The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • Page 662

BrtTSniiiiiiimMm mt- -wr? 't-p-rftr -t Baps' Slitf It had been raining steadily in the City of the Angels, and on the offwhite cement walls of the handball courts in the old Hollywood YMCA you could feel a slight accumulation of moisture. Simon (Stuffy) Singer. 27, world and U.S. singles handball champion, took a good long look around court No. 1, the dryest of the three, before beginning his afternoon game with a longtime friend, Dr.

Leonard Rosen. Stuffy is 5-feet-8. 1 65 and wears his dark hair combed straight back. His face is youthful that is to say bartenders, on those very rare occasions when Stuffy enters their establishments, immediately ask to sec his driver's license. Lenny.

Rosen had learned handball with Stuffy over the last eight years at the Hollywood where the toughest handball on the West Coast is played. They had come up through lower-level competition together, attained ratings together, but then Stuffy kept getting better and better, while Lenny merely stayed very good. Watching Lenny lose the first two games to Stuffy 21-6, 21-9, 1 realized the difference between one of the four or five best players in the area and a challenger for the world championship. Lenny was sweating hard. Stuffy merely looked a bit warm.

Stuffy took it easy. He didn't ram in killshots two inches above the floor. He kept the ball in play as long as he could before slamming it into a corner of the court where Lenny couldn't reach it. Lenny had to run faster, harder, and seemed to cover twice as much court as Stuffy, who seemed to know exactly where the ball was coming. Across the champion's face lurked an amused, uncompassionate smile.

Lenny took it well, except for once when Stuffy suckered him into lunging for the ball that went, as if by magic, behind him. The anger was just a flicker, and Lenny quickly stifled it. His face rcassumcd its even-natured smile and he yelled over to the few spectators watching: "I'm playing the best I've ever played and he's toying with me!" The third game became even more of a massacre because Lenny was tired, and finally, with the score 16-2, Stuffy declared the court too moist to continue. The match was over with smiles all around. All his life.

Stuffy Singer has known he's a great athlete. At Bancroft Junior High, standing 4 foot 10 barefoot, he was voted the outstanding athlete. At Fairfax High, he quarterbacked the varsity eleven and played second base well enough to be offered a contract by the Dodgers. He won the national table tennis title, junior division. At 15, he signed up for tennis lessons at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, ten for $30.

He took the first seven in one week and won the city junior tennis championship. He never took the remaining three. In 1966 doctors told him to stay off the handball courts, so he took up golf for three months and played consistently in the low 80s. His prime asset is speed. "I'm exceptionally quick," he explains.

"I could always beat all the sprinters in high school or college for a ten-yard sprint. From there on, it was like I was running backwards it was ridiculous. But that initial step and the signal that comes from the mind to the body seems to be exceptionally fast." From his first game of handball, in November of I960, Stuffy knew he had found his game. "This was it." he says. "To show you how cocky I was at the time, after I'd played handball for two weeks, I set up a program for myself.

At the end of two years I was gonna win the Southern California singles championship. In the middle of the third year I'd get to the semifinals of the nationals, and in the fourth year I might win. But then again I might not have won, I figured, because of Jim Jacobs (Stuffy's handball mentor and idol) being in the tournament. The fifth year would be the same thing. The sixth year I would win." After Stuffy had been playing handball for six months, he had a match with the then-champion, Jacobs, who was a resident of Los Angeles.

When the game was over, Jacobs told the awed beginner that whenever he wanted to play handball, he should give Jacobs a call. The offer was not made because Jacobs was overly impressed by Stuffy's ability, but because Jacobs likes to encourage younger players. After the game, Stuffy took his dad aside and asked him, "Do you think he knows that I'm the one who's going to take over his title some day? Does he know I'm the one?" As Stuffy quickly mastered the game, he became known for his blistering temper. "People used to think I was crazy. But 1 wasn't getting mad at someone else.

I was always getting mad at me. kicking the wall, slugging, punching the wall, swearing, screaming, busted a knuckle." At the nationals last year one of Stuffy's opponents told him. "You know, I've never seen anybody who was demanding as much from himself as early as you were." Stuffy began to win matches and tournaments. His career followed exactly the plan he made for himself the second week he ever played the game. He was right about Jimmy Jacobs, who twice eliminated him from national championship tournaments in the semifinals.

Then, in 1966, the year Stuffy promised himself he would win the national singles championship regardless of Jacobs, he slipped on a damp court and injured his knee. Doctors told him they could not locate the trouble, so Stuffy continued to play, though with great pain. His game suffered, and many players gossiped that Stuffy was dogging it. To make matters worse, Jacobs quit singles competition that year, at the age of 36. Paul Haber, a handball nomad whom Stuffy does not admire, took over the national singles title.

While he was injured, Stuffy seemed to mellow. He quit driving himself, knowing his personal timetable was irrevocably upset. Jimmy Jacobs and a circle of local players remained loyal, as did some handball tournament promoters. But other tournament promoters told him he could start paying for his own plane tickets to their tournaments. That hurt.

In early 1967, Stuffy stepped on another damp spot and slipped again. This time he heard a popping sound in his knee which continued.