By any standards, Mark Margolies, who is now in his
late sixties, lived an uneventful life. He was modest and soft-spoken. Even
after he graduated from Brooklyn College, he lived with his parents until he
was 30, mainly staying in his room, working only sporadically, and reading
philosophy books. Then, on a weekend hiking trip, he met Gabrielle, the teacher
who was to become his wife. She helped him get a job as a lab assistant, which
he kept for the rest of his life. The two of them then proceeded to raise two
children.
Margolies, however, had one overriding passion. That
was handball. He loved any kind of handball – one-wall, four-wall, black ball,
pink ball – and its derivatives like paddleball and racquetball. Even when he
was a kid, once the exercises were over in gym class, he’d head to the handball
court.
Once I asked Mark, whom I met when I worked near his
co-op in Brooklyn Heights, whether he played any other games, like basketball
or softball. “Well, I learned to swim because I had to. Once I tried touch
football,” he said. “It was horrible!”
When I asked him how he got into handball, he said
his father, a working-class Jew from Brownsville, worked for the Post Office,
but his passion was boxing. “He was a boxer,” Margolies said, “and he trained
for boxing by playing handball. He would go to the Betsy Head handball courts
in Brownsville, and I’d go with him and watch.” At the same time, because Mark
was very shy and had no friends, he never got into sports like the other kids.
“You know the last time I went to a baseball game? The last year the Dodgers were in Brooklyn—1957,” he said. “My brother took me. I sort of enjoyed it, but I never had any real desire to go again.”
Soon afterward, his family moved to the Sheepshead
Bay section of Brooklyn. From there, it was an easy walk to the Brighton Beach
handball courts, the mecca of New York City handball. Everyone, he said, played
there—kids like him, guys in their seventies, A-level tournament players, beginners.
Sometimes he’d half to wait a half an hour to get on a court, but he didn’t
care. He was hooked.
“When I was playing handball,” he said, “it was like
I was taken to another dimension. There was such high energy, I was in such a
state of ecstasy, that it was like I was removed from the world. Many of the
courts had night lights, so sometimes it would be midnight and I didn’t even
know it. My parents had to come down and get me. I’d play singles, doubles,
sometimes two against one – it didn’t matter, as long as it was handball.”
As time went on, playing on the neighborhood courts
got a little boring for him. So he’d get on the trains and go to different
neighborhoods all over the city. Even after he got married and moved away from
Sheepshead Bay, he continued to go to the courts in Brighton Beach, where the
best, most competitive handball players held forth. He went to neighborhoods
that most of his peers considered dangerous, like Bushwick or Central Harlem. “Are
you kidding?” he’d answer, after someone feared for his safety. “The guys there
are some of the best players. They put their all, every part of their body,
into it!”
He stopped playing for a few years after he had
kids, but when the children got a little older, he went on his handball trips every
Saturday and Sunday, while Gabrielle stayed home and pursued his own interests.
Once, I asked whether he went to all five boroughs.
“Well, I went all over Brooklyn and all over
Manhattan, up to about 168th Street. I never went to the Bronx – it
was too far. I didn’t like Queens, didn’t play there except when I worked in a
school there. I’d play on my lunch hour, in the schoolyard. The other teachers
loved to play me, the custodians loved to play me, even the kids played me.
They thought I was over the hill, but when I started to play, they couldn’t
believe it!”
Hearing this story, I asked whether he was an
“A-level” player. “Definitely not—I was a B-level player. But who cares!” he
answered. “Besides, A-level players in handball don’t get that much recognition
anyway—it’s just that they get into the record books.”
When Mark was
about 45, his wrists were beginning to go, so he switched to racquetball – “not
paddleball,” he’d say, “the wooden paddle was too heavy for me.” He joined a
local gym, and had almost as much fun on their indoor racquetball courts –
well, almost as much – as he had when he played handball. When his legs and his
back started to go, he switched to ping-pong, but soon, he wasn’t even able to
do that.
I saw Mark recently, just sitting at a counter at a
local diner near his home and staring straight ahead. His hair was white, his
beard was gray and matted, and he had a cane at his side. If you didn’t know
him, you could easily mistake him for a street person.
“Been playing any ball lately?” I asked politely,
thinking that the answer was no.
“No. My doctor forbids it—you know, my back,” he
mumbled.
“Do you go to the handball courts at Brighton Beach
to watch?” I asked, trying to salvage something good for him.
“Yeah,” he said, sighing. “But that’s all I can do.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” I sympathized.
“I’m not sad,” he said. “Handball gave me more than
50 years of fun. I’m can’t complain!”
