Back to the Future with Spaceball
When Don Botsford closed his Ann Arbor Gymkana in 1986, he put his spaceball court into storage, quietly ending an obscure and glorious chapter in Ann Arbor’s sports history.
Two Chronicle volunteers try their hand at spaceball. Don Botsford is in the foreground. (Photo by the writer.)
Or so we thought.
Last February Botsford, now 80, installed the court in his new gym, a 2,000-square-foot pole structure on his 20-acre nature preserve on the outskirts of town. It’s one of the few places in the world where people can still play spaceball – a game once dominated by players from Ann Arbor – and probably one of the few places in the world where anyone knows what it is.
“It’s a fun, silly game; it’s good exercise, and if you could get more people to play it they would get addicted,” said Washtenaw County prosecutor Brian Mackie, whose competitive spaceball career in the 1960s took him to distant shores (Cleveland) along with Botsford and two other players from Ann Arbor. [Full Story]