yes, there was a deeply problematic “Anthropology Games” competition in which indigenous peoples were paid to compete in events in which they’d had almost no training in order to demonstrate the general superiority of western athleticism. And yes, the gold medal in the marathon was very nearly awarded to a man who’d completed much of the course in a car.

But it was also the first Olympic Games in which gold, silver, and bronze medals were awarded to the top competitors, hurdler George Poage became the first Black athlete to win a spot on the Olympic podium, and competing with a wooden prosthetic leg, George Eyser won multiple medals in gymnastics. Also, there was not a single allusion to menage a trois in the opening ceremony. Nor was there an opening ceremony.

In the interest of not making every reader from Chicago completely hate me, I should clarify that I actually really like deep dish and think that it is infinitely better than the Provel and cracker crust garbage St. Louis likes to pass off as pizza. Chris6d, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

One could even argue that because the Games were part of this gigantic fair, which welcomed nearly 20 million people and became the only Victorian era fair to make a profit, this boosted the visibility of the Olympics, which were already a little bit of a hot mess with an uncertain future at this point.

So yes, David R. Francis and the City of St. Louis were a little bit sneaky and underhanded and totally stole the Olympics from Chicago, which still hasn’t hosted the Games. The city does have a lot going for it, though. They have a river they’re fond of dying green every St. Patrick’s Day, an interesting cheese casserole dish they refer to as pizza, an alarming number of murders, and a somewhat irrational, now mostly friendly rivalry with a tiny little proud city to the south on the bank of the Mighty Mississippi.

Not bad for some swampy little upstart.

It was one of those long boring afternoons in 1965 when thirteen-year-old Frank Pritchard and his siblings were in a pickle. They had nothing to do and were getting a little cranky. That’s about the time their dad, then a Washington State Representative, Joel Pritchard arrived home with his buddy Bill Bell after an afternoon of golf, and made sportsball history.

I suspect every great sport has a vaguely ridiculous origin story. Image by Nils from Pixabay

The two men jumped in to solve the problem by suggesting that the kids make up a game. Frank, apparently a typical 13 year old, turned it around and challenged them to make one up themselves. The two friends readily agreed and set out to see what they had handy.

The property had an old, little-used badminton court, but a quick search of the family’s sportsball equipment yielded no rackets or shuttlecocks. What they did find were some ping pong paddles and a wiffle ball.

The ball bounced surprisingly well on the asphalt court and once they’d lowered the net a bit, the two men got the kids playing a made-up game that was a little bit like badminton, a little bit like tennis, a little bit like ping pong, and at least at first, a lot like Calvinball from the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip that two decades later would introduce the world to the greatest game to never have the same rules twice.

Also, this new made-up-on-the-spot sport was evidently pretty fun.

The family played the next weekend as well, and Pritchard and Bell introduced the game to another friend named Barney McClallum. Together, the three of them decided to write down some rules to their new hodgepodge sport that made Joel’s wife Joan think of pickle boat races in which the leftover or mismatched rowers team up and race just for fun.

It was probably only a matter of time until someone decided a wiffle ball would be more fun to try to hit with a racket. Image by 기석 김 from Pixabay

So the game became pickleball. Whereas most sports that fall into the category of made-up-because-someone-was-bored fade into obscurity after a family reunion or two and someone has inevitably broken an ankle (which could maybe, possibly be an absolutely true story from the depths of Angleton family lore), pickleball became an official thing in 1972.

That’s when its inventors established a corporation to protect the integrity of their burgeoning, accidentally-kind-of-super-fun sport. By 1976, the game started getting some national press, and in 1978 it was included in a book titled Other Raquet Sports.

By 1990 pickleball had made it to all fifty states, and in the mid-nineties, it was my favorite sport to play in my high school P.E. class, even though I was pretty sure my P.E. teacher Mrs. H. had made it up one afternoon when her kids were bored.

Of course now, nearly thirty (thirty?!) years later, it seems like everyone plays pickleball. The United States Amateur Pickleball Association boasts more than 70,000 members, there are organized leagues and tournaments, and there’s even a restaurant in my part of the world called Chicken N Pickle where you can, get this, eat chicken and play pickleball. Brilliant.

Move over tennis. There’s a new game in town. Stephen James Hall, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

The hubs had a birthday recently and he got a couple of rackets, so we decided to hop on the bandwagon and give it a try at a local park converted in the last few years from a baseball diamond (because who would ever want to play baseball?) to generally busy pickleball courts. Neither of us remembered precisely how to play, but after a YouTube video or two we were ready to go.

I vaguely recall being pretty good at the sport in high school. It turns out that thirty (thirty?!) years is plenty of time to get a little rusty. The hubs hadn’t played the sport in several decades either, but he does have a much more impressive background in tennis than I do, which gave him a definite advantage. Still, the game really is super fun.

Like the kind of fun one might expect to have on a long boring day when the family goes searching for something to do among the sportsball castoffs in the garage. And a great game is born.