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
Waddyis
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.
