Boys and their Balls - Part 24

Handball

Handball refers to two different ball games.  European or Olympic handball is a team sport similar to soccer, except in handball the ball is held and thrown with the hands, whereas in soccer the ball can be kicked or touched with anything except the hands.

Above is the French national handball team in 1993.

This is a video of some amateur handball players horsing around in the locker room after a game.  Why are they sliding on the wet floor?  Just for fun, I guess.

These are Dutch handball players Sonni de Jonge and Toby Trouw.

The Dieux du Stade calendar of naked French rugby players expanded to include athletes from other sports.  This is handball player Nikola Karabatic in the 2009 calendar.

Nikola's brother Luka also plays handball.  Here are the two brothers in the 2015 calendar.

And here's Luka in the 2018 calendar.

In 2016, Argentine handball player Federico Pizarro posed for ESPN's Body Issue.

Russian-Greek handball player Konstantin Igropulo celebrating with the EHF Cup, which his team has won.

This guy was unidentified except that he was a handball player, but I couldn't leave him out.  Maybe you can guess why,

American handball is an entirely different game.  Basically, it's like squash, played in a court with solid walls, except instead of hitting the ball with a racquet, the players throw and catch the ball with their hands.  The object is still to throw the ball against the wall in such a way that the other player can't return it.

Pictures of nude American handball players are almost impossible to find.  But I did find the curious home movie above, showing two guys playing handball wearing nothing but jockstraps.  Other sections of the movie (not shown) were more typical home movie fare: men and women on a porch and in a backyard.  From the women's clothing and one shot of a car, it looks like it dates from the 1930s.  Then, astonishingly, it switches back to the guys playing handball in jockstraps.  The jockstrap sections ran about 6 minutes long; I trimmed it to half a minute, which is enough for you to get the idea.