Robert Burroughs

In 1969, another San Diegan was building tennis-racquet stringing machines in his garage in Point Loma. He was a high school friend of Bud Muehleisen’s, and the chance meeting of the two at the Kona Kai Club in 1970 was to have a profound effect on the sport of racquetball.

A mere five or six years ago, it was le sport hot. Racquetball had come out of nowhere, like Halley’s comet, flashing onto the scene and supplanting tennis as the sport of the moment. Everyone was playing it. Doctors played in between quadruple-bypass operations, lawyers slipped out of court for an hour of play between hearings. Business executives, both men and women, arrived at work in the morning carrying gym bags with what looked like dwarf tennis racquets poking out the sides. They returned from lunch hour with the flushed look of strenuous exercise or hurried away from their desks at five o’clock to make a five-thirty court time. On college campuses, courts originally intended for that more elitist of racquet games, squash, now abounded with the devotees of a sport that anyone could play.

Racquetball’s explosion onto the sports scene was brilliant and loud, and the people who controlled the game believed that it was going to reach the heights the two most recent sports phenomenons, tennis and skiing, had reached. There would be television, big money, national exposure, famous players, and a following in the tens of millions. At least in part, all of these things happened. But racquetball never reached the top. It became the sport that almost made it, and its professional players became figures on the periphery, the Twilight Zone of sports fame.

San Diego was to racquetball what Hawaii was to surfing: it was the place to be if you were serious about the sport. The top teachers were here, the top pros were here, and the two top manufacturers were here. San Diego was at the heart of the new sport. Racquetball’s roots, however, were in the East. The game was invented in the late 1950s in Greenwich, Connecticut, by a man named Joe Sobek. Sobek, a tennis pro, was looking for an indoor racquet game to play during the winter. He cut off a wooden tennis racquet to a length more suited to play on indoor squash and handball courts. Using the core of a tennis ball (itself a small ball known as a “Pennsylvania Pinkie”), Sobek began playing his new racquet sport.

The game was initially called “paddle racquets,” and it began to spread slowly from Connecticut. During the 1960s the Sportcraft Company, a well-known sporting goods manufacturer, began to produce wooden racquets. Followers of the sport belonged to a loosely organized group known as the Paddle Racquets Association, and it was not until 1969 that the first String Racquet Championship was held. Six weeks before that tournament, two amateur handball players from San Diego, Dr. Bud Muehleisen of El Cajon and Charlie Brumfield of San Carlos, heard about the game and the tournament. They decided to enter. The two men spent the next several weeks practicing what was to them a new sport, then they showed up in St. Louis for the championship. The 250 men and women competitors convened a meeting to establish an official name for the sport. Muehleisen.was sitting next to another local player. Bob McElheamy of Coronado. McElheamy leaned over and asked Muehleisen what he thought of the name “racquetball.” Muehleisen liked it. They brought it up for a vote, and paddle racquets officially became known as racquetball.

In the tournament itself the two newcomers from San Diego, Muehleisen and Charlie Brumfield, kept winning in their respective brackets and ended up meeting in the finals. Muehleisen won. Over the next decade, Muehleisen would win sixty-six major amateur titles. His participation in the game, as player, teacher, and supporter, would bring him the reputation as the “father” of modern racquetball and guru to the younger generation of players. Charlie Brumfield turned professional when the sport did, in the early Seventies, and he became a top singles player nationally. But at the time of the St. Louis tournament in 1969, another San Diegan was building tennis-racquet stringing machines in his garage in Point Loma. He was a high school friend of Bud Muehleisen’s, and the chance meeting of the two at the Kona Kai Club in 1970 was to have a profound effect on the sport of racquetball.

Franklin W. “Bud” Held was an established athlete in his own right. Held was a native of Lakeside, attended Grossmont High School, and then studied engineering at Stanford. He was a track-and-field star, and in 1952 he competed with the American team at the Helsinki Olympics. From 1953 to 1956 he was the world record-holder in the javelin throw. In the years after his participation. Held was a minister of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Point Loma, but in 1967 he left the ministry to return to engineering. He began by building a machine to shape javelins for his brother Dick. Dick Held javelins are still used today by world-class throwers.

Bud Held was also building tennis-racquet stringing machines. In 1970 Held ran into Bud Muehleisen in the pro shop at the Kona Kai. Held’s interest in aluminum alloy racquets and Muehleisen’s passion for the fledgling sport of racquetball found a common ground. Muehleisen persuaded Held to try racquetball; he quickly decided that it was a legitimate sport, not a fad. Now enthusiastic as well, Held began to make prototype racquets for Muehleisen to test. At an invitational tournament held later that year in St. Louis, Muehleisen and doubles partner Charlie Brumfield used two of Bud Held’s prototypes. Other players were so impressed with the racquets that Muehleisen returned to San Diego after the tournament with two dozen orders. Several months later, after the 1970 National Championships, orders for more than one hundred racquets came to Held.

His one-man company, which he had named “Ektelon” (a contraction of two Greek words roughly translating to “drawing out to perfection”), began to expand rapidly. At about the same time, another Bud, Bud Leach, began to produce racquetball racquets in San Diego. Leach Industries of Scripps Ranch and Ektelon became the two leading manufacturers of racquetball equipment in the country. As the sport grew through the 1970s, major manufacturers like Head, Voit, and Wilson jumped into the game, but the two small San Diego companies held the top of the market.

Bud Muehleisen was teaching at Muehleisen Courts in El Cajon. Leading pro players like Charlie Brumfield, Steve Strandemo, and Jerry Hilecher were playing and practicing locally. The industry sponsors of these pro players, Ektelon and Leach, were testing the newest racquets on local courts. San Diego had more than 200 of these courts by 1979, but the game had gone national as well. Ektelon reached sales highs in 1978 and 1979, and racquetball appeared to be growing still. And then the event occurred which racquetball people had been waiting for: a major pro racquetball tournament was shown on television. The 1980 national championship from Anaheim was on ESPN, the cable sports network, and the fate of racquetball suddenly changed.

With the first few shots, it was clear that there was a major problem: the game was not suited to television. The ball was too small and the action too fast to be followed on the screen. The tiny sphere rocketed around the court; points were rung up before the action had been digested by the viewer. There was a new generation of hard-hitting young players, and their style, in combination with the new plastic- composite racquets and a ball whose chemical composition had been formulated with speed in mind, produced the lightning-fast action that the game had become noted for — but which only confused the viewer at home. There were also basic technical problems with televising the game. Essentially the game was played in a glass cage, and the camera angles and the confinement of the small court space made the play even more difficult to follow.

Bud Muehleisen is emphatic in his assessment of the game’s failure on television. Muehleisen says that the problem was the ball. “The ball,” he says, “is too fast.” The ball manufacturers, in their zeal to embellish the quick-action nature of the game, had formulated balls that shot around the court like bullets. Muehleisen agrees with Bud Held that racquetball's appeal lies in that speed. Young people. Held says, enjoy the action, while professionals, business people with high tension and stressful lifestyles, find that they can “blow off a lot of steam in an hour of play.”

The championship matches were broadcast by the cable network in 1981 and in subsequent years, but the big networks did not pick up coverage of the sport. Without the big money, there would be no huge purses, and there would be no wide exposure. The manufacturers now began to look more closely at the tournaments themselves. Companies like Ektelon and Leach had been putting up much of the money to sponsor players and bankroll tournaments. But when they looked at just who was coming to tournaments, they found that the audience consisted mostly of players, their friends, and families — a limited market. Cutbacks in the player and marketing programs were made.

In addition, the racquetball manufacturers themselves were beginning to have problems. The debilitating pressures of the struggling national economy had reached down into the sport. Sporting goods dealers pushed the limits of the thirty-, sixty-, and ninety-day payment plans the manufacturers gave them.

Numerous small dealers went bankrupt and their debts to the manufacturers went unpaid. Ektelon in particular suffered during this period. The consolidation of its scattered Mission Valley operations into a new building on Aero Drive led the company to borrow some three million dollars — at twenty-three percent interest. Furthermore, a miscalculation in the manufacturing costs of a new plastic composite racquet resulted in a loss of almost twenty dollars for each racquet sold. And there was an aborted attempt to manufacture an Ektelon racquetball, a ball that ended up breaking apart after a short time in play. Despite the fact that the sport was at a peak both in popularity and in sales, Ektelon was in trouble.

The trend was changing. Aerobics and its many offshoots, from Jazzercise to swimming pool “splash-dancing,” had begun to force their way into the health clubs and spas, and as clubs sensed the movement toward these new trends, they began to convert racquetball courts into exercise rooms. The Nautilus weightlifting machine had also come on the scene, attracting a following and moving into space formerly occupied by racquetball courts.

The smaller court club operations had the most difficulties; some folded, many sold out to the new large fitness chains like Family Fitness Center and Holiday Spas. The new fitness merchants shifted away from racquetball immediately. The Holiday Spa on Camino del Rio South, for example, has converted all but two of the original twelve racquetball courts to fitness and weight rooms. Courtsports on India Street, a club which had continued to rely on racquetball for the majority of its income even after the game’s popularity began to level off, has yielded to the fitness change.

Several courts there have recently been converted from racquetball to fitness rooms. With the same abruptness with which it had charged onto the sports scene, racquetball slipped back into the second row.

Racquetball, however, is far from dead. According to industry sources there are about 12 million racquetball players at present, and sales indicate that the number is growing. The filtering-out process that followed the racquetball boom left approximately half a dozen racquetball equipment manufacturers. Leach Industries became a part of a company called Diversified Products. Bud Held sold Ektelon to the Browning Company, a famous American arms and sporting goods manufacturer, in the spring of 1980. But these parent companies, and the few other manufacturers remaining, are still competing in today’s market, which is estimated to be worth $250 million a year.

Bud Muehleisen is still running his racquetball facility in El Cajon, and to this day he remains convinced that if the influential powers within the industry were just to slow down the ball so that the rallies would be longer and the television audience could follow the play, racquetball would have a chance at the big time.

Bud Held is no longer involved in racquetball, except for his participation as a player. He lives at the south end of Del Mar, in a house that overlooks Fenasquitos Lagoon, and works at the investments he was able to make after the sale of Ektelon. Held disagrees with Bud Muehleisen about the effect of slowing down the ball. “Racquetball just isn’t a spectator sport,” Held says. “It’s a game that is much more fun to play than it is to watch. I don’t think that slowing down the ball would help that much.”