Touch the World: The Pleasures of Handball

This is ‘book’ 13 in the series The Impossible Books of Keith Kahn-Harris. The cover was created by Gus Condeixa. For more on this series, read the introduction here.

What sort of book is it?

An affectionate love letter to a neglected group of sports. It could work as an extended essay or a short book. It could also work as a longer travelogue, travelling around the world to delve into different kinds of handball and its players.

How likely is it that I will write the book?

Maybe an outside chance that I’d write it as an essay. The longer option seems impractical sadly, at least for the moment.

Am I happy for anyone else to write the book?

I would love to read a book like this.

Synopsis

The touch of ball on hand — so simply, yet so profound.

Touch: the sense that transforms the world. With our opposable thumbs, we humans reach out to grasp reality and in doing so, we shape it. When we touch the world, we are capable of both brutal destruction and delicate creation.

Touch also opens up possibilities for play. Possibilities that are at once viscerally violent and exquisitely skill.

Sport, the apotheosis of the simultaneous primal brutality and refined delicacy of human play, offers boundless possibilities for reveling in the pleasures of touch. Yet, many of those sports that utilise touch to the fullest are also the ones that are most overlooked.

What are these sports?

They are often grouped under the general term ‘handball’, and all of them involve contact between ball and hand, but the simplicity of the term belies the complexity and variety of this family of sports:

- They come in many national and regional varieties: Frisian, Australian, Irish, American, Basque, Valencian, Italian, French

Here’s a game of Frisian handball:

- They are known by many names: Wallball, Downball, Fives, Kaetsen, Longue Paume, Llargues, Pallone, Esku Huska

Here’s a game of Llargues, played on a Valencian street:

- They are played in many different spaces: One-wall, three-wall and four-wall courts, fronton, triquete, or just the street

Here’s an American game of three-wall handball:

- They are played by both the elite and the marginal: Pupils at ancient schools in England, muscled inmates in American prisons, leathery-skinned retirees in Miami, proud peasants in obscure European rural communities, street kids in American backstreets.

Here’s the national final of Winchester Fives, played solely in the English elite school of the same name:

Although some versions of handball are very popular and can even be at the centre of regional identities, nowhere does handball challenge the professional sporting behemoths. It never appears in the Olympics and, although there are some professionals in some varieties, they never appear on billboards. The diversity of handball is its greatest strength and its greatest weakness: the sheer quirkiness of its many varieties, their byzantine rules and the fierce pride of their devotees, prevent them from being assimilated into global sporting popularity (although international competitions under compromise rules do exist and are growing in popularity — something I’m a little ambivalent about).

Handball is therefore the antithesis of football: the game that took over the world.

The kick of the ball can be as unsubtle or as skilful as the touch of the hand can be. Yet there is a layer of alienation between ball and player in football. The foot is less sensitive than the hand, it has less capacity to hold and shape reality, and these days it is usually clad in expensively-produced housing.

For all of its universality, its popularity on any spare piece of waste ground anywhere in the world, football is part of the alienation that scars the modern world. Once, football was like handball, with countless beautiful local varieties. Although there are still a few nostalgic relics of this era, for the most part, the standardisation of football in the nineteenth century swept away the diversity.

Somehow handball survived where football didn’t. Where football is modern, global, vast, industrial and soaked in money, power and corruption, handball is ancient, anachronistic, rooted, organic.

Well okay, maybe I’m overplaying this distinction (and I do have great affection for football, particularly in its lower-league and amateur varieties), but for me handball is an ideal as much as it is a sport. For that reason, Touch The World will not include the Olympic team sport of handball (nor other ball-touching sports such as basketball etc). For all of the esteem in which I hold team handball, it is too professional, uncomfortably close to football.

Touch The World revels in the delights of handball. The book explores its multiple varieties, wallowing in the myriad obscurantisms embedded in their rules. It is a paean of praise to a marginal world in which the alienating force of globalisation is resisted through the primal universality of touch.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this Impossible Book, why not browse through the rest of the series here?

Also, please recommend and share it on Medium or elsewhere. I would love to read your comments too.

Many thanks!

Finally, here’s an alternative cover: