The Handball Prodigy who Overcame Addiction to Become One of the Best Players in the U.S.

If you didn't know better, you might mistake Emmett Peixoto for a celebrity, with his chiseled good looks and mop of jet-black hair. If you did you know better, you'd be right.

Peixoto is a star on the professional handball tour. He's also a recovering alcoholic who hasn't had a drink in 10 years, and a singer-songwriter with three CDs of rock ballads on iTunes. When he's not training for or playing in professional handball tournaments, the 33-year-old teaches handball at the Olympic Club in San Francisco to anyone willing to learn, no matter their age. In his spare time, he reads Nietzsche. Next year, he plans to apply for PhD programs in Philosophy. Not bad for a guy who was expelled from two different high schools.

Like most professional handball players in the U.S., Peixoto learned the game from his father, Jim, who dragged him to the YMCA in Watsonville, California, when Emmett was ten. That experiment didn't last long, as Emmett didn't have the strength to hit a ball to the front wall. Two years later, Emmett returned to the Y bigger and stronger, able to easily hit the front wall with his shots. He was hooked. Within a few months, he was entering and winning junior handball tournaments. So was his younger sister, Courtney. It was a family affair: Emmett, Courtney, and their parents drove around the country to play handball, often returning home with a few more trophies in the trunk.

Growing up, Peixoto played every form of handball. Of these, four-wall—played in an enclosed indoor court with a small, hard rubber ball—is the most challenging and physically demanding. (Three-wall and one-wall are played outdoors, with a softer, bigger ball.) It takes years to master the swing from both sides of your body and grow accustomed to the feel of the hard ball pounding your gloved hands. With four walls and the ceiling in play after the serve, the angles the ball can take at speeds hovering near 90 miles per hour seem infinite. Every athletic skill is tested: speed, agility, strength, stamina, flexibility, hand-eye coordination, reflexes, explosiveness, mental toughness.

Despite its demands—or because of them—Peixoto was drawn to four-wall, and he excelled at it. He turned pro at 19. Peixoto became so good at handball so quickly, and at such a young age, his sense of self became warped. "I had this thing I was good at. I was special in this one way but wasn't getting recognition. I turned into a punk," he reflected. "School didn't like me. I didn't like school. I knew handball could take me places."

Yet even with his eyes on a pro handball life, Peixoto started drinking, heavily. He was arrested and charged with a DUI in 2004. Peixoto bottomed out on Christmas Day in Las Vegas. He'd gone to visit his friend Dave Chapman, at the time considered the best four-wall player in the world. They gambled and drank themselves silly. Peixoto blacked out. When he woke up, he thought, I can't believe I'm here and not with my family on Christmas Day.

When he returned home from his bender in Vegas, he asked his father, also a drinker, to join him at Alcoholic Anonymous meetings. His dad agreed, and together they walked down the path of recovery.

"I started doing things outside myself," Peixoto told me. "I went back to school. I played better handball." He also got serious about his music. He wrote and recorded three CDs over several years, including a single "Sky Burns Out."

While Peixoto's personal life was spiraling out of control, the pro handball tour was breaking up. In 2004, the nonprofit United States Handball Association, which promotes all forms of the sport in the US and had run the tour since the 1970s, walked away from it. An organized tour wouldn't return to the scene until 2011, after the World Players of Handball stepped into the breach and found a corporate sponsor.

The WPH is the brainchild of Dave Vincent, a handball player who runs the organization out of Tucson, Arizona. Vincent started out in 2005 with a goal of promoting handball through film and webcasting. Over the years—and hundreds of matches—he built a top-notch production and broadcast crew that made ESPN sit up and notice. The two have worked together since 2013. Today, the professional four-wall handball tour features six to eight tournaments a season. WPH produces a high-quality package of live tournament feeds, player interviews, and analysis. ESPN makes it available in real time on ESPN3 and its ESPN Watch app. No money changes hands: ESPN gets free content; WPH gets access to potential new fans and players.

At a time when ESPN is paying millions of dollars for broadcast rights, you have to wonder if giving away broadcasts for free makes sense. Right now, it seems WPH has no choice. The market just isn't there. That's why WPH is more than a broadcaster and tour organizer. It's a nonprofit foundation that runs handball clinics and junior tournaments around the country, aiming to build the next generation of American handball players. The pro tour—dubbed the Race 4 Eight—is one way to get the message out.

All of this costs money, of course, which means WPH is always in fundraising mode. Prize money for the pro tour tops $200,000 for the season, with tournament winners taking home between $5,000 and $10,000 at each stop. At the end of the season, the top eight players earn bonuses based on the rankings (hence the name, Race 4 Eight). Bruce FaBrizio, creator of the Simple Green line of cleaning products, is a handball fanatic. The company sponsors the tour and enjoys naming rights on the opening tournament of the season. Another big booster is former NFL quarterback Jake Plummer, who famously walked away from football at 32, in part to have more time to play handball with his brothers and father. He now hosts an annual tournament at his home in Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, called the Helleva Handball Bash. It was the kickoff event to the first Race 4 Eight in 2011.

Peixoto didn't compete in that kickoff tournament, as he was still recovering from surgery on a torn labrum in his right shoulder in December 2010. He'd sustained the injury in a one-wall handball tournament in 2007 and played through pain for more than three years. Even without full movement on his right-handed swing, Peixoto reached the top of the pro handball rankings in 2008. Two years later, the pain was so severe that he agreed to surgery. It was a risky decision for his pro handball career—no other player had ever come back from torn labrum surgery.

Peixoto was determined to be the first. He returned to the pro tour in early 2012 by qualifying for the Race 4 Eight event in Fresno, California, not far from where he grew up. A few months later, he completed work on his master's degree in Philosophy from Boston College, returned home to Watsonville, and set his mind to regaining his championship handball form. He's almost there. In the last two years, he's played his way to the finals of the U.S. Nationals in four-wall, only to lose to Irishman Paul Brady, the most dominant player in the world.

He recently swept to victory at the Olympic Club's four-wall handball tournament in the Men's Open bracket, his 12th club championship in the last 14 years. He also handled logistics for the weekend and coached his proteges during their matches, including his wife, Jessica. She had never been on a handball court before the two met. After they married, Emmett taught her how to play. Less than two years later, she's holding her own in the amateur ranks, playing against men and women.

The pro tour rolls into New Orleans this weekend for the third tournament of the 2015-2016 season. Peixoto will be there, chasing Brady and trying to work his way back up the rankings. He is currently ranked fourth after disappointing finishes in the first two tournaments in the season.

You'd think that at 33, Peixoto would face formidable odds of climbing back to the top of the sport. Then you find out that Brady is 36 and, many believe, in the best shape of his life. That's what Dave Fink told me. Fink is also 36 and ranked sixth on the tour. He knows the top players better than most: when he's not on the court, he's in the booth with Vincent, calling matches for the WPH/ESPN broadcasts. Like Peixoto, Fink learned handball from his father, and was on the court at an early age. He turned pro at 17, left the tour in his twenties, and came back to it at age 29. In between, he turned himself into a scratch golfer.

Perhaps the player closest to dethroning Brady from the top ranking is Sean Lenning, who will turn 31 in April. Lenning grew up playing handball on courts at the tavern his parents frequented in Lynwood, Washington—"a place to smoke and gamble," as Lenning recalled it, and the center of a thriving handball community. He started playing when he was nine and, like Peixoto, struggled at first despite being big for his age. "I'm sure I cried more than I smiled," Lenning told me. Two years later, he won the National Championships in four-wall for players 11 and under.

Lenning attributes his success to his aggressiveness and unpredictability. "I go for goofy trick shots. I fall into patterns less often than other players, which makes me hard to read," said Lenning. That approach helped Lenning win the World Championship in one-wall handball last summer, but the effort exhausted him and he flamed out in the four-wall. Now he's working to improve his fitness and mental toughness. "I need Paul Brady legs," he said. So he bought a hacky sack.

The guys over 30 hear the footsteps of the next generation of pro players. Everyone in the sport talks about 27-year-old Mando Ortiz, who nearly lost his life to a heart defect at 21. Six months after open-heart surgery, Ortiz was back on the court. He then shocked the handball world by knocking off Brady in the quarterfinals of the Players Championship in Salt Lake City, Utah, the final event of the 2012-13 Race 4 Eight tour. It was only the second time Brady lost a professional handball match in the United States.

After Ortiz, though, the outlook for the American four-wall players looks bleak. Most of the best young players are coming out of Ireland, where handball is the national sport. It's an amateur sport there, strictly governed by the Gaelic Athletic Association, and so the top players–or at least those who can afford the travel expenses–come to the U.S. to compete for prize money on the WPH tour. Mexico is the other four-wall powerhouse for young players. Third-ranked Luis Moreno hails from Hermosillo, in the northern state of Sonora, which borders on Arizona. Brothers Daniel and Luis Cordova grew up in Juarez, just over the border from El Paso, Texas. Daniel Cordova is only 23, and sits just behind Dave Fink in the rankings. Luis is 11th.

Despite the uphill battle to grow handball in the U.S., despite the need for more courts, more money, more coaches, and more players, Emmett Peixoto is cautiously optimistic. "Handball's popularity will rise again," he says. "The sport is so pure and all-encompassing, and yet all you need is a ball and walls."

Maybe Peixoto is optimistic because he's "obsessed with handball," as his wife, Jessica, told me. Maybe it's the excitement and determination he sees in the eyes of his youngest handball students. Or maybe it's that handball brought him to the brink of destruction and, together with his family, provided his salvation.