I spent my high school freshman year at St. Albert Catholic School in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The boys there had to wear slacks, a dress shirt, and a tie. Girls wore Exorcist-green below-the-knee plaid skirts designed by a blind Scotsman.
Classes were all boys or all girls. One might assume the school segregated classes because adolescent boys and girls distract each other. Clearly, however, what the school administration feared most was a feminine influence that might inhibit the teachers’ urge to abuse boys.
I am not talking about sex abuse. Outside of a few unwelcome shoulder rubs by Mr. White, the Latin teacher, nobody tried to seduce me. No, I am talking about common run-of-the-mill beatings.
The lay teachers tended to be very large men who coached athletics and taught . . . I really do not remember what they taught. What I remember very well is that they all were proud of their homemade paddles. These were hardwood weapons with holes strategically drilled so that they would pinch, as well as bruise.
If you misbehaved, you had to stand in front of the class and hold your ankles while an obese giant tested his strength on your ass. Sometimes nobody misbehaved, but if the coach was in one of his moods he might ask the class to vote on who should “get the board.” The kids who were new, or too mouthy, too short, too fat, too . . . anything, tended to get the board a lot.
Before my sophomore year my father asked whether I wanted to return to St. Albert, or go to Underwood High. Not being a fan of authority figures bullying children, I chose Underwood.
In the intervening decades I have thought of St. Albert High no more frequently (and no more fondly) than one might recall a particularly bad bout of hemorrhoids. Now, however, I think of the school twice a week.
On Tuesdays and Saturdays I play “padel,” which is Spanish for “paddle.” Padel, a cross between racquetball and tennis, was invented in Spain, and is quite popular here. The racquet, as the game’s name suggests, is a paddle. It is about 1 ½ inches thick and has holes, just like the paddles used by sadistic teachers at a certain Catholic school in 1971.
By the way, if you are writing a blog about paddles and you want to find Internet images to include in your essay, be careful. The first result may be “S&M Paddles.” If you click on that, presuming “S&M” is a paddle-making partnership, the Google algorithm is going to think it has you pegged, and that you like being pegged.
The padel court is smaller than a tennis court, and it has a back wall that you can play off, making it a faster sport. The balls look like tennis balls, but they have a little less bounce.
Padel’s inventors were faced with a choice. They could have adopted racquetball’s scoring system. In racquetball, the first player to get fifteen points, wins. “Ha!” said the inventors. “That is no way to keep score! Any beer-swigging redneck can count to 15!”
Determined to elevate the game’s status, they adopted the system used in country club tennis. Only a few astrophysicists and engineers understand that system, although some attorneys pretend that they “get it” (nobody believes them). Since I am a lawyer I will pretend to understand the scoring. Here goes:
The game starts with both players at zero, called “love/love.” The person serving the ball first says “love/love” or, in the alternative, may sing “Love, love me do.”
Once someone scores the game will be 15 to love. The next point is 30, then 40, and the following point wins that game. If players tie at 40, the server does not say “40-40.” The server says “deuce,” or sings “She’s my little deuce coupe, You don’t know what I got.”
The tennis scoring system was invented in 12th century France. Nobody knows what kind of liquor the inventors were drinking, but historians agree that it had to have been a lot. We also know that the drunken Frenchmen realized, after declaring that the game must be won by at least two points, that a progression starting with 15-30 should have ended with 45, not 40. Subsequent scoring would have been 60, 75, 90, etc. But where do you go from 15-30-40?
The dipsomaniacs should have just admitted an error. One of them made that suggestion, but the largest and most arrogant of the bunch, a teacher in the local Catholic school, staggered to his feet and thrust his glass forward, spilling most of the contents, and shouted. “No. What we do is, we just stop counting.” He slurred his words, but he said this in French, so nobody noticed.
His drinking buddies blinked their confusion. “Bear with me,” he said. He paused a moment, marshalling his thoughts, and put the glass down. Leaning forward, fists on the table, he intoned, “If the server is ahead by one, he says ‘ad-in.’ If the other side is ahead the server says ‘ad-out.’ If that round ends in a tie it returns to deuce and the players keep doing ‘ad-in,’ ‘ad-out,’ deuce, until someone wins or, and in a long game this will be inevitable, nobody remembers who was ahead, in which case the game devolves into a shoving contest.”
And that’s how rugby was invented.
“Sacré bleu!” shouted the drunken Frenchmen, just before passing out. “No game has a more perfect scoring system!”
They awoke the next day, each with a massive hangover. They looked at their notes and realized the tennis scoring system made no sense whatsoever. But because they were French, they sniffed at their critics. “Si tu ne comprends pas, c’est parce que tu es un idiot” (If you do not understand, it is because you are an idiot).
While I miss racquetball’s simplicity, I very much like padel. True, it triggers memories of corpulent sadistic bastards, but they probably are dead, and the sport is great fun. See for yourself: