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In the early 1980s, more than a century after the medicine ball's invention, Lineaus Hooper Lorette, then a tax accountant for the Catholic Archdiocese of Austin, wrecked his knees running. Seeking out a more joint-friendly regimen, he started throwing around an old medicine ball at his local YMCA, and revived a series of throwing and catching exercises that were once performed by strapping men with waxed mustaches and suspender singlets. Fellow ex-joggers got interested but failed to find medicine balls of their own, so Lorette decided to make some himself. "All accountants want to do something honest for a living," explains Lorette, who, as a self-anointed "collapsed Catholic," was named after a saint: Pope Linus.
Since 1986 the Lineaus Athletic Company has produced 1,200 balls out of chrome-tanned glove leather, double-stitched with polyester and filled with kapok (a bean-seed fiber) and strands left over from thread manufacturing, which renders them heavy and virtually immortal. Each ball is stamped LINEAUS and logged in a book with information on who owns it (Mick Jagger, the New York Giants).
Lineaus medicine balls come in two different weights and dimensions tailored to men and women. The company also makes shoulder-straining football, a heavy baseball, and a punching bag. The football weighs 22 ounces--a regular game ball weighs 14 to 15--and according to Lorette, the extra ounces result in a projectile that's "easy to catch and comes down quickly, so you will be able to run under a pass and feel fleet of foot."
Twenty years ago Harvard's strength coach purchased a single Lineaus ball. A decade later he encountered Lorette at a sports equipment convention and told him: "Your manufacturing strategy's flawed because the balls last too long! Ours is as good as the day we bought it, and we don't need another." As Lorette, who crafts each ball by hand, puts it, "They last so long they'll end up as items in wills."
