“Grab the shovels” is a term that, when read, we almost always hear in the voice of a fed-up parent. A parent fed up with you, fed up with the beach, fed up with his life. “Grab the shovels” is almost the last thing left to that father or mother before committing a crime. It’s a faucet, an escape point to the torture of a summer vacation that a whole family has poured into. At what point did it all seem like a good idea? Paying like a millionaire to be like a convict in the sun, in the middle of not-so-stylish crowds, with the pores of the skin blocked with sand and salt, salt and sand. Summer radioactivity that devours and destroys books you never read, bottomless wicker baskets, soft sandwiches, dazzling mobiles, towels and swimsuits of a thousand colors, some waving in the wind and others in the display of liberated buttocks.
“Grab the shovels” is a call to return to order. A voice of someone sane who, in the midst of chaos, decides that the time for meaningless nonsense is over. To see two individuals playing paddles by the sea is a parenthesis of civilization in the midst of barbarism. A necessary reminder that culture exists, has rules and a certain sense of proportion and transcendence. To see two individuals playing paddles by the sea is to be Bob Dylan at the heart of We are the world, it is to immediately stop Rubiales, it is to teach reading and writing to those who do not know.
The origin of the aforementioned summer sport known as Joc de Pales is not clear. There is a castist and leftist version and another, the opposite. Probably, the true one is the last one. Both take place on the beaches of Santander. The first is the one defended by Mariano Pérez, which indicates that the aforementioned game began in 1928 on Magdalena beach, near the Tennis Club. A group of boys took advantage of the balls that were thrown and lost from the said Club and dedicated themselves to playing with them. First with rope rackets and on wet sand with boot and then with wooden rackets, on dry sand and without boot. This version has the advantage of starting the sport in a patriotic and working class way.
The other version places everything in a trip that Gustavo Gallardo, a millionaire from Granada who summered in Santander, made with his friend José María Avendaño, in a Rolls Royce to Biarritz (France). It was the late thirties. The two friends watched as French boys and girls played with a red sponge ball that they hit with wooden rackets. When they returned to Spain, they ordered similar rackets from a cabinet maker and it all started with a tournament at a Club called Caracola.
Be that as it may, “Grab the shovels” and carry it out constituted a popular and successful sport from the first moment. The purists call it “Cantabrian shovels”, but there is no known beach on the Spanish coast, in the last seventy years, that someone has said to another “Take the Cantabrian shovels” without receiving in return a reason for mental concern.
Why it is decided that the game in the basic mode – chubby father and unbearable son or daughter – takes place at the seaside also gathers different theories. A priori, it is supposed to be pleasant because while the sun is designing what your carcinomas will look like, the freshness of the sea water, of the waves covering your feet and rising up your calves, makes it so. Another theory is that your doctor prescribed sea water for your varicose veins and psoriasis and you’re more or less compliant. A third tells us that you play paddles by the sea because that’s where you can annoy people the most. That walks up and down, in pairs, without stopping talking like the taxi drivers in that Morrisey song. Disturb the one near the water with the towels taking advantage of the sun, the reflection and the possibility of considering the sea as a toilet included in the bedroom itself. Choose the theory you prefer.
The game has the paradox that, contrary to most games, it is not competitive, but, on the contrary, seeks the cooperation of the partner. In other words, it is a game without an opponent. The funny thing about the Spades Game is that the shots are increasingly difficult for the opponent, but that the opponent returns them, and the more they return, the better. It’s a game of overcoming where you need the other to get it. It is strange that, with those premises, the game has worked so well in our country, because it is obvious that there is no Spanish family that has not had, has and will have shovels in their home. There will even be people who say that without shovels there is no home and they are probably right.
If one of the players only seeks to humiliate the other, the game will soon end to leave him with no reason to exist. In a way, the barbarism that surrounds the players – with its rules, its respect and savoir faire – will eat them up like the Amazon jungle the ruins of pagan temples and Christian churches. If the one dedicated to breaking the game is the son or daughter, it would not be superfluous to remember that whoever said “Grab the shovels” was a parent fed up with life and with the right patience to stay away from the Penal Code.
Played well consists of the ball not hitting the ground and a player not being able to touch the ball twice. It seems easy. It is easy. So easy that it’s immediately deadly boring. There is the possibility of going into the sea to look for a lost point or to make false apologies because the ball has hit some body on some towel. But beyond that, it’s boring. There is no known instance of a Game of Paddles on the seashore lasting more than ten minutes.
The shots are the usual ones in racket sports: drive, backhand, overhead or below the waist. Of each stroke, the most humiliating is the last one if you fail and the most epic if you manage to answer the characteristic dropped ball. If the person who is forced to play has abandoned the diet and has a belly, it is possible that, in addition to problems with the meniscus, he is at risk of a stroke. It is not superfluous to remember that, sometimes, as in life, it is worth losing a difficult point if by doing so you keep your dignity intact.
