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.
The competitors weren’t there to play so much as to dominate. The children wore serious expressions. Each round pitted two or three teams against each other and was judged by a suite of veteran jumpers. There were singles (one jumper) and doubles (two jumpers) categories: within each, there were contests for speed and for longer routines. The designated jumper from Miss K’s fourth-and-fifth-grade contingent, a tiny girl with flapping arms, approached the ropes. Her turners started slowly and then, once she had entered, went faster, whipping the ropes into a helix. The little jumper completed the twenty-five-second test with intimidating speed and only a few falters. “This little crew right here,” the m.c. said. “You’ll see them at Barclays at halftime next.”
The Japanese Children’s Society had driven in from New Jersey. The jumpers of Extreme Air, New Hampshire’s only nationally competitive jump-rope team, had done their hair in identical French braids. “As you see, double Dutch transcends gender and ethnicity,” the m.c. said of the team, whose members were mostly white. Brooklyn boasted the most clubs in the competition, including Jazzy Lil Secret, who, halfway through the doubles competition, brought out a small, cornrowed boy. While his teammate, a taller jumper, hopped over the ropes, he jumped onto her back with wacky agility. She continued, unfazed; together they resembled a bouncing kangaroo.