What's On My Mind: Of Racquets Old and New
by Aubrey Waddy

March 13, 2014

“Call that a callus?” I thought to myself, in my best Crocodile Dundee accent. “Once upon a time, mate, I could have shown you a callus.”

It was a teenager in the changing room at my club. He was showing his palm to a friend, apparently new to squash, whom he had brought along for a hit. I discreetly looked over and saw a small area of hardened skin near the base of the lad’s thumb.
 
“A callus? Huh, that’s nothing,” I thought.

Way back when, a squash racquet was an implement acknowledged by lumberjacks, respected by them even. The old squash racquet took some serious gripping. In these modern high tech times, lightweight racquets need much less hanging on to, and, action-reaction, much less pressure comes back onto the hand of the gripper. In the course of generating racquet head speed and, in equal measure, slowing the implement down afterwards, you do have to hang on hard these days, but nowhere near as hard as once upon a time.

The ‘me’ of forty years ago would have convincingly won a callus competition with the lad in the changing room. It takes a paragraph to give a full account: where the teenager had his single callus, I had a far more substantial one, plus another of equal size to the side of the base of my index finger. There was one at the base of each of my other three fingers, plus one on the opposite side of my palm to the thumb. Plus sundry others. Finally, bizarrely, there was a narrow callus half an inch long where the top joint of my little finger used to get squashed against the grip by my third finger. Understandably, girls wouldn’t let me touch them with my racquet hand.

As a young man I ceased to be useless at squash during three years in Australia, under the fierce influence of postgrads at Sydney University. Crocodile Dundee’s dad would have said, “Call yourself competitive, mate? Now, that’s what I call competitive.” At some time during my mainly anaerobic introduction to the squash pennants in New South Wales, I settled on using ‘Apollo Five Star’ racquets, a top Aussie brand that happened to have a bamboo shaft. Rough hewn lumberjacks might have turned up their noses at the Apollo, on account of its shaft, but not even the panda, for whom bamboo is the staple diet, would have been able to make any impression on an Apollo’s handle with its teeth. It had the sort of durability that wouldn’t be seen again until modern day aerospace materials came along in the 1990s.

I returned to England after the three years among highly friendly, highly competitive Aussie squash players and eventually my Apollo racquets gave up (but never in the shaft). This was tough: could I find a similar racquet over here? To my relief I discovered something called the Court Star, made by Dunlop. Or more accurately, I suspect, branded by Dunlop. The racquet was actually indistinguishable from the Apollo, apart from the decoration. These beasts were probably manufactured in some Far East sweatshop, close to a source of the freak bamboo. A bonus was that over here the Court Stars were cheap. Their strength meant that Dunlop marketed them, I discovered, for the hire trade. My friends, all armed with top of the range flash Slazengers, Grays Light Blues and Dunlop Maxplies, laughed at my downmarket bamboo weapons.

However, the Court Star choice turned out to be more than vindicated. In my county closed championships a year or so after I’d returned from Australia, I was playing a semi-final against someone I hadn’t come across up to then, the splendidly named Jolyon Ralston, a young marine. Lieutenant Ralston was not the most cultured of squash players, but he was commando-tough and very physical. Among my legacies of the match was a wicked bruise smack in the middle of my calf, inflicted by my opponent’s pestle-hard patella. Happily, this wasn’t as bad as what I inflicted on him. The young Jolyon had hit one of his many loose, half court shots. The rally was a foregone conclusion: all I had to do was to strike a (left handed) forehand as hard as I could to the back left corner. Not even Jonah Barrington, at the time the fastest player on the planet, would have been able to retrieve the shot if properly executed. Aware of this - Lieutenant Ralston was an intelligent bloke - and crowding me as he had been doing all match, with marine officer initiative he set off early for the back left corner. Too early. The result was a terrible blow to the side of his knee from my all out forehand follow through.

Jolyon went down as if he’d been shot. But as the gallery grimaced and turned away with ashen faces, two remarkable facts prevailed: first, my Court Star had somehow survived the impact intact. The shaft of any other racquet would have been splintered by that heart-of-oak Navy leg, with the head almost certainly separating and smashing into the opposite wall of the court. And second, the mighty marine leg also remained unsplintered. Any other person’s limb would have been permanently damaged by the blow inflicted by my Court Star club. Truth to tell, I was proud that Jolyon stayed down for as long as two minutes, a reward for all those power forehand drills I’d done.

I duly won the match, no hard feelings. Maybe Jolyon had a tot of rum when he got back to his base. I never encountered him again. Eventually, I’ve recently discovered, he limped off to New Zealand, but my attempts to contact him have failed. I’ve been wanting to tell him that out of sheer respect, I chose his name, ‘Jolyon’, for the hero in my squash thriller, Sex and Drugs and Squash’n’Roll.

To finish the equipment story, eventually Dunlop agreed to supply me with respectable Maxply International racquets, with my initials proudly displayed on the shaft. The fact that these were free overcame my allegiance to the Court Star, and I took my chances about meeting another marine.



But hold on, here’s how absurd the Maxply International looks alongside a modern Dunlop racquet.

My current racquets, not much different from the Dunlop Aerogel Pro GT on the right in the photo, come in at 135g, 4¾ ounces. The Maxply on the left is 237g, all of 8¼ ounces! No surprise then about the old-time calluses. Apparently, in the 1960s at the behest of the legendary Azam Khan, Dunlop produced a 6½ ounce version of the Maxply, but it turned out to be too fragile, as did a subsequent 7½ ounce version.

Finally, what about the stars of the story, the Apollo Five Star and its twin, the mighty Dunlop Court Star? (Ignore the damage to the Apollo in the photo below. I’d like to think it shows how determined I was to continue using those weapons when I got back to England.) The racquets illustrated weigh no less than 250g each, nearly 9 ounces. I don’t know how heavy tennis racquets are these days, but it’s probably not as much as that.

The funny thing is, although racquet weight was an issue back then, with the Grays Light Blue favoured by some players owing to its lighter construction, it wasn’t a big issue. Everyone coped perfectly well with the enormous momentum that must have been developed by the tiny but distant racquet heads.

If I recall, more of a perceived factor in racquet choice was whether it had gut or synthetic strings. At the time I couldn’t care less, and I still don’t. The critical element in a squash racquet for me (apart from survivability against the legs of the Navy’s finest), is the circumference of the grip. If that’s far wrong in either direction, any control I have deserts me.

We’re much better off with modern racquets, from 115 grams - 4 ounces - upwards. I can remember towards the end of my first-time-round squash career starting to develop pain on the inside of my elbow from the strain of hitting forehands. And the range of shots open to the clever player these days must be more extensive.

And I wonder if I’d have had more girlfriends if I’d been able to use both hands!



Aubrey Waddy is an English writer and squash player, on the verge of 65 and what-happens-next! Aubrey is a consultant in the medical device industry, and apart from this and writing, spends his time titrating squash against the diminishing capacity of his bad knee. He returned to the game twenty five years after retiring from a moderately successful amateur career, and surprised himself by achieving selection for the English o-60s Masters team for the 2011 home internationals.

Aubrey’s writing credits include the first ever novel to be set in the world of competitive squash, “Sex and Drugs and Squash’n’Roll”, and in June 2012 he published his second novel, “Just Desserts”. The books are available on Amazon, Kindle etc.

Aubrey has three sons, and lives with his new partner Alison, by fortunate chance - or judicious selection - a physiotherapist, outside of London.

www.aubreywaddy.co.uk


What's On My Mind is a column by rotating authors.
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