Recently when searching Ebay an unusual looking racquet came up for sale in England. Our good mate in the USA, Rolf Jaeger decided to buy it as part of his second tennis collection, having sold his first to Tennis Australia. Neither of us had seen this before, but after some quizzing of his UK mate we found the racquet belonged to game played indoors on horse back, a winter polo variation if you will, with the extremely fanciful name “Aviation Pushball”. The game involved a feather light, air filled ball which could be guided and hit from player to player to score a goal.
Aviation Pushball in action and the racquet right with a very intriguing stringing technique.
Within the Australian newspapers, we found at the same time a new game invented in England in the early 1900′s mainly for women, where in a type of cricket/tennis variation you hit/bowled the ball with a racquet to a batsman with racquet, to fielders with racquets where the ball could be caught using the strings. This game was called VIGORO and amazingly the game survived into the 1930′s when, as with lawn tennis, boxed sets were sold and even more surprising is the existence of Vigoro associations in NSW and Qld today. The racquets have been replaced by bats but it is great to see how other games evolve and survive. See more at the NSW website www.vigoro.com.au
Finally, and thanks to our UK contributor, we find reference to another racquet sport called “BAGBALL” which it would appear did not survive the journey.
So great fun learning about these marvellous developments.
Vigoro in play c1903 & sets sold in 1930…still going strong today.
Bagball looks like points scored for accurate driving or volleying.
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