Platform Tennis in Life Magazine

Kenneth Ward arranged for a piece to run in Life Magazine, and he appeared in several of the pictures that ran with it. In one of the shots, his expression was so contorted that Life felt impelled to caption it: “Up the wire, like a monkey, goes Ken Ward, President of the American Paddle Tennis Association. In spite of his strange antics, Ward is a good-looking New York broker.”

(Note: The pictures were taken by the Albanian-American photographer Gjon Mili who, along with Harold Edgerton of MIT, was a pioneer in the use of stroboscopic instruments to capture a sequence of actions in one photograph)

The Life article brought some amusing reactions.

One was a letter from a man who objected to calling O’Hearn the “game’s greatest player.” He said O’Hearn had never played against him.

Another man’s letter made the revolutionary idea of taking balls off the backstop seem tame:

“Your article on paddle tennis as played by a group in New York State is most interesting to us here in New Jersey, but I would like to tell you about our game. We play in a garage, about 30 by 60 feet in Morristown, using the ceiling as a play surface. This, of course, eliminates any advantage in playing the net position, as the ball can be struck against the ceiling making it strike the opponent. Along the center of the ceiling runs a beam the full length of the court and balls played off this introduce strange angle shots. No walls offer any hazards but one rear wall, and that is a trickster’s delight. Here is an old hot air furnace with its pipes reaching out like arms to change the direction of the ball or destroy it for one attempting its return. In a match last week the ball struck against the ceiling, bounced up from the floor into the maze of pipes and has not been found yet. For all I know it has now been shoveled out with the ashes. On winter weekends it is a toss-up whether this game or hockey prevails, but we old men have a preference for our game of paddle tennis.”

Source: Adapted from Fessenden S. Blanchard, Platform Paddle Tennis, 1959