By Michael Kaufman

(Note:  I was honored to be invited to read this tribute to my  father, originally published in the Summer 2010 issue of Jewish Currents, at the Second Annual Community of Jewish Writers event on Wednesday, May 11, in Schenectady.)

My father’s game was handball, basic. Not the three- or four-wall kind they have at the fancy gyms. Jack Kaufman played his handball outside on a cement court with a single wall. That was the gritty game he played as a kid in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and that’s how he still played when our family moved to the suburbs of Nassau County, and later, after he retired and moved with my mother to Miami Beach. For years she begged him to stop for fear he would drop dead of a heart attack in the middle of a game, but he never listened.

Had it not been for the Parkinson’s, he probably would have continued  playing into his eighties like his hero, Vic Hershkowitz.

The name Hershkowitz was as well known in our house as those of other great athletes my father admired: Sugar Ray Robinson (“pound-for-pound the greatest fighter of all time”), Joe Louis (“His best punch was his jab”), and Jackie Robinson (“I want you to remember this,” pointing to Robinson the first time he took me to Ebbets Field to see the Dodgers play. “This man is very special”).

And there was Hershkowitz. When he died in 2008, the United States Handball Association called him “the greatest all-around player in handball history.” From the early 1940s to the early 1960s, Hershkowitz won twenty-three national amateur handball titles. In his later years he won twelve Masters events. He was stocky and strong like my father, around 5’ 8” and 180 pounds. And like my father, he began playing handball in Brooklyn during the Depression.

“We couldn’t afford the other sports,” Hershkowitz told an interviewer. “It kept us off the streets.” My father said that too.

Once, when we were living in Oceanside, my father took my older brother Gene and me to the handball courts behind the high school and challenged us to a game. He was in his late forties then and my mother had already begun pleading with him to stop playing. Gene and I were decent enough players ourselves and we thought we’d have an unfair advantage playing him two-against-one. But he insisted and before long it was clear we were in over our heads.

He had us running all over the court chasing his bullet-like shots as he positioned himself perfectly to return our feeble responses. I don’t think we managed to score a single point. We were out of breath at the end while he had barely broken a sweat.

A scene like this can be ugly in a family . . . a father showing off his prowess and humiliating his sons. But Gene and  I loved every second of it, laughing as we staggered around the court in futile pursuit.

He was our Hershkowitz.

Michael can be reached at michael@zestoforange.com.