Tiny Jumpers Rule at the Double Dutch Summer Classic

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From The New Yorker:

Last Sunday, at the Double Dutch Summer Classic, a jump-rope competition held at the Josie Robertson Plaza, at Lincoln Center, in Manhattan, Miss K’s Loopy Jumpers, fourth- and fifth-graders from Brooklyn, marched onto the stage from their station on the shaded side of the plaza, to the sound of Mr. Fingers’s “Mystery of Love.” The m.c.s of the competition—two former competitive jumpers—had been hyping the crowd. “What’s the heartbeat of double Dutch?” one of them crowed. “The turn!” the well-informed crowd answered. Hundreds of people, primarily black women and their daughters, dressed in Sunday style, had come out to see the tournament. Attendees of the matinée of George Balanchine’s “Jewels,” performed by the Bolshoi Ballet, looked on from a Lincoln Center balcony before their performance began, and suddenly vanished. “They’re missing the real show,” one woman, who would spend the next five hours of the contest evaluating routines from behind dark sunglasses, said.

The sound of taut ropes lashing on concrete at short intervals is, to me, the sound of summer. As children, my neighbors and I would commandeer entire New York City blocks, sometimes setting our jump-rope stations in the middle of the road for extra room. In “The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop,” Kyra D. Gaunt remembers watching girls on her block do the same. “They made it seem so . . . natural, off-the-cuff, unrehearsed, magical, like watching Michael Jordan fly on the basketball court,” she writes. Like basketball or baseball, jump rope is cheap; unlike them, it has been considered a playground diversion, not a discipline. My friends and I were not aware that, back in 1973, David Walker and Ulysses Williams, two N.Y.P.D. detectives interested in building after-school opportunities for New York City children, had sketched out a set of rules for double Dutch, the style of jump rope that involves turning two ropes in a strand-over-strand motion, and had developed ways of testing a jumper’s competency, style, and speed. The next year, they founded the American Double Dutch League and held the first Double Dutch Summer Classic, at which around fifty teams competed annually until 1984. This past weekend, as part of an initiative led by Walker’s daughter, who took over the league from her father, the competition was revived, with the support of Lincoln Center and the nonprofit Women of Color in the Arts.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

If you’re not familiar with Double Dutch:

.