The Big Question: Why Is Fistball Not Played In The UK?
One of the my consuming childhood passions was discovering obscure sports. My passion was kindled by this mammoth book, that I consumed chunks of every morning over breakfast.
It was John Arlott who introduced me to Winchester Fives, Jai Alai, Hurling and much else. Not that all of these sports were necessarily obscure in the absolute sense. But I inhabited a sporting culture dominated by football, rugby, cricket etc and longed for a more diverse diet. And who was to say that football and the like were so popular out of any intrinsic merit? Maybe Real Tennis or Gaelic Handball were more thrilling to watch or participate in; their relative obscurity undeserved.
One day in the early summer of 1985, I watched a segment of the news announcing that the World Games was coming to London. Then in its second iteration, the multi-sport event is a kind of Olympics for ‘second tier’ sports, most of which I had never heard of.
This would be my Woodstock.
Bowing to my incessant pleading, my parents agreed to book for a couple of events that summer. So it was that they took me to a sports hall near Crystal Palace to watch one of the Roller Hockey matches (perhaps between Spain and Portugal if memory serves). It’s a fabulous spectator sport — all the speed and collisions of Ice Hockey but you can actually see the ball!
A week later, my mother dropped my friend Nick and I off at a wet and windy Barnet Copthall stadium for the preliminary rounds of the Fistball tournament.
Fistball (known as Faustball in some countries) resembles Volleyball, but on a much larger outdoor pitch and -crucially- the ball is allowed to bounce.
Nick and I had a fun day out. It’s an attractive sport with plenty of spectacle and skill.
Recently, my lockdown-addled brain wondered — does Fistball exist in the UK? Was I the only British person who remembered that rainy day in Barnet? Or was there, unbeknownst to me, a thriving Fistball subculture in our green and pleasant land?
Well there appears to be. The International Fistball Association lists nearly fifty national associations. It’s an impressively diverse list, and alongside Benin, Albania and North Korea is Great Britain. Yet a fairly extensive Google, YouTube and Facebook search finds not a trace of a British association. An article on Fistball in the Times in August 2019 explains:
If you are from the UK, chances are you have never heard of it. Britain is listed as one of the 62 nations affiliated with the International Fistball Association, but there is no British Fistball website. There do not appear to be any clubs to join.
However, the IFA does list a British contact address and it is in a surprising place. The owner of a post office in Mid Glamorgan, Srimal Wickremasinghe, was introduced to the sport by an Austrian colleague at the International Olympic Academy, a “multicultural interdisciplinary centre that aims at studying, enriching and promoting Olympism”. Wickremasinghe, 64, said he would like to get the sport into schools but thus far British fistball is an idea in one man’s head.
There is certainly no British team at the men’s world championships, which have been taking place this week in Winterthur, Switzerland, with 18 nations on show: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Namibia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Serbia, Switzerland and the United States.
The lack of a UK internet presence makes me wonder whether the globalisation of Fistball is something of a fantasy, spread by the burghers of the sport to give the impression that it means something beyond its heartlands of Germany, Austria and Brazil. Is British Fistball simply vapourware?
It’s interesting to speculate as to why the UK has resisted Fistball’s charms. I doubt the sexual innuendo in the name helps matters much, nor the fact that if you squint the IFA logo looks pretty sexual:
My suspicion — which I can’t prove- is that the UK, despite its history of spawning multiple sports, has become so dominated by a small cluster of them that we have lost much of our sporting diversity. There’s an interesting piece of work for a sociologist of sport (which I am not) to compare the diversity of national sporting cultures.
In addition, the UK seems oddly resistant to sports that involve contact between hand and ball. For their automatic entry spot in the 2012 London Olympics, a British handball team had to be especially picked and trained since, while the game is played here, it is nowhere near the international standard of many other European countries. England was currently ranked 136 in the men’s volleyball world rankings and 199 in the women’s rankings. Other forms of handball that involve hitting a ball against the wall are massively popular in many countries (in New York for example they are a common street game) but in the UK are largely restricted to the private school games of Eton, Rugby and Winchester Fives.
From where does this British resistance to putting hand to ball spring from? Maybe the innuendo that ‘hand to ball’ connotes? Are the British unconsciously reluctant to touch an object of play without either mediation in the form of a racket or bat, or the distance that a foot encased in a shoe provides? Or is this a national quirk that has no meaning at all?
Another interesting angle on Fistball is how expats spread or do not spread sports. You can be pretty sure that wherever there are more than 100 Australians you will find a local Aussie Rules team (there’s one that meets in my local park in London). But do German and Austrian expats not feel the need to set up Fistball teams when they relocate to global cities like London?
Sometimes I feel that trivial questions can unlock the whole world. There’s no doubt that the lack of UK Fistball tells us something. The question is, what? In contemplating Fistball in my lockdown reveries I may be contemplating the secrets of existence.
Thanks for reading. This article is part of the publication ‘A Lockdown Miscellany’, a space for reflection on the obsessions provoked by this strange period of lockdown. Would you like to share yours? If so, get in touch.
