St. Louis Washers Growing in Popularity
When I was younger, we had a couple of other neighborhood/bar games. The older kids either played bottle caps or cork ball. Most everyone is familiar with cork ball; it’s where you try to hit a smaller version of a baseball with a thinner bat, or mop stick. Bottle caps is pretty much the same, but you use the crown cap from a bottle of beer or soda instead of the ball. In our neighborhood, it was harder to come by the regulation cork balls, so most of the time we used a rubber ball. They were cheap, (about 50 cents), and usually disintegrated into a spongy chunk after a few days of play. The younger kids played what we called “wall ball.” Using the same rubber ball, the idea was to draw an imaginary line on a brick wall. Then you bounce the ball off of the wall as hard as you could throw it and the other player had to catch it on one bounce. The ball had to stay above the imaginary line. Simple, but you could also “go long” and try to bounce it over your opponent’s head. It was risky business doing that because if he caught it on the fly, he could go “up to the wall” and trickle it or bounce it way back over your head. There was a certain amount of deception and strategy involved.
Now it seems that washers has gone from the backyard to the big time. It’s not just for St. Louis anymore, and is spreading out across the country. There is even an International Association of Washer Players. Their Web site at www.washers.org gives detailed information on the game, official rules, and upcoming tournaments across the country. There is even a Washers for Wellness foundation that puts on charity washer tournaments for pulmonary fibrosis research.
ProWashers sells plastic washer kits at Wal-Mart and local grocery stores. Several sporting goods stores like Denny Dennis also carry them. If you want something a little more fancy to impress your friends, Missouri Washer Works makes wooden sets right here in Missouri. They say that they can’t make enough to keep up with the demand.
A number of bars in the St. Louis area like Novak’s on Manchester and The Royal down on South Kingshighway, host washer tournaments on a regular basis. Local Classic Rock station, Khits96 hosts an annual washers tournament where over 300 teams pitch washers to win prizes and raise money for the Special Olympics.
It’s a shame that we didn’t have washers in our neighborhood; it’s really a fun game to barbeque pork steaks and drink beer by, and much safer than lawn darts. Of course, all of the washers were kept in jars in Uncle Bob’s garage, and woe unto the kid, (or adult), who made off with them.