Seriously. That's the only language bullies understand.

He may be tougher than any of you, but he's not tougher than all of you. Get together, crowd him onto the court, post a lookout, and do what you have to do. You can hit things other than little rubber balls with those racquets. Painful, but not enough to cause serious debilitating injury; perfect for avoiding those pesky lawsuits and assault-and-battery charges.

Yeah, it's sad when a bunch of adults have to resort to junior-high behavior, but it's pretty clear that eighth grade is where this guy's mental development stopped. Talk to him on his level, and he'll get the message.

Just tell him flat out, "We don't enjoy playing with you because you're a bad sport, so you're out, end of story."

It's fun having balls. Things get done.

He hit somebody (yeah, with the ball - no difference) who hadn't hit him first over a game? Get rid of him. Don't be unnecessarily unpleasant - you want to remain in control of the situation - but get it done.

Nice and weak are not the same thing, but too often they are treated like synonyms.

This letter raises bigger questions for me, like: why can't tolerant secular people get their act together to defend their great achievement - western liberal civilisation - from fundamentalist bigoted cheating bullies?

Since when did the forces of darkness manage to convince us that any kind of a 'no', or a 'get lost' was somehow hypocritical and dreadful?

I see this everywhere. Feminist attitudes towards the treatment of women in Muslim cultures for example. Or left wing parties unable to scourge themselves of the fascist socialists in their midst. Or secular liberal societies paying more and more lipservice to people's religious beliefs in politics, the law, education and health care.

Enough!!!!

A fun racquetball game is a social achievemnt - a lot of people never reach sufficient maturity and grace to be able to do that.

Nice doesn't equal weak, and it shows how easy nice people have had it for how long that they have started to think so. Nice is a strong and principled stance to take in a world of brutality and easy dismissals.

By the same token our secular, tolerant, diverse and liberal societies are not vacuums. It's not that no one believes anything. It's that behaving with restraint and consideration is the only way to get along. Therefore: either follow the rules or get out.

Ghandi knew this, and he was somewhat of a saint. Why don't we?

This racquetball bully obviously thinks you guys are all pussies just begging to be hit and abused.

This is my advice: Disabuse of him of that notion right now. Why would you need to discuss it with anyone else unless you doubted that they didn't like being abused and hit? Tell him you play for fun and he is no fun. Give him a week to turn it all around, and if he can't tell him not to come again.

No more Mr Nice Guy.

This bully of yours needs a good strong mistress, is all.

LW says that off court he's perfectly cool, which means that on the racquetball court he feels free to express aggression and pack leader behavior that otherwise would seem out of place in his daily life.

Give the man a break! LW and the other teammates are a little wussy. Even if this guy weren't a bad sport, he clearly dominates and intimidates your little group with his physical prowess. Its rarely enjoyable to play against someone who almost always wins.

And here's our angst-filled LW, who writes in with the same social issues a 5th grader would have. LOL No one makes LW and friends play with this man. Man up!

This "bully" just needs someone strong to push back and call him on his bad behavior. Unfortuantely LW and friends aren't it. Kick him to the curb and send him my posting. It might be the hint he needs to find a game of female, D&S wrestling instead of racquetball.

when he does stuff like hitting people with the ball, does anyone react? What i would do is call him on his behavior EVERY TIME HE DOES IT. He might not even be aware of how over the top he is, b/c he's so high on his enjoyment of the game. The whole group needs to calmly confront him every time he acts like a roid-rage jerk.

If he does something offfensive and worthy of sports television rather than friendly play, just walk off the court and say that the behivior is unacceptable.

Now if your other friends are as passive as you have been, you will see them stay on the court rather than walk off with you, in which case, you have become real and they have remained unreal.

Bullies get positive reenforcement for what they do, don't be surprised if the others prefer the bully to someone who complains about the bully. Don't complain, don't engage, walk away. Anyone who walks with you is a friend.

Of course, it would be far more fun to do to him what he is doing to everyone else, but you will take more heat than he for that. Chances are he will cry foul.

If you make a clean break, the bully can clean up his act and be a better sportsman someplace else.

If you give him a week to shape up, it will be a test of wills, and the confrontation has to be repeated.

Confront him as a group, like Cary said.

As a kid, my husband (we'll call him Bully) was a perfect student, and took enormous pride in his game-playing abilities. When we started dating, another boy who'd known him for many years said DON'T!!! He told me stories about playing ping pong with him and how good Bully was, but when this friend won a game, or sometimes even a hotly-contested point, how Bully would throw things--once he smashed his ping pong paddle on the table so hard that he cracked the paddle and the table as well! Of course I didn't believe my friend--Bully was such a nice guy in all the situations I'd ever seen him in.

So we dated, and got married, and started playing chess once a day before dinner. And for months, he won every game, and everything was just peachy. And then one day we brought the chess set to a nearby park and played a game on a picnic table, and for the first time in over a hundred--maybe two hundred--games, I won. And before I could even get it wrapped around my head that I'd actually won a game of chess for the first time in my life, he had grabbed the chessboard and smashed in on the ground, yelling about how stupid he was for screwing up what should have been an easy move--yelling obscenities as parents were pushing little kids on a nearby swingset. And did I stand up to him? I was too busy crying and picking through the grass trying to find all the chess pieces.

That was 35 years ago, and it was last chess game I ever played in my life. (At least I went out on a win.) We tried playing bridge with some friends, but you can imagine how that went. It wasn't until we had children and one of them had difficulties losing that Bully finally managed to understand--a little--how bad his own behavior had been, though to this day he insists that he wasn't yelling at ME after that chess game, he was justifiably upset at making a mistake.

Anyway, the sooner this racquetball bully feels some real repercussions and starts noticing that people DO object to his poor sportsmanship, the better off he will be, and the better off other people in his life will be. So go and tell him you're done playing with him. It's the right thing to do.