One afternoon in late 1970s, after they’d finished a tournament in Buffalo, N.Y., Davey Bledsoe and his close friend Steve Keeley decided to hitchhike across Canada. Naturally this was Keeley’s idea, the same Keeley who’d later author a book called “Hobo Memories” and today lives in the desert raising tarantulas.
“I remember this older guy picks us up,” Bledsoe said recently, “and he says to us, ‘So what do you boys do for living?’ When we started to think about it, it seemed like a pretty funny question and we both started laughing. ‘Well, sir,’ we told him, ‘we play racquetball.’”
In fact, both were elite players, with Bledsoe then the No. 1 player in the world. Earlier this year, the Atlantan became the 45th player inducted into the USA Racquetball Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs. In those days they called him “The Golden Retriever” for his curly blond hair and economic, explosive footwork.
Perhaps because racquetball’s surge coincided with the disco era, it is difficult recalling, or even taking seriously, how popular this sport became, much less the physical and mental virtuosity required, at least at the higher levels.
There was a thriving pro circuit and Bledsoe’s annual income routinely reached six figures for several years. But there were also millions of other players with wildly diverging skills -- there were an estimated 3.1 million players as early as 1974 -- playing at racquetball clubs that seemed to open every other day. There were eight magazines alone devoted to the sport, with Steve Keeley himself the unofficial racquetball laureate. His 1976 book, “The Complete Book of Racquetball,” remains the sport’s definitive guide.
To Bledsoe, now 59, all that seems like “several lifetimes ago.” A few years back when he downsized by moving out of his Atlanta home into a condo near the Paideia School, he said, “I threw away six boxes of trophies. It’s just hard to keep carting around all that stuff.”
But last March when Bledsoe received that Hall of Fame letter from USA Racquetball president Cheryl Kirk, it was almost as if those discarded trophies had marched right back into his living room like resurrected soldiers.
For Bledsoe the professional racquetball battles were relatively few, his pro career lasting only from 1977 to 1984, which basically parallels the sport’s peak. His earnings accrued from prize money, endorsements – a magazine writer in the late 1970s once wrote, “What Jimmy Connors does for tennis, [Bledsoe does] for racquetball” – summer camps, personal appearances and exhibitions.
He gave lessons to a number of offbeat celebrities indigenous to the era, but none compared to the alarmingly rotund figure everyone simply called ‘E.’
In 1974, a year after graduating from the University of Tennessee, Bledsoe was still an amateur when he met a senior amateur racquetball player named George Constantine Nichopoulos. In popular culture circles he was already known as Dr. Nick, official doctor to Elvis Presley. To put it lightly, Dr. Nick explained, the King was badly overweight and needed regular exercise. He wondered if the young racquetball phenom could teach his patient the game.
Bledsoe’s approximate replay was, “Thank you, thank you very much,” and he took the job.
In the daytime he was an account executive for an advertising firm and at night his job was teaching racquetball to Elvis and his seven body guards known as the Memphis Mafia. The body guards were enthusiastic though not particularly deft players. Bledsoe once bet each $100 apiece he could win a game to 21 points using a plastic antifreeze bottle for a racquet. All seven reached deep into their wallets and several hours later Bledsoe emerged $700 richer.
“To be honest, Elvis wasn’t much of an athlete,” Bledsoe recalled. “He was very rigid. They just wanted to get him moving around, get him some exercise. He’d get in the court and bang the ball around. I’d try to teach him the rules or orchestrate a formal match, but he wasn’t much interested in that.
“He did like game, though,” he added, “and wound up building a $250,000 racquetball court in back of Graceland. The locker room had this circular shower, with gold shower heads.”
But Bledsoe’s own talent was evolving beyond Graceland and even the Memphis Mafia. In 1975 he moved to San Diego, which in those days was the center of the racquetball universe. He started off as a player rep for racquetball pros, scheduling their tournaments and plotting their itineraries. But when he began routinely beating those players he represented, Bledsoe became a full-time professional himself.
He shot to the top almost immediately. He would wind up winning 25 amateur tournaments and 12 pro-ams, the most lucrative of which paid $10,000 for first place. His absolute apex came in 1977 and 1978, when he won back-to-back world championships.
“I was a power player,” said Bledsoe, a wiry 6 feet 1 and 180 pounds in his prime. “But I combined this with efficient footwork. You want to move as little as possible. You have to anticipate, you need great peripheral vision to read your opponent’s body positioning. When you do have to move, it must be quick and explosive. With me, there really wasn’t anything I couldn’t get too.”
Some of the premier players in those days included the power hitting Marty Hogan, whose serve was once clocked at 144 mph and whom Bledsoe beat in a memorable 1977 match. Then there was Steve Serot, whom Bledsoe outlasted during a marathon 4 1/2-hour match in Memphis in 1978. There was also “The Ceiling King,” Bill Dunn – the ceiling players were racquetball’s equivalent to tennis’ baseline players -- who frequently gave Bledsoe fits. “I wanted to tell those ceiling guys, ‘Hey, play like a real man,’” he said.
The sport also featured singular characters and oddballs, of whom Keeley was likely Exhibit 1A. For reasons known only to Keeley, who probably deserves his own feature-length movie, he often competed in a tee shirt inexplicably displaying the number, C12 H22 011, the formula for sucrose. A compulsive cyclist, he once began a summer bicycle trip from Vancouver to South America. But 200 miles into the Baja he shut it down, telling a Sports Illustrated writer, “I was miserably hot and couldn’t stand listening to the Mexican music on my headphones anymore.”
“We had some characters and we had some good times,” Bledsoe said. “No question, most of us loved a cold beer now and then.”
The glory years, however, were fleeting. Just as affordable racquetball clubs popped up everywhere in the late 1970s, they seemed to just as quickly disappear in the mid-1980s. The reasons were varied, but primarily club owners figured they could make more money converting racquet clubs to physical fitness clubs, adding aerobics, exercise classes, dance classes and bodybuilding machines.
Bledsoe moved to Atlanta in 1981, initially to set up a racquetball academy at the Omni’s old Downtown Athletic Club. But as the professional game faded, he retired in 1984 and went into an entirely different direction.
In conversation Bledsoe conveys nearly the same pride for his second career as he does his first. In running his many summer camps, he’d developed a knack for managing capital and from 1983 to 1987, he headed up the major order department for Ivan Allen Furniture, doing "half the original furniture at the Carter Center,” he said. Then from 1987 until earlier this year, he was a program manager for AT&T and was part of a team that launched a satellite in 2000.
He continued playing as a top-ranked amateur until 2001 and when it became too painful playing on heel spurs, he finally laid the racquet to rest at age 50. If Bledsoe doesn’t quite have the same chiseled physique of 30 years ago, he still weighs about the same, playing golf and running distances, which he’s loved since he was teenager. He claims, mostly, he doesn’t miss racquetball.
“It’s funny, but I still get calls from people who want lessons,” he said. “I try to be polite, but I have to tell them no. I’ve been out of that business a long time.”
