Child Of The 1980's

Here’s a rather more obscure toy that you might have had for playing in the garden. It was called the Swoosh Ball although I’m sure it had other names too. I have a vague memory of something called a Ripperoo, which may well have been this particular toy.

The Swoosh Ball looks a bit like a plastic rugby ball. It is threaded on to a couple of lengths of cord which have grip handles on each end. Two people each take hold of two of the grips, and the Swoosh Ball is positioned at one end of the strings.

The player starting with the ball at their end can then pull the strings apart quickly to make the ball go shooting along the strings to the other player, who must then do the same thing before the ball reaches their end and crashes into their fingers. Ouch…

I guess the idea was to play a tennis like game, sliding the ball back and forth until one player failed to return it, although apart from getting tired arms I don’t think it would have been that hard to miss sending the ball back, as there wasn’t an awful lot of skill involved it would seem.

Anybody out there remember these? I never had one personally though I do remember seeing them advertised on TV and thinking they were pretty cool at the time. Looking back now I can’t imagine why I thought that…

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This entry is filed under Toys - Garden and was posted on May 24th, 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.