That's Wimbledon over for another year and still no British winner.
Tennis was a traditional Summer High Wall game, but more often or not there was little or no access to proper courts. Granted there were a rake of courts in the Meadows but they cost money and the surly guy in the wee ticket shed seemed keen to maintain standards so took a dim view of scruffy wee laddies with one ball (grey not thon new fangled green yins) and a few auld bats.
Never mind the High Wall had it's own Centre Court, namely the steps at the side of the Dick Vet. A wee bit of innovation and inspiration and the game of Stepball was born.
Now here was a proper game. The idea was that you stood at the bottom, hit a ball up the steps and took turns trying to return it, a bit like Squash (which we had never seen or played) or Shapes (played all the time with a fitba against a flat wall)
The steps were irregular and so the random angle of return idea is what turns Stepball into a real challenge. This was perhaps derived from the ancient childhood game of Kerbie.
The real breakthrough was when the tennis ball got lost and was substituted by a golf ball.
Returns were faster, even less predictable and could "gie ye a sair yin"
The fact that golf balls and tennis bats are not all that compatible added to the speed and mayhem. These fellys were flying at you at some lick from aw angles.
An array of protective helmets were then introduced giving the game an even more surreal quality. If I recall they ranged from pots, cardboard boxes with eye holes, a light blue 60's puddingbowl style motorcycle helmet with leather ear flaps, all the way through to a WW2 ARP helmet. What a braw laugh we had. A real "Oor Wullie" moment
Now there were not a lot of cars around the High Wall in the early 70's but the owners of the few vehicles parked in a 50 yard radius of the Stepball arena started to get a bit humpty about the sound of golfball against metal.
They were always met with innocent looks and protestations of "No mister we never hit your car"
Eventually Stepball was hounded out due to the narrow-mindedness of a tiny minority of selfish motorists. Shame cos it was a barry game and could have caught on globally.
2 comments:
If they narrow minded bams hadnae ben so erm...narrow minded, SCotland would mibby huv produced an actual tennis champion by noo.
It wisnae Roddick's serve wot done fir Murry, it wiz they Dick Vet motor snobs.
Stepball does indeed sound barry.
You forgot to mention old Mr Tansey. If he caught you Stepballing around on his shift then yer ears were clipped with his warcry of "Buckin laddies". But then again he was the sleepiest nightwatchman I ever saw. You could creep in and throw peanuts in his open snoring mouth and he never even woke up, and if he did with his limp it was a pushover running away.
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