By Dan Nilsen
Sometimes nice guys finish first.
Lou Giampetroni was both in the world of four-wall indoor paddleball — a lifelong ambassador and proponent of the sport, and a five-time national doubles division champion along the way.
His mastery of the game and his dedication to its growth earned him three major honors from the National Paddleball Association.
Lou received the NPA Sportsmanship Award in 1977, the Earl Riske Award in 1978 for significant contributions to the sport, and induction into the organization’s hall of fame in 2014.
“He was head of the association at one time,” said Jim Augustine, longtime director of the Flint YMCA. “He was a character, but he was a solid person. You could count on him if you needed anything in paddleball. He would always step up and say ‘I can do that’ or ‘I could help. If you want to go to the tournament this weekend, I’ll get you a partner.’”
The Earl Riske Award was named after a University of Michigan phys ed instructor and Director of Intramural Sports who invented the game in 1930. The proximity of Ann Arbor to Flint was one reason Flint became a hotbed of the sport.
Another reason was the arrival of Lou Giampetroni in town.
Lou grew up in Detroit, attended Northeastern High School and earned a journalism degree at Wayne University. He was hired by the Flint Journal in 1954 as a sports writer, later becoming a courts reporter and eventually a night metro editor.
Lou was already married at the time to his high school sweetheart, Sue, and had started a family in Detroit. But when the Journal job opened up, he moved to Flint by himself and lived at the YMCA.
“I thought it was so fascinating that he moved to Flint and was writing for the Journal, while mom and my brother Tom were still in Detroit,” said daughter Angela Leach. “He worked in Flint during the week, and then on weekends would go back to Detroit. It was a couple of years before mom moved up to Flint.
“The story was, both were full-blooded Italians, and for Italians to move away from their families was a big deal. They usually moved onto the next block. Once mom and dad figured things out, they would live in Flint and go see the families every weekend.”
In Flint, Lou was an athlete who played softball and golf, hooking up with judges and attorneys he knew while covering the courthouse. At the YMCA, he got a taste of paddleball.
“It was a very active sport and an opportunity for athletic
people who wanted another outlet,” said Leach. “Paddleball could be played any time of the year.”
Just playing the game wasn’t enough for Giampetroni.
“He ran all the paddleball leagues and tournaments at the Y,” said Scott Lawrence, who became a lifelong friend. “He always entered the tournaments, so we started playing together.
“It was a funny relationship because we were 20 years’ difference, but we hung out together. I just enjoyed his company. He was always thinking about other people. I started calling him Father Paddleball, then Grandfather Paddleball later on.”
Augustine dubbed Lou “The Godfather of YMCA Paddleball.”
“He stayed a loyal member of the Y and did everything he could to encourage people who never played the game to start,” Augustine said. “He would work with a beginner one-on-one and was willing to play with anybody at any level.
“He ran the tournaments and played in them. He set up the seeding and all the brackets and had other people work the desk to record scores.
“His wife was the biggest one to put on the hospitality room, and other paddleball wives would help. She put out
a big spread, with fruit and drinks and sandwiches. That was Sue.”
From the early 1980’s until 2013, Giampetroni also wrote the NPA Newsletter, and his writing skills shone through. A stickler for rules, he once addressed violations that were not being enforced.
Paraphrasing the adage “Records are made to be broken,” Lou’s headline was “These rules are not made to be broken.”
Borrowing the well-known line from Strother Martin in “Cool Hand Luke,” Lou’s opening sentence was “What we have here is failure to follow the rules.”
Giampetroni played paddleball for better than 45 years, winning those five national doubles championships between 1981 and 2006 in various divisions.
In 1981, Lou partnered with Jer Fennell of Brooklyn to win the Masters Division (both players must be 45 or older) in the nationals at Flint.
At Dearborn in 1984, he played with Dearborn’s Bob Paige for another Masters crown.
Again in Dearborn in 1987, a third Masters title came with Lou joining Flint’s Max Calhoun.
The final two national titles paired Lou and Grand Blanc’s
Gary Nehring for the 1996 championship in the Golden Masters (55 or older) hosted by Davison, and the 2006 title in the Platinum Division (65 or older) in Ann Arbor.
“He was good with his strategy,” Augustine said of Lou’s strengths. “He didn’t have the steam, but he had strategy. He had a good understanding of the court and where you were.
“He could lob the ball well, pinch the ball well and he could drop it in the corner when you were backing up. He would position himself and position the ball so that you would be the one doing all the running.”
Lou played his last match in 2014 at age 82, and died in 2017. Three years later in 2020, the NPA Board of Managers, calling him “a giant of the sport,” voted to rename the Sportsmanship Award the Lou Giampetroni Sportsmanship Award.
“I don’t know if it was 30 percent of his life or 40 percent, but he was Mr. Paddleball,” said Augustine.
People who knew him can see Lou possibly playing pickleball these days, among them his daughter.
“What I have realized with pickleball is that I get these vibes from my dad,” said Leach. “I envision him back in the ’70’s and ’80’s and kind of channel what he was experiencing. I feel like this was what he felt like.”
