An Ode Owed to Squash by John Branston February 24, 2020
An
old handball player (is there any other kind?) once told me, “I always
knew there was a sport I was good at, it just took me 50 years to find
it.”
That's how I felt when I took up squash at the age
of 50, some 20 years ago. A higher level of mediocrity after a lifetime
of baseball, football, basketball, tennis and racquetball. A solid
backhand and I never double-faulted. Memphis had some good players
then, but the game was transitioning from hardball to softball, from
American to International courts, from Pakistanis to Brits and
Canadians, from heavy racquets to light ones, and the Old Guard of four
or five players soon stopped playing.
Rhodes College, a small liberal-arts college in
Memphis, built two international squash courts, perhaps hoping,
wrongly, that they would attract some squash-playing students from the
Northeast and foreign countries. Instead they were the happy windfall
for a few faculty members and a handful of alumni and community members
like me who paid $200 a year for the privilege.
I lived five minutes away and became a squash
player, tourist, promoter, and evangelist. Memphis is a good tennis and
racquetball town, hosting pro and amateur tournaments for years as well
as the celebrated “hands vs. racquet” challenge in the 1970s that
matched a handball player against a racquetball player (racquets were
smaller then and the handball player won). Growing squash, I thought,
would be easy. Squash was getting some attention from the Olympics
(thumbs down), Ted Gross (DSR), John McEnroe (“that's a squash shot!”)
and novelist Ian McEwan (Saturday).
And for a while it was. Within a few years we had
15-20 players, organized a local tournament, and brought in John
Lawrence from Chicago and Mike Way from Boston to do clinics. I took a
racquet to Germany, Amsterdam, London, and Paris where it was easy to
get a game, a new friend, and a free beer. A generous community member
paid to have one Rhodes court refloored to make it springy and easier
on the knees. Several of us traveled to Chicago, Nashville and Atlanta
for skill-level tournaments and to Richmond to watch the pros play. We
were in the front row when James Willstrop faked out Ramy Ashour with
what broadcaster Alan Thatcher called “the double whammy.”
Our best players moved up to the 5.0 level and we
had enough regulars to bring former World Number One John White to town
for a weekend to thrash everyone without breaking a sweat. Our little
community included Americans, Pakistanis, Aussies, an Egyptian, an
Indian and a South Korean.
But what I took for spring was in fact Indian
Summer. We had peaked. Our best players migrated to a private country
club. The oldest ones aged out or succumbed to injuries. Our John White
free exhibition match attracted exactly six people. We never got a
woman to play, not one. The students who mustered one year for a squash
club were not particularly athletic in a school that boasts 15 sports
for men and women. One of them told me more might come out “if we had a
real coach.” The fake coach (me) thought, “well, you're not real
players.”
U.S. Squash is a member organization focused on the
squash sanctuaries mainly in the Northeast and Northwest rather than
start-ups. I was unable to explain that novices reluctant to pay $15 to
cover towels and soft drinks and sandwiches at a local tournament were
absolutely not going to pay $50 or $75 more to join U.S Squash and play
in a sanctioned event. (On the other hand, regular players will not
travel to an unsanctioned event, so there you are.)
Then there was the little matter of pickleball.
There is no squash doubles court in Memphis or in
Tennessee for that matter. Pickleball can be played indoors or outdoors
on a marked-off gym floor or tennis court. It is easy to play,
welcoming to men and women and young and old, somewhat aphrodisiacal to
seniors, easy on the knees, and 16 people can play on one tennis court
– usually for free. It is wildly popular and becoming moreso every
year. Many a night I would play squash on the new court at the Racquet
Club of Memphis while 50 or 60 people, most very fit, played pickleball
nearby. Nobody watched squash, nobody wanted to try it, nobody gave a
damn. So it goes; more court time for us addicts.
The year I turned 60 I set a goal of mastering the
four-corner butterfly and playing in a national tournament. When I
turned 70 last year my goal was to play four games of “long ball”
(which takes the front corners out of play) without calling paramedics.
It is the greatest game ever invented. I will play
until they carry me away. My son plays at a squash-only club in Salt
Lake City that has six courts, teaching pro Craig Bennett, and dozens
of good, friendly players from all over the world.
He has found another sport he is good at, and it didn't take him 50 years to find it.
(John Branston was a reporter in
Memphis and Mississippi and has written several stories for The Daily
Squash Report. He was the winner of the inaugural Squash Fiction
Contest on DSR.)
