Reaching his paddle toward the moonlit sky, Doug Pendry drops a serve into the opposite side of the court, unleashing a volley in a game that is perhaps one of the more peculiar ways to spend a late winter’s night in Winnetka.
He and three other players slap the ball across the court’s painted aluminum floor, over the net and against the chicken-wire walls that define platform tennis–better known by its addicts simply as “paddle.”
Part tennis, part racquetball, paddle is played outdoors only in cold-weather months, when the ground is too frozen for golf and the snow is deep on tennis courts. If anyone’s happy to see winter temperatures hang on even as spring draws closer, it’s paddle players.
The game is waged with a flat racket riddled with holes and a rubber ball whose speed rises and falls along with the mercury level. Twenty to 30 degrees is great; if it gets too warm, the ball bounces around like crazy.
“This is perfect paddle weather,” said Michael McColl, 33, on an icy night when the moon hung in the sky like a polished dime. “I don’t think there’s such a thing as too cold.”
So as local paddle leagues wrapped up their competitive season this week, it’s almost as if Mother Nature saluted them with one last chilly blast. The nighttime low shouldn’t creep above freezing until Saturday, and the area could plunge back into snowy conditions Sunday night and Monday, according to the National Weather Service.
Die-hard paddle players swear they’ll keep playing into April–or until golfing season takes off, whichever comes first.
Outside Eastern cities like Rochester, N.Y., Summit, N.J., and Philadelphia, the biggest concentration of players of this obscure game is in the Chicago area, home to an estimated 6,000 enthusiasts, several national champions and the second-largest annual paddle tournament in the country, held in late fall.
And Winnetka–with its peculiar quartet of elevated courts hemmed in by heavy-duty wire and plunked in the middle of a snow-covered park–is the game’s Midwestern epicenter.
On this frosty evening, the game is a sweaty, four-man macho matchup. Paddle, celebrating its 75th birthday this season, demands patience, precision, some grunting and a fair amount of beer drinking.
“I like to call it my bowling league,” said Pendry, 41, as he reached for a postgame bottle from a pile of 12-packs stacked outside the courts’ warming hut.
Most paddle facilities are private. But over the years, the Winnetka Platform Tennis Club and Park District program have grown to be “the largest paddle program in the known universe,” brags Pendry, the club’s president.
Concocted in 1928 by two men in Scarsdale, N.Y., paddle eventually made its way to tennis clubs and country clubs, where it served as a cold-weather alternative to summer sports. It came to the Winnetka Park District in the 1970s, where residents now pay $400 and non-residents $475 to play from October through early March.
Paddle also has bounced onto the health club scene: In Chicago, for example, two courts sit atop the roof of the Lakeshore Athletic Club in Lincoln Park.
And regional interest appears to be growing. In Hinsdale, the village hopes to add four courts to its current two in the summer to meet demand, said Parks and Recreation Supt. Bob Kotula.
Valley Lo Club, a country club in Glenview, plans to break ground for two new courts in the spring to help ease its long waiting lists for court time.
Courts are pricey–upward of $40,000 to build–and equipped with removable boards at the base so snow can be easily shoveled off. Heaters beneath the textured floor melt the slush.
Scored like tennis, paddle is played as doubles on what looks like a tennis court but is only one-fourth the size. Players can hit the ball off the chicken-wire screens, making it a game of strategy and self-control rather than strength and speed.
Inside the Winnetka club’s hut, a no-frills shelter with the slight fragrance of a locker room, enraptured guys await their appointed game times while standing at several windows, each the size of a wide-screen TV, studying every stroke outside.
Although an increasing number of women are forming teams, after-dark platform tennis remains primarily a middle-age guy thing, with the concept of “male bonding” practically written into the rules.
“This is our yoga,” said Jim Preschlack, 37, of Lake Forest. “It’s yoga for men.”
“Guys’ night out,” added Alan Graham, 61, known as “The Godfather” among his paddle peers.
“The guys who are Type A are going to get frustrated because it’s a game of momentum,” Preschlack said. “There’s something rhythmic about hitting the ball. It’s serve, drive, rally, lob. It’s almost like music.”
And that cadence makes it particularly alluring to athletes whose 40-, 50- or 60-something legs don’t relish conventional tennis as much as they used to.
The dress code for paddle is layered nonchalance: Sweat pants, fleece vest, knit hat or baseball cap. A few men wear gloves; most swing their rackets barehanded.
“You kind of don’t want to look good when you play paddle,” Preschlack said.
The Winnetka club hopes to build a new $350,000 warming hut in the summer, followed by two more courts. In the meantime, one of the more critical parts of paddle–postmatch hanging out–takes place in the current tiny hut, largely warmed by body heat.
“It’s a community and it’s a culture,” said Brenda Sussna, 52, a longtime paddle player and the Winnetka club’s vice president. “We’re in this climate, so you’d might as well do something to survive.”
Women play their matches in the afternoon, followed by fruit-and-cheese trays and chitchat. The men go for pretzels and an import.
Before paddle’s appearance in Winnetka, curling was the outdoor winter game of choice for local men, said Ted Read, 65, who remembers the early days when paddle courts were built of wood and sprinkled with salt to melt the snow.
Like many new paddle players, David Kreisa, 34, is a racket convert.
“I much prefer this,” said Kreisa, who moved to Winnetka from Wisconsin two years ago.
“When I first moved here, I tried to get some guys to play [indoor] tennis, and I couldn’t find anybody,” he said. “They were all playing paddle.”
