Pushball: The Giant Ball Sport That Vanished

Some sports need time to find their footing. Others arrive with a bang, enjoy a brief moment in the spotlight, and then vanish almost as quickly as they appeared. Today’s pickleball could very well be yesterday’s pushball, a bizarre sport that once captivated crowds across North America and Europe before fading into history.

Pushball was one of those ideas that probably sounded brilliant on paper. Invented in 1894 by Moses G. Crane in Massachusetts, the sport featured an elephant-sized leather ball measuring more than six feet in diameter and weighing around 70 pounds. Backed heavily by sporting goods giant A.G. Spalding & Bros., pushball was promoted as a simpler and supposedly safer alternative to football.

Crane’s inspiration came from a common frustration. Watching football games, he could never see the ball amid the pileups of players. His solution was not to make the ball easier to spot. It was to make it impossible to miss.

The centerpiece of the sport was a giant sphere built around a custom rubber bladder and covered in thick horsehide leather. Two teams of 11 players battled to push, roll, shove, or somehow launch the oversized ball toward their opponent’s goalposts. A ball pushed under the crossbar earned five points. If a team somehow managed to get it over the crossbar, they scored eight.

What followed was absolute mayhem.

Because the ball was so massive, players on opposite sides often couldn’t see one another. Giant scrums developed around the ball as athletes pushed, tackled, lifted, and occasionally climbed on top of it in hopes of gaining an advantage. Imagine rugby, football, and a demolition derby all rolled into one oversized leather package.

During the early 1900s, pushball became a genuine phenomenon. Universities such as Harvard, Yale, and Miami University embraced the sport, often turning it into annual freshman-versus-sophomore battles that attracted large crowds. For a brief period, it seemed as if every campus wanted a giant ball of its own.

The problem was that once the novelty wore off, the game itself was not particularly exciting. Aside from the spectacle of dozens of people wrestling with a giant leather sphere, the gameplay could become repetitive. Participants often found themselves endlessly pushing the ball back and forth, feeling less like athletes and more like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill.

Then there was the injury problem.

Pushball was marketed as safer than football, but reality had other plans. Concussions, broken bones, severe sprains, and knocked-out teeth became common occurrences. Players could be crushed beneath human pileups or simply flattened by the giant ball itself. The injury toll became so notorious that organizations eventually began distancing themselves from the sport. The U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division famously removed pushball from its annual All-American Week sporting events because too many soldiers were getting hurt.

Despite the risks, pushball’s popularity spread far beyond college campuses. In 1906, the New York Giants baseball team adopted it as part of spring training, replacing traditional conditioning drills with giant-ball chaos. Military units in both the United States and Britain adapted the sport for horseback play, turning it into a training exercise for cavalry riders. On Wall Street, stockbrokers reportedly cleared the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during Christmas celebrations to play spirited matches, often naming the giant ball after whichever stock was causing the most headaches that year.

Watching old photos of pushball today, I cannot help but think of the giant white balloon known as Rover from The Prisoner. Patrick McGoohan’s surreal television series used the balloon as both a literal and symbolic instrument of control. Looking at pushball’s giant leather sphere rolling toward a crowd of unsuspecting players, the comparison feels strangely appropriate. One looks like a sporting device. The other looks like an existential threat. Sometimes it is hard to tell which is which.

The sport even evolved in unusual directions. During the 1920s, the British military experimented with “Auto Pushball,” where teams driving automobiles attempted to maneuver the giant ball across a goal line. In 1933, the British Pathé short film Pushball Pippins showed French women gleefully tackling and pushing a giant 50-pound version of the ball around a field. The spectacle remained entertaining, even if the sport itself was fading.

Cost also played a significant role in its demise. The very first leather-covered pushball commissioned in 1894 reportedly cost $175, a staggering amount at the time. Adjusted for inflation, that translates to somewhere between $4,500 and $6,700 today. No pushball moms were lining up to buy equipment for the kids. No local leagues order replacement balls every season. No push, no pushball.

As football evolved with better rules, improved safety measures, and a more engaging style of play, pushball slowly slipped into obscurity. The giant leather balls were expensive, difficult to transport, vulnerable to weather damage, and increasingly viewed as dangerous relics from another era.

Still, the sport was not entirely forgotten. Its DNA survives in cage ball and Earth ball games that generations of schoolchildren have encountered in gym classes. So the next time someone tells you pickleball is an odd sport, remember that a century ago, people were willingly throwing themselves at a 70-pound leather ball the size of a small car and calling it recreation.

Compared to pushball, pickleball looks downright sensible.