The year is 1928, Herbert Hoover has just been elected President in a landslide. He takes a trip to South America, plans to meet with the heads of state, and prepares for his next presidency. While traveling, he sees something far more important and influential than shaking hands and meeting politicians: a game called “Bull-In-The-Ring,” played by Navy sailors on the battleship. Utah.
The sailors really enjoyed the game, and it was their preferred way to spend time at sea. It involved nine players standing in a circle, with the tenth, “the bull” standing in the middle. Players would launch the ball through the ring, while the bull would attempt to intercept it. The player who threw the intercepted pass would become the bull, and play would continue.
Seeing this sparked Hoover’s imagination. What if it was possible to code a version of “Bull-In-The-Ring” to become a full team sport? Work in sports began as a way to keep the sedentary Hoover in shape. Dr. Joel T. Boone, a White House doctor at the time, used one-on-one medicine ball workouts with Hoover as a way to improve his health, and it wasn’t long before the entire cabinet started playing in the White House lawn. in teams. Soon a new sport was born: “Hooverball”.
And it’s weird like hell.
Two teams of four players each would lead to a volleyball court with a net of similar size, but instead of using a volleyball, the players would throw a six-pound medicine ball over the net. Players would be required to catch the ball without it touching the ground before throwing it back, just like volleyball. Dr. Boone believed that the strenuous act of throwing and catching a weighted ball was so pronounced that a single hour of playing Hooverball had the same physical impact as three hours of tennis or six hours of golf. Not only Dr. Boone believed in sports, but hundreds of sports scientists.
The best part about Hooverball was how much players believed in Hooverball. There was a cult of Hooverball, so to speak, which resulted in its proponents making some seriously ridiculous claims. Will Irwin, a friend of the President and his biographer, wrote about the sport in a 1931 article:
“It is more exhausting than boxing, wrestling or soccer. It has the virtue of reaching almost every muscle in the body. “
So here we had a sport invented to make the president lose weight, now it is promoted as the most physically exhausting activity of the decade. There was a fervent belief that Hooverball would sweep across the nation and become America’s new favorite sport.
Unfortunately, that didn’t materialize, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t get some amazing stuff. Hooverball rules were inherently loose. Players were encouraged to master the game to better suit them directly. He also created all kinds of shooting innovations, designed to deliver the ball more effectively and score more points. We had releases like …
- The Body Twist – A player holds the ball at his waist and spins it around in a quick motion to throw it over the net.
- The trebuchet: more or less what it sounds like. You launch with one arm, using the other as a fulcrum to catapult it over the net.
- Over the head: it’s more or less in the name. A two-handed shot focused on strength.
- The Spike: Similar to a volleyball spike, except that the player catches the ball in the air and tries to push it towards the ground with the greatest possible force.
Like all beautiful things that fly too close to the sun, Hooverball made no lasting impact on the sports world. Perhaps that was because the effectiveness of the sport was not what was advertised, or perhaps named after Hoover helped kill the game. The fondness for attributing the Hoover name to objects and movements became a key point in 1932, and with that it is entirely possible that the Hooverball concept was viewed with the same kind of failure as its presidency, forged during the Great Depression. For decades it remained dormant until the CrossFit world discovered long forgotten sport. Greg Glassman, the godfather of CrossFit wrote an article in 2003 extolling the virtues of sport saying:
“We had to give it that CrossFit flavor, so we played in the sand with a twenty pound ball and an aggressive pit bull-breaking ball. It was really hard; everyone was tired and a well-known black belt of Brazilian jiu-jitsu was bitten ”.
Dog bites aside, it wasn’t long until U.S. gyms looking to add to their CrossFit regimens added Hooverball as training. The sport developed to prevent a president from gaining weight was now being used by conscious health across the country as a means of increasing strength and endurance.
For a time it seemed like a great Hooverball return was on the horizon. Not only were people playing, but there were also plans to hold major tournaments in the sport. The national Hooverball championships appear to have been held in 2017, but there is no evidence that they took place in 2018 or 2019.
What makes this even weirder is that it seems that interest in Hooverball disappeared as soon as it arose. Dozens of YouTube videos of people practicing the sport and general interest were down, and there is now very little information on the sport that is still played on a regular basis.
But, we will always have the memories. From a past time, from a game long forgotten, a sport devised for a president and played by the common man. Hooverball will live forever, in its own way.
