Congratulations to the World Outdoor Racquetball (WOR) Hall of Fame Class of 2024. The following deserving players and contributors are welcomed to the Hall.
- Geoff Osberg, Huntington Beach, CA (Contributor)
- Jesus Ustarroz, Huntington Beach, CA (Contributor and Player)
- Cliff Swain, Marshfield, MA (Player)
- Rod Felton, Honolulu, HI (Contributor)
See https://www.usaracquetball.com/wor-hall-of-fame-inductees for the full list of WOR Hall of Fame inductees, which was founded in 2012.
Geoff Osberg & Jesus Ustarroz
Geoff Osberg and Jesus Ustarroz are being recognized for their long service running Outdoor Nationals at Huntington Beach’s Marina Park. They have served as co-tournament directors since 2012, and are now the longest tenured directors in the 50-year history of the event.
The pair are two of the most beloved tournament directors in WOR history. They are famous for putting on an exceptional event that is sensationally festive, wickedly fun, with warmth and charm and some of the best food on the planet. You always feel special with two of the planet's best tournament directors. The pair endeavor to make Outdoor Nationals like a “family reunion” where players from Southern California can catch up with players from all over the country, play some ball, and have some fun every year.
Geoff Osberg is a born-and-raised Southern California native, hailing from Redondo Beach, growing up in and around Orange County. He was introduced to outdoor racquetball while still in elementary school, played in High School with fellow hall of famers like Mike Beltran and Greg Solis, and returned to the sport in the mid 2005s just as WOR was taking off. Osberg became a common tournament participant throughout the latter half of the 2000s, frequently playing outdoor nationals and other shootouts in the area. Osberg also began helping tournament directors by capturing video of events and posting it online, helping to promote awareness of the sport at a time when cell phones and ubiquitous online video clips were not nearly as prevalent as they are now.
Meanwhile, Jesus Ustarroz is a NYC native with typical one-wall roots who moved to Southern California and, like Osberg, found himself more and more engrained in the outdoor racquetball community in and around Marina Park. More importantly, Ustarroz maintained his connections back to NYC, and especially to Robert Sostre & Freddy Ramirez, who he convinced to fly across the country to compete in the Outdoor Nationals in 2004-2005. Jesus’ connections and the success of the New York crew in Outdoor Nationals eventually led to more and more New York players to travel not only to Beach Bash, but to Outdoor Nationals and (eventually) Las Vegas, and paved the way for WOR to become a truly national organization. Ustarroz deserves a lot of the credit for the early growth of WOR in this regard.
In 2012, when the tournament needed a new director, then WOR-leadership approached Osberg about officially taking over their marquee event. He was an ideal candidate; he was a familiar competitive player in outdoor events, was already volunteering his time for the betterment of the sport, and he hailed from the area. Osberg agreed and got to work. Osberg’s first move was to install Jesus Ustarroz as his co-tournament director. The pair were long-time competitors and friends from the courts, and both had a vested interest in seeing the sport (and the event) move forward. The new team took over, met with WOR founder Hank Marcus to begin to comprehend the task at hand, and got to work.
The pair have a great working relationship, have never had a serious disagreement about the operation of the event, and both think along the same lines about tournament expectations and operational details. In today’s racquetball landscape (where funds are limited and these types of roles are essentially volunteer jobs) it helps to split out the work as much as possible.
The pair don’t just run Outdoor Nationals; they also put on shootouts throughout the year to give players an outlet for competition and to give them practice time on Marina’s big courts to get them ready for the annual Nationals event. The pair are also frequent participants and attendees at
On the court, both are strong competitors. Ustarroz owns two Men’s Pro Doubles titles at Outdoor Nationals, both won with partner Rocky Carson in 2016 and 2017. The pair also owns a 3WallBall pro Doubles title, won in 2015. They’ve also made three major outdoor finals together. Osberg also competes in Pro and has had great success in CPRT, 40+ and 75+ divisions over the years.
Congrats to both Geoff and Jesus for this honor; it is well deserved.
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Cliff Swain
Congratulations to Cliff Swain’s induction to the WOR Hall of Fame. He now is a member of both the USA Racquetball Hall of Fame (class of 2003) and the WOR Hall of Fame, a unique honor that recognizes his accomplishments in both indoor and outdoor.
Cliff won the 2014 Outdoor Nationals Pro Doubles title with Josh Tucker and made two other Outdoor Nationals pro doubles finals (in 2005 with Marty Hogan and again in 2011 with Jason Mannino). He is a seven-time semi-finalist. In Singles, he was the Outdoor Nationals pro singles finalist in 2006 and has several semi-finals runs in the mid-2000s.
Swain’s outdoor career started just as he started to wind down his IRT pro touring career in the early part of 2006. He started to compete regularly at the Outdoor Nationals Events in Huntington Beach. He was present at the 2005 event that represented Brian Hawkes’ going away party, getting ousted in the pro Singles semis against the legend despite it being the first time he had ever played 3-wall short wall. Swain then made the pro singles final the following year in 2006, losing to Hawkes’ successor to the outdoor throne Rocky Carson in just the second time Swain had ever played on the big 3-wall courts.
Despite losing to both outdoor legends, Swain advanced through draws filled with experienced outdoor players and played the champions tough. When asked how he did it, Swain laughed and basically said he had no idea what he was doing on the court each time. Swain depended on his regular indoor drive serve, and had not yet “studied” outdoor strategy when he showed up to play at Huntington Beach in the early days. Hawkes beat Swain with his patented “out the door” Z-Serve in 2005, and Carson used the same serve plus his more polished all-around game to sweep to the 2006 title. It is a testament to Swain’s racquetball acumen that he competed as well as he did, despite his inexperience playing singles on the big SoCal courts. Swain never got close again to the pro singles final, eventually opting to focus on doubles and on the CPRT events going forward.
Swain continued to play the major California event for years, entering in both pro singles and doubles when he could, and holds one Outdoor Nationals pro doubles title (won in 2014 with Josh Tucker in dominant fashion over two long-time outdoor pros in Lane and Scott Davis). He also made the pro doubles final in 2005, playing with the legend Marty Hogan and losing to two WOR Hall of Famers in Greg Solis and Craig “Clubber” Lane in a star-studded match. When asked about playing with Hogan in particular, Swain notes that Hogan just makes him laugh on the court. He is such an entertainer, always playing to the crowd and having fun. But when the matches get to crunch time, Hogan flips a switch and goes back to the same level of competitiveness that he used to earn his five pro titles and dozens of tournament wins during racquetball’s hey-day of popularity in the late 1970s and mid-1980s.
Swain has continued to support outdoor racquetball in his post-playing career, and has been known to travel and represent the outdoor community. He was present at the opening of WORstock courts in Tennessee, playing doubles with Beach Bash tournament director Vic Leibofsky. Lately, Swain has been playing more and more one-wall racquetball, having fallen in love with the variation of the sport and with the Beach Bash one-wall major in general. Swain calls one-wall the “great neutralizer” of racquetball in that it is impossible to pick on a player’s weakness, especially in doubles. The lack of side walls forces all action to the middle, and the middle can be adeptly covered by the stronger, left-side player. Swain notes that one-wall doubles allows lesser players, or players with almost no serviceable backhand to compete at a high level (even with pros), and this level of competitive access opens up the sport to beginners more easily than indoors, which means they stick around and continue to participate. In Swain’s first foray into one-wall pro doubles, he again teamed up with Hogan and ended up losing to the best-ever one-wall team of Robert Sostre and Freddy Ramirez at Beach Bash. Swain recalls just how well the pair played together, just how adept they are at one-wall in general, and how they were able to control and command the match against two of the best ever indoor players.
After much traveling for both sport and family, Swain has now moved back to his Massachusetts roots, living in a town on the coast called Marshfield, about halfway between Boston and Cape Cod. He continues to drive up to Boston to play one-wall and long-wall when he has the opportunity, and continues to play national outdoor events all over the country. To this day, if Swain could pick anywhere in the world to play, he would pick the long-wall court at the L Street Bathhouse in his hometown. Or maybe Beach Bash, since it is his wife’s favorite event (she can watch Cliff play if she wants, and if she does not, she can head down to the beach). Swain shows no signs of slowing down on the outdoor courts, and will continue to play in the sun for the foreseeable future.
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Rod Felton
Two small outdoor courts tucked into a park on a beach in Oahu became the focal point for nearly 40 years of tournaments and an outdoor playing community that continues to this day, and it’s in large part thanks to the passion and efforts of one man: Rod Felton.
Felton (known as “Big Rod” due to the fact that he’s 6’4” 420lbs) was born in Muncie, Indiana. After his parents split up as a young teen, he joined his mother (who had relocated to Hawaii) and went to high school in Honolulu. He was big and athletic, and was a state champion tennis player at Moanalua High School. After graduating he returned to the mainland (and his hometown of Muncie) to attend Ball State University, but Felton had gotten the Hawaii bug. After graduating college, he enrolled in the Army, spent four years stationed in Oklahoma, and as soon as he was out he returned to the Aloha state for good.
One Christmas, on leave from Oklahoma and visiting his mother in Oahu, Felton walked down the street from Honolulu to the neighboring town of Waikiki. He walked a path along the ocean front and came across a small park right off of Waikiki Beach, tucked in between several hotels. It was a small former Army base called Fort Derussy, which was decommissioned in 1976 and was now primarily the site of the Hawaii Army Museum. The former fort grounds housed walking trails, picnic areas, volleyball courts … and one solitary racquetball court. The court was unique (a common theme in outdoor court construction): it is technically a “3-wall” court but the side walls are just 3-feet in length. The courts essentially play like one wall courts, though a well-hit pinch shot will be irretrievable. Also unique was the geography; the court faced the Pacific Ocean, no more than 50-feet away from the front wall. In fact, today the erosion has gotten so bad that at times the ocean water runs all the way to the court pavement, and large sand bank drifts have to be constructed to protect the park.
Felton caught the bug of outdoor racquetball, was playing constantly, and became one of the dominant players on the island. He got to know all the regular players, and became the logical person to start coordinating events on the courts based on his connections. He started running outdoor doubles events in the latter half of the 1980s, and estimates that he and his various partners over the years won the lion’s share of the tournaments. His tournaments became better and better attended, and he started to tailor his events to some of the bigger social events on the Waikiki calendar, namely the Super Bowl and the Pro Bowl.
Felton started by having Super Bowl weekend tournaments. Felton got to know a fellow by the name of Arnie May who ran tournaments in his hometown of Vancouver and vacationed in Honolulu every year. May and Felton would play on the outdoor courts each January, and eventually the two paired up to run tournaments coinciding with his annual vacation, which happened to fall on Super Bowl weekend. They would wheel a TV onto the park grounds just next to the courts, plug it in to the neighboring snack bar, and players would play and watch the Super Bowl (usually on around noon Sunday afternoon in Hawaii thanks to the time-zone difference).
Eventually they had a better idea; for many years, the NFL’s Pro Bowl was hosted at the Aloha Bowl in Honolulu the weekend following the Super Bowl, and the local Waikiki Beach hotels would be filled with athletes, media, and their families for the traditional year-end event. Football players had a long history of playing racquetball in the 1980s, and those who had earned a trip to the Pro Bowl often enjoyed playing some pickup racquetball on the one-wall courts near their luxury hotels. Felton began running a one-day event the Saturday of the Pro Bowl weekend; athletes and fans would play the event one day, then go to the Pro Bowl the next day. Felton ran these tournaments from the early 1990s all the way into the mid-2010s, when the NFL made the decision to permanently move the Pro Bowl to Orlando.
Even after the Pro Bowl left Honolulu, Big Rod continued to host many professional outdoor tournaments at the famous Waikiki Beach outdoor racquetball courts.
During Big Rod's time hosting outdoor racquetball tournaments in Hawaii, many notable athletes, politicians, and even movie stars either played in or attended his hosted events. This included WOR and USRA Racquetball Hall of Fame members Marty Hogan, Cliff Swain, Rocky Carson, Jack Huczek, & Jimmy Lowe. Several NFL Pro Bowl and NFL Hall of Fame members also attended his tournaments, including Franco Harris, Marcus Allen, Dominic Raiola, & Olin Kreutz. Other professional racquetball player greats who played in the Honolulu events include local Honolulu Legend Egan Inoue, an IRF 2-time champion and 2-time Brazilian jiu-jitsu champion, and 3-time US Open Champion Christie Van Hees. WOR Hall of Fame members who played in Big Rod’s Waikiki Beach tournaments include Rob Hoff, Mike Peters, Vic Leibofsky, Greg Solis, and Robert Sostre. NBA Hall of Fame member Wilt Chamberlain also played in a few of the early Pro Bowl tournaments, as well as NBA great Michael Cooper. Other notable athletes include WWF World Tag Team Champion Chief Billy White Wolf. Notable politicians who attended the tournaments include the late senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii.
Big Rod has a 45 year history of participating in outdoor racquetball as a top-level doubles player, but also as an outdoor racquetball tournament promoter and director. He is also a former WOR Director. His contributions are legendary and his status as a WOR Hall of Famer is confirmed.
Links to Press Coverage of Waikiki Outdoor Tournaments:
https://archives.starbulletin.com/2008/02/04/news/story03.html
https://archives.midweek.com/content/story/midweek_extrastory/dare_to_come_in_the_cage/P1/