Short answers, pulled from the story.
National handball championships in the United States have been held annually since 1919. The Amateur Athletic Union organized them until 1950, when control passed to the newly formed United States Handball Association.
Racquetball was invented in 1949 by Joseph Sobek in Greenwich, Connecticut, when he played handball using a strung racquet instead of a bare hand. The sport grew directly out of handball courts and handball rules.
The small ball, called an ace ball or blackball, weighs 2.3 ounces and measures 1.875 inches in diameter; it is harder, faster, and used almost exclusively in four-wall handball. The big blue is a softer, hollower ball borrowed from racquetball; it bounces more slowly and is the only ball used in the European 1-Wall Tour.
An estimated 2,299 public handball courts are spread across the five boroughs of New York City. One-wall handball grew there when beach-goers in the early 1900s began hitting balls against wooden jetties, and by the 1930s thousands of indoor and outdoor courts had been built throughout the city.
The earliest written record of a wall ball game being banned dates to 1287, when the Synod of Exeter prohibited it because of the damage it caused to church buildings. Robert Braybrooke, Bishop of London, issued a separate ban in 1385.
Four-wall paddleball was invented in 1930 by Earl Riskey, a physical-education instructor at the University of Michigan, when he used wooden paddles to play on the school's existing handball courts. Handball courts and handball rules provided the direct template for the new sport.