Racquetball

During the late 1960s at Beale Air Force Base, I started playing racquetball during lunch hour. It was a fairly new sport, and most of the people on the two courts were playing handball which I did not have the talent nor the calloused hand to enable me to participate. In the early days of racquetball it was wood rockets looking like small tennis rackets with short handles. It was one way to keep in shape and as I got better and more people became interested in the sport it slowly gained an audience that would play during lunch hour. As the sport progressed the wood rackets are replaced by composite or metal, and I became a source for supplying rackets to people who were interested in taking up the sport. I would buy the rackets and distribute them a cost to those interested in playing. Several SR71 crew members took up the sport. I remember Butch Sheffield, Duane Vick and Jack Veth buying rockets through me and playing. They held a tournament at that time and I won the tournament but was excluded the next year because I was not in the military; however I continued to play at every opportunity and and took my racquetball bad with me during trips.
Frequent trips supporting the SR71 operation, enabled me to play in at Kadena AFB  Okinawa, Mildenhall AFB England, Offutt AFB NE, Eglin AFB FL, Baltimore MD and Smithtown NY, wherever there are a challenge court available. Racquetball became my go to exercise routine wherever and as often as I could. I would enter tournaments whenever I could and was skillful enough to place in the top three of seniors bracket. It was a lot easier than dragging a golf bag in clubs on and off airplanes.
Once Janis and I got to Okinawa, Jan spent most of her time taking pictures, developing pictures and framing pictures in the MWR facilities and SCUBA diving with me often. As for me it was playing racquetball, ELINT data processing and analysis at work and scuba diving with Jan. I entered every racquetball contest held on Okinawa and won most. Many of the courts on the Army and Marine bases were very limited in spectator access and sometimes not well air conditioned to reduce the moisture on the walls, which severely changed the trajectory of the racquetball during games.
However on Kadina there was a new Risner Sports Complex that had two exhibition courts with glass back walls and many other courts. Tournaments were held and ‘challenge court’ was available during lunch and after work hours. in 1987 they held a Island wide tournament at Risner Sports Complex; I entered all three divisions , the open, seniors and the doubles. my doubles partner was a SR71 ELINT analysis sergeant, Al Martinez, that worked with me. Brian Shul an SR 71 pilot also entered the open and senior divisions. I beat Brian in the open, Brian beat me in the seniors and Al and I won the doubles. The SR71 Det1 had captured the tournament. Janis, my wife, took many black and white pictures and developed them at the MWR facility.
Brian and I played quite a few games and on one occasion a nurse that was watching asked Brian if he was the same person she had studied about at  Brooks Burn Center in San Antonio; it seems his recovery from a aircraft crash in Vietnam, prior to being an SR71 pilot and his recovery from major burns was the focus of several classes people took to become nurses. On another occasion Brian came to my apartment with some pictures he had taken while piloting the SR71 at altitude and asked why are some images that were reflections in his helmet shield we’re blurry and the helmet was and focus. Jan, being the family photographic expert, told Brian the images were in the far field not the near field, as was the helmet, and to close down the aperture and focus on the images not the helmet and both would be in focus. Brian was in pretty good shape and tried to run every day and told me that at Beale he had run the Feather Falls scenic trail in California, turned his ankle pretty bad and flew the next day. Pain didn’t seem to be a deterrent to hm.