In Queens, Cold Weather Brings Heat to Handball
By SARAH MASLIN NIR
A steady ribbon of steam rose from a stainless steel pot at a park in Queens, a small flame licking at its underside. Every so often, Washington Giovanni Cardenas lifted the lid to pluck a round morsel from the roiling water.
Timing was important: undercooked, the objects would be flat; overcooked, the casing could melt. Two minutes was the magic number.
Mr. Cardenas was not tending stove at a cookout on that Wednesday in late February: inside his pot were bright-blue rubber balls.
Mr. Cardenas, 39, is a self-described religious devotee of the sport of handball, and like many of his peers, he is committed to playing the game year-round. But the cold weather is not hospitable to players, and even less so to the handballs.
“On a winter day the ball is cold, which makes the rubber harder, the air in the ball denser, so the ball doesn’t really expand and contract off the bounce,” said Ruben Acosta, 32, a hotel concierge who is known on the court as Superstar. Boiling the balls, he said, gives them back their zing.
“When you play with the steam ball, it makes everything a lot more interesting,” Mr. Acosta said. “Your reflexes have to be faster, your instinct has to be faster. It changes the game.”
That is why in the trunks of their cars, next to the usual gear of water bottles, gym shorts, gloves and plastic tubs of balls, the handball players tuck in some unconventional equipment: a canister of propane, a lighter and a pot. (“My mom doesn’t know this is missing,” Mr. Cardenas said.)
New York has the most outdoor handball courts of any city in America: about 5,000, according to the United States Handball Association. By comparison, Los Angeles is in second place with 500.
But indoor courts are few and far between, and they are often hogged by the best athletes. Indoor clubs also charge court fees, which, while usually under $20, can add up for fanatics like Mr. Cardenas, who works at a moving company. He estimated that he had played more than six games a week since he became hooked on handball six years ago.
The answer for Mr. Cardenas and a revolving group of about 50 players — some of whom know each other only by handles like PlayStation and Pollo — was “steamball.” These players do not have to deal with “a whole mob of people who are trying to play indoors,” Mr. Acosta said before dipping into a handball player’s sideline activity, trash talk, “because they’re not man enough to play outside.”
On this unusually temperate Wednesday in February, the air was still cold enough to deaden the rubber on a court in Rego Park, Queens. As cars rushed by on the Grand Central Parkway, a dozen friends watched Mr. Cardenas shield a propane burner in a large paint bucket from the wind. He dropped four azure balls into a few inches of water simmering in his mother’s pot.
Then, in teams of four, the men launched into two parallel games with rapid-fire volleys, thwacking, sweating and trash-talking.
Every few minutes, a player would reach into the piping pot, swapping a flagging ball for a toasty one. Some tossed the sizzling ball like a hot potato in the cloth of their sweatshirt. The heated rubber hit the concrete wall of the court with the same satisfying sound as popping bubble wrap.
A regulation handball has a diameter of just under two inches and weighs 61 grams, said Matt Krueger, the national association’s development coordinator. It consists of a rubber exterior with a center of compressed air, and when that air becomes too cold, the pressure inside the ball drops.
To the uninitiated, there is little difference between a boiled ball and a cold “deadball,” but the latter moves more slowly, and players must hit it harder. After playing that way all winter, Mr. Cardenas said, players find that they have lost their competitive edge when the sport’s stars re-emerge in the spring.
The steamball players of Rego Park said they adopted the practice from a group of older players in Woodside, Queens, about three years ago. But Mr. Krueger said similar practices abound. In Seattle, he said, some players use a slow cooker, and players in Coney Island have been known to inject air into balls with a syringe.
Ball-doctoring tactics are not permitted in official tournaments, Mr. Krueger added, but they are fine for recreational play.
Not everyone is a fan. Some prefer the more relaxed pace the cold ordinarily brings.
“I hate steamball,” said Vladimir Zhivulko, 20, a student. “It’s too much work, it’s too much hustle.”
Others mocked steamball at first. “They say bring the potatoes, the eggs, the spaghetti,” Mr. Cardenas said. “We’ll make a soup out of it while the water is boiling up.” But the mockery stopped when critics saw how the game flew, he said.
Collette Smith walked her pit bull past the Rego Park courts during a heated game of steamball and inquired about the bubbling contraption on the asphalt. She was blown away.
“Who would think these kids out here would think of something like this and execute it?” Ms. Smith said. “It’s incredible.”
