After three weeks of playing shuffleboard, 10-year-old C.J. Reede has decided that it’s better than most sports except basketball. He learned everything he knows about the sport from Mary Eldridge, a gray-haired athlete who refuses to divulge her age.
Eldridge is president of the St. Petersburg Shuffleboard Club and has been an active member since 1965. She's made it her mission to save the dying sport stuck with the senior citizen stigma. She teaches kids from the Ballet Society every Thursday morning and other beginners.
“You gotta put some juice in it,” she says, demonstrating the proper way to push a disc forward.
The sport is similar to pool. A cue is used to push the object to the other side of the court, targeting certain spots to get points. And a player can beat an opponent by hitting the opponent’s disk to another spot.
Her instructions for a successful stroke: hold the cue with your arm straight down, position the cue at the disc, take two steps forward, push and follow through with a smooth upward-arm motion.
Eldridge has just finished loading several lanes with cues, discs and chalk for a group of kids coming from Tampa to play shuffleboard. Eldridge strides through each lane, spreading across the courts micro-glass beads that enable the discs to slide. She’s careful not to spread too many beads. Beginning shuffleboard players shouldn’t have slippery lanes because it’s harder to control the destination of the discs, she says.
“Shuffleboard is about self-control,” Eldridge says.
During the club’s peak several decades ago, it was the world’s largest shuffleboard club. From the 1930s through the 1960s, this historic site of 110 courts catered to more than 5,000 members annually. Players would have to wait to get a court. They were limited to three games per group. At tournaments, the grandstand would be filled to standing-room-only capacity.
But today, the cracked paint of the mint green walls and clusters of shrubbery peeking out between the lanes make for a desolate environment. From the top of the stands, the neat rows of unused shuffleboard courts seem endless. Membership is down to about 110 people, but even that is deceiving. A group of eight regulars come most days. On Saturdays, about 30 people come to play shuffleboard.
But there is something magical about this complex frozen in time. It was designed from a combination of styles, Mediterranean revival, art modern and missionary revival.
The grandstand alone is a relic. The wooden seats are spotted with rust stains on the cracked beige paint. Styled like theater seats, the bottoms flip up, but not automatically.
‘NICKEL GAMES’
Ralph Clark, 89, and Frank Howard, 88, are among the regulars. They play shuffleboard every morning except for Sunday, which is reserved for church. Like many retired seniors in Florida, these people came from different parts of the country and have only been playing as a group for four years. Their ritual: “nickel games,” three games a day from 10 to 11:30 a.m., alternate days for singles and doubles. Losers of each game hand over a nickel to the winners. It’s what Ralph calls “big finance.”
“It makes it a little more interesting,” said Clark, who considers himself a competitive player. “We play just as hard for the nickel as in a tournament where we play for $50. We try to win.”
NEW KIDS IN TOWN
When kids come to play shuffleboard, Eldridge separates the old and the young into different areas. The retirees complain about the kids making noise and running around the courts, ruining their concentration.
Eldridge began opening the club to kids three years ago, when a teacher inquired about bringing kids in from a summer program.
Last month, kids from the Ballet Society, located in the same complex as the shuffleboard courts, began playing the game every Thursday morning. Artistic director Sean Musselman said he had been thinking of a new activity for the kids this summer. It turns out, shuffleboard was right under his nose.
“(The kids) have really, really taken to it,” he said.
Ten-year-old Naquan Reese also likes it better than the sports he plays at school, but he still likes football and basketball better because he’s more accustomed to them.
But for a generation raised on TV, video games and basketball star idolatry, developing an appreciation for a dying sport attached with the stigma of retirees may pose a challenge.
Seniors may be annoyed by all the disruption kids cause, but they believe there is enough room for both old and young.
“Downright, it’s a good idea,” Howard said. “I wish we could get more people.”
Scott Hartzell, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times and author of St. Petersburg: An Oral History, agrees that appealing to youth is the only way for the dying sport to survive.
“Getting that younger generation involved is salvation,” he said. But “if you close your eyes and envision people playing (shuffleboard), you don’t think of young people and teens…It’s a faster-paced generation.”
To keep up with the pace, Eldridge uses the Internet to appeal to youth. A self-taught web designer for the club, Eldridge posted the club’s website last summer. This summer, her goal is to create a website that teaches people how to play the game. She plans on using images from her digital camera and is looking to hire a graphic designer. “Somebody young and innovative so that we can get a nice hip look for the website.”
DEMAND AND DECLINE
Organized in 1924, the St. Petersburg Shuffleboard Club was once the heart of social activity in the city, not just for retirees. People in their 40s and 50s played in the expert division, Eldridge said. Besides shuffleboard, the club offered card parties, movies, music and more. The pastel ’50s-style sign in front boasts dancing, bingo and a poolroom.
American shuffleboard as we know it was developed in St. Petersburg in 1928 when Pierce V. Gahan submitted a constitution and bylaws that standardized shuffleboard rules throughout the country, according to Hartzell’s book.
The city’s first public relations director, John Lodwick, promoted local tournaments in northern newspapers, which boosted tourism, especially in the 1920s economic boom period, Hartzell said. Through the 1930s and 1940s, the place expanded and reached its peak of 110 courts.
“It was the other world,” said Eldridge. “In the old days, we had more members than capacity. Now we have more capacity than members.”
The Tyrone Gardens Shopping Center, built in 1949, and Central Plaza, built in 1952, contributed to the decline of shuffleboard, Hartzell said. Air-conditioned indoor shopping centers became very popular.
Then television entered the picture, Hartzell said. “People were finding different things to occupy their time.”
Downtown development has affected the shuffleboard club in other ways. During tournaments, the losers would usually stay and watch the rest of the games. Now, Eldridge said, they leave once they’re finished playing.
“Because of traffic, nobody wants to stay,” Eldridge said. “So they all skedaddle to avoid traffic.”
FUTURE FANS
But Eldridge doesn’t want to dwell on the past. She said she doesn’t want to be a part of what she calls, “the woulda, shoulda, coulda club.” Now she’s focused on promoting the sport to young people by teaching beginners’ classes and working on multiple side projects for the website.
Although her primary goal for the summer is to put up an instructional website, she’s already planning several computer projects to promote the game among the general public.
One project is an interactive CD-ROM that teaches shuffleboard strategy, which she plans to market to other clubs in the area. Eldridge is learning software programs such as Java and Paintshop Pro 7. Another project, which she said would be just for fun, is a blog titled, “The season in the life of an expert player.”
If all of these projects ever get accomplished, Eldridge says she would be “tickled.”
