It's not boxing

July 11, 2011 10:13 PM

Fives is a handball sport of British origin. One of the major types, Eton fives, is played in an area which is a replica of one of the bays of Eton College Chapel. Eton fives is exclusively a doubles game, but other versions, such as Rugby fives, can be played as singles. Eton fives is commonly played by public school boys in Britain, but is very popular with ordinary people in Nigeria.
posted by winna (25 comments total)

We invented a game in college as well. Required a tape ball, a racquetball racquet, and a long hallway with door jams and frames to stop poorly bowled balls, as well as a specific "batting area", created by the jutting out of the walls in a space in front of the elevator. Looking at that "Eton fives" link, is appears others have done similar things.

My game was more interesting too it appears...
posted by Windopaene at 10:35 PM on July 11, 2011

We played handball at school, and had a fairly large court - about the size of a tennis court, with walls on three sides. We basically played foursquare in it, except that the ball had to hit a wall before bouncing in somebody else's square.
posted by robcorr at 12:07 AM on July 12, 2011

I played rugby fives at school a few times, but the regulars kept palming me off with the broken glove, which means you either play like shit or end up with a bruised hand. It's all good fun till somebody breaks a metcarpal, I suppose.
posted by Segundus at 12:56 AM on July 12, 2011

Huh? From the pictures it looks nothing like handball.
posted by salmacis at 1:09 AM on July 12, 2011

Unbelievable. To build a standard court, you construct an exact replica of a section of the wall at Eton College chapel.

"three walls, with the left hand wall interrupted by a buttress approximately halfway up the court. There are also two levels to the court, the front being around six inches higher than the back half of the playing area."


My game was more interesting too it appears...

Mine: three person scooter dodgeball. Two throwers, one on each side of a basketball court. The third player rides around between them on a scooter. Whoever hits the rider scores a point and gets to replace him. Serve goes to the player who has least recently ridden. International rules require an uneven asphalt playing surface, cracked and partially covered in ice.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 1:52 AM on July 12, 2011

I played Rugby Fives at school, and have the wonky fingers to prove it.

At my school, it was the sport of choice of the potheads and wasters - the courts were in an obscure corner of the school grounds, and no teacher could be arsed supervising such a niche sport. Amusingly, we all got seriously hooked on the game and ended up playing for hours longer than was required (it just occurred to me that the teachers probably knew this would happen, and turned a blind eye to the fags and joints knowing we'd end up getting a ridiculous amount of excercise).

It's a beautifully evil sport, too. The bizarre layout of the court allows for hideously cruel manoeuvres - I used to be able to reliably get the ball to clip the lip of the back step and skim along millimetres above the ground: to return that effectively required your opponent to break their fingers on the floor. Which they would do, and it's much easier to beat someone with a broken finger. It's the only game I know of where, if your opponent cheats, you can acknowledge it and play on, by shouting 'blackguard!' - the key was to delay your shout to the last possible moment (the arcane scoring procedure means it's sometimes better to play the foul than punish your opponent for it).
posted by jack_mo at 3:41 AM on July 12, 2011 [2 favorites]

Oh, and a name drop: John Barnes used to watch us play while waiting to pick up his son, and once complemented a friend and me on a game well played. The high point of my unsporting career.

I always wanted to pay for a discreet commemorative plaque immortalising the moment, but the school demolished the courts at around the same time they started admitting girls. Imagine! Girls and no fives! Life must be hell for the poor boys who go there now ;-)
posted by jack_mo at 3:56 AM on July 12, 2011

Thanks, jack_mo, you brought back fond memories of lunchtime at a grammar school in the West Midlands. One aside, in the late '60s, fives was the gateway drug for sixth formers who went on to embrace life as potheads and wasters ;)
posted by Mister Bijou at 4:17 AM on July 12, 2011

Thanks, jack_mo, you brought back fond memories of lunchtime at a grammar school in the West Midlands.

Fives is so niche that I'm going to guess that school was King Edward VI Camp Hill. (If so, my fives gloves played on those courts, on the hands of their previous owners.)

One aside, in the late '60s, fives was the gateway drug for sixth formers who went on to embrace life as potheads and wasters ;)

Heh, it really is the sport for the non-sporty.
posted by jack_mo at 4:41 AM on July 12, 2011

King Edward VI School Five Ways.

the sport for the non-sporty

Oh, yes, indeed.
posted by Mister Bijou at 4:50 AM on July 12, 2011

Brings back memories of broken nails and squashed fingers. Sometimes we played with a hard squash ball - no glove.
posted by adamvasco at 4:56 AM on July 12, 2011

We played fives every day too -- can't even remember the rules now but it was sweaty fun in the summer and of course the fives court was in a forgotten corner of the playing field so all sorts of stuff happened behind it -- mostly smoking, but I certainly experimented with amateur pyrotechnics back there. It was definitely a sport for nerds and misfits. This was Aylesbury Grammar School around 1980-82.
posted by unSane at 5:06 AM on July 12, 2011

I used to walk past the fives courts at Eton, and I always wondered why they were such a bizarre shape. Thanks for clearing up that mystery.
posted by Frasermoo at 6:14 AM on July 12, 2011

King Edward VI School Five Ways.

Ooh, close! Sort of.

Here's a picture of my fives gloves, and a couple of balls.
posted by jack_mo at 6:26 AM on July 12, 2011

Wah! Ultimate Nostalgia. Thanks!
posted by Mister Bijou at 6:35 AM on July 12, 2011

It was definitely a sport for nerds and misfits.
For what it's worth, Roald Dahl was the captain of the fives team at Repton School.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 6:42 AM on July 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

There's a tiny cul-de-sac off a road near me called Fives Court, which has always confused me because Eton is nowhere near SE1. But it's not just Eton, then. At least it's possible that it's a real fives court, though why the honest working classes who lived in those terraced houses would be playing fives is a further mystery.

(Extra trivia - the junction of the end of that road - Hayles Street - and Brook Drive is the location where much of this video was filmed.)
posted by Grangousier at 6:45 AM on July 12, 2011

My game was more interesting too it appears...

Mine: Downhill Bowling. Winter sport. Needed one bowling ball, a few pop cans, a snowcovered hill with a ditch at the bottom, and an adjacent parking lot. Set up the cans in the parking lot in regular bowling formation, walk the bowling ball up to the top of the hill, bowl the ball downhill as hard as you can, and using the ditch as a jumping ramp, launch the bowling ball into the air into the parking lot to either knock down or (preferably) crush the pop cans.

Scoring was somewhat informal, based on how many cans could be destroyed, how far the ball could go, or just creating a majestic trajectory of an airborne bowling ball sailing past the other contestants. Good cardio, too, walking the bowling ball back up the hill again and again.
posted by Capt. Renault at 6:59 AM on July 12, 2011

I looked up fives because for some reason I find reading public school stories soothing. There's always passing references to fives courts, but I couldn't ever get an understanding of what the heck the game was from context. While all the public school stories go into exhaustive detail about cricket, none of the ones I've ever read talk in detail about fives.

The fact that you all are calling it a 'sport for the non-sporty' puts it in context for me - the stories are aspirational, and fives was not an aspirational sport.

It's interesting to me that it was difficult to reconstruct the social significance of the game from within the context of the books - it's assumed the reader knows.
posted by winna at 7:35 AM on July 12, 2011 [1 favorite]

Excellent post. Sadly, Fives is not the game for me. I have the reaction times of a sloth on Xanax.

Still, it looks fun. I like minimal-equipment sports, especially those involving buttresses.
posted by everichon at 8:16 AM on July 12, 2011

I came here to say what Multicellular Exothermic said above about Roald Dahl. Reading about that in his autobiography as a kid, I couldn't understand quite how strange a game it really is. Thanks for the videos.
posted by hydropsyche at 8:44 AM on July 12, 2011

Thanks to many readings of Tom Brown's Schooldays as a kid (and occasional rereading as an adult), I was aware of fives, but never quite knew what it was. I knew that it was kind of like handball, and yet not. I had no idea that the court was so small and convoluted. Great post - thanks!
posted by rtha at 9:34 AM on July 12, 2011

In a particularly complicated falling manoeuvre, I broke two wrists simultaneously playing fives in New Zealand, and had both forearms in plaster for a while. This made me an even better fives player.
posted by Sparx at 1:28 PM on July 12, 2011

I find it charming that in addition to Eton Fives, Eton College has kept two home-grown games that are only played there, the simply named wall game and field game. Like Eton Fives, the wall game appears to require a peculiar piece of college geography as a playing field.
posted by grouse at 11:22 PM on July 12, 2011

Metafilter: definitely a sport for nerds and misfits
I'll stop now.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 8:49 PM on July 29, 2011