Patrick Hueter, who grew up in Neuss, plays together with his brother Ian at the Handball World Championship for the USA.
Photo: imago/Petter Arvidson
He was a bit kinked, yes, reports Ian Hueter. “There was a lot more to it,” said the US handball player after the 27:32 defeat against Bahrain on Thursday evening. “We definitely could have beaten this team.” Nevertheless, he really enjoys the atmosphere at this World Cup. The whole team is now looking forward to the game against Denmark this Saturday – and to a sold-out, noisy arena in Malmö.
The US team will suffer a heavy defeat against the defending champions, even the Americans are aware of that. But her mood will not suffer, assures her captain. “We wanted to advance our sport in the States on the way to the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles,” says the playmaker. “We’ve already achieved that by making it into the main round.”
The team around the 25-year-old keeper, whose brother Patrick is also part of the selection, has actually made sporting history. With the 28:27 preliminary round victory in Jönköping against Morocco, a US selection won a game at a World Cup for the first time since 1964. The relatives from San Francisco then cheered, reports the keeper. “You saw this live on ESPN. Many of our friends thought it was cool that they could see us at an event like this, even though they don’t know much about handball.«
In this way, Guardian gets to the heart of the core problem of handball: the still lacking globalization of the sport. Other nations like Brazil or Bahrain have developed well recently, also with the support of Scandinavian coaches. The Egyptians are already so strong that they can dream of a medal. But in the financially strongest sports market in the world, the USA, handball is at most as popular as archery or curling.
In order to change that, the world association IHF and the top European clubs support the US national association by training talents with US citizenship, such as Tristan Morawski, who grew up in Landshut, in the academies of European clubs. The only 17-year-old left-hander Morawski wants to be no less than the “Michael Jordan of handball” and has already been trained by the multiple German champions in Flensburg.
The project is logistically controlled from Germany. Andreas Hertelt from Krefeld, who once won the European Cup with TuRu Düsseldorf, is now the team manager of the USA selection, which is coached by Norwegian Robert Hedin. Former player consultant Stefan Bögl also coordinates scouting from Solingen. While the national association is trying to build long-term successful structures at home, coaches and scouters are looking all over Europe for talented people who have US citizenship – like the Guardian brothers, who grew up in Neuss and play in the 2nd division for Bayer Dormagen . Her mother is from California.
However, a look at history shows how thick the board to be drilled is. As early as the 1960s, German handball players and officials tried to put the USA on the world handball map. The background was the repeated failed attempt by the world association IHF to heave handball back into the Olympic program after 1936, when the field variant was played in Berlin. In 1961 in Athens, the members of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) voted 21:17 against the inclusion of the 1964 Games. The IHF could even count on IOC President Avery Brundage (USA) as a supporter, a fan of field handball.
The most elementary problem: the low distribution. For example, while volleyball was played in more than 70 countries, in 1961 the IHF had just over 30 members. Handball was simply unknown to many IOC members. “A sport that is not popular in America has little chance of making it into the Olympic program,” commented a US sportswriter at the time. The IHF therefore initiated the founding of a US federation and granted German handball players permission to play in the States: The USA took part in the 1963 Field Handball World Championships in Switzerland for the first time. At the 1964 World Cup in Czechoslovakia, the USA also played in an indoor championship for the first time.
In the US goal at that time was Hans-Jürgen Hinrichs, who had previously won the championship with THW Kiel, had also played in the German selection – and was now making a career as a manager in the auto industry in the USA. Vincent Drake, a former professional basketball player who represented Canada at the 1967 World Cup, also caused a stir.
Even more helpful for the Olympic ambitions were the demonstration games during the IOC session in October 1965 in Madrid. At that time, German stars like Hansi Schmidt and Rüdiger-Felix Schmacke were flown in to make the sport appealing to the IOC members in two friendlies against Spain. “The motto issued by national coach Werner Vick was that handball had to be an Olympic game again,” Schmacke later recalled. “That’s why he asked us to make the game as balanced and exciting as possible, because the IOC members wouldn’t have liked a big win.” The players fulfilled the task. And still in Madrid, handball was included in the program for the Munich games in 1972.
The first president of the US association, Peter Buehning, was also a German immigrant. The entrepreneur developed a daring plan in 1969: while the youth of the world were protesting against the Vietnam War, he traveled to the Pentagon and proposed an image-boosting project to four-star general William Westmoreland: GIs who were successful in other sports should be handball players without further ado be repurposed and compete at the Olympics. The name of the program »Army Champs«. The Commander-in-Chief of the Vietnamese Armed Forces agreed.
Shortly thereafter there were the first castings for Munich. »I had no idea what handball was. I played basketball. What I heard was: It looks like water polo,” said Rick Abrahamson, who completed the first tests in the fall of 1969. When the motley selection rebelled against coach Buehning shortly thereafter, their duty officer threatened that if they continued to refuse the training, they would board the next plane to Vietnam. “That was a short meeting,” reported US captain Dennis Berkholtz later, laughing.
The US boys even qualified for Munich 1972, where they won against up-and-coming Spain and kept up for a long time against the traditional handball nation Denmark. Subsequent attempts to really popularize handball in the States before the home games in Los Angeles in 1984 and in Atlanta in 1996 all failed.
The recent US project to establish handball in the States appears to be utopian not only against this historical backdrop. Regardless, the Guardian brothers will continue to dream of stepping onto the Olympic stage in Los Angeles in 2028. For them, according to captain Ian Hueter, the historic World Cup victory against Morocco was just the beginning.
