50 And Counting: Rob Dinerman Marks A
Golden Anniversary March 4th, 2022
This
passage from Rob's prep-school memoir "Chasing The Lion: An Unresolved
Journey Through The Phillips Exeter Academy" chronicles his accidental
discovery of squash on March 4, 1972 -- 50 years ago today.
That Friday evening I was in the room of my
classmate David Cortes and his roommate, Steve Mullin, on the
other side of the well from my own, when all of a sudden Steve fetched
a squash racquet out of the closet, took a few casual swings and (as he
later told me) on the spur of the moment announced, surprisingly since
he was a club hockey player who as far as I knew had never been on a
squash court, that he was going to play squash the next day. For some
reason I remember thinking “Then so am I!” even though I half-expected
that by the time the following afternoon rolled around whatever impulse
had seized him would have run its course and vanished. The following
day, Saturday, March 4th, was the last day of Winter ’72 sports, the
day when most of the varsity teams would be competing against Andover,
our arch-rival.
The squash team was playing at some
other prep school, which meant that the squash courts were quite free
--- there were ten of them, five of which were lined up adjacent to
each other on your left as you entered the Love Gymnasium after walking
up an extended ramp to get to the entrance, and all of which were
unoccupied when Steve, myself and a few other students from our dorm
visited them early that afternoon.
These nice and warm courts
were very different from the freezing ones I remembered were there when
I first arrived at Exeter three years earlier, which had been
eliminated when the new gym had essentially displaced the old one
during my 10th-grade year. Gone as well was a cold, pitch-dark alleyway
which one had had to navigate to get to the old-gym courts. I had
borrowed an old racquet from an area of the gym known as “The Pound”
which loaned out aging and barely adequate equipment for various
sports; the basketballs they dispensed were infamous for being so worn
out that the leather had become smooth to the point of being slippery
and pumpernickel-like, and the racquet I borrowed for that afternoon
was so warped and curved that it resembled a bow-and-arrow bow,
creating an automatic forehand cross-court while making it virtually
impossible to hit a backhand cross-court. Even the racquet-head was
noticeably curved, not just the shaft.
In spite of this atrocious
equipment, I was amazed at how good the ball felt off my racquet and
even at what tactile pleasure I got right from my first few swings. I
had been an indifferent club tennis player and a pretty good ping-pong
player, who used to love hitting the ping-pong ball and especially
coming across the ball, angling and spinning it (both topspin and
under-spin) to influence the spot and manner in which it hit the table
as well as how it acted after it bounced. But even hitting a ping-pong
ball didn’t come close to matching what hitting a squash ball that
afternoon felt like, or the way doing so imparted a feeling of joy and
exultation that almost made me feel giddy.
What had begun as just tagging along
with Steve Mullin’s whimsical comment of the previous evening was
taking on a magical quality, at least for me (none of the others seemed
especially to be sharing what I was going through). I even noticed with
fascination and delight the geometric quality of the way the ball
acted, how a ball that hits the left wall before the front wall would
then hit the front wall while veering to the right after it had earlier
come off the left wall at the same angle that it had had while going
into it. Actual textbook geometry had held very little interest for me
in the math classroom --- indeed, I hadn’t even been able to follow it
well enough to stay with my class until the second go-round ---- but
its properties in this squash-court setting held intrigue and
wonderment for me.
I was paired up for a little while
with Jack Foley, who had been playing club squash all that winter, but
the only reason he won those games was that I couldn’t handle his lob
serve, which crept so close to first the side wall and then the back
wall that the presence of those walls cramped my backswing too much for
me to get a good cut at the ball. I won most of the points that became
actual “points” (i.e. where there were exchanges after the initial
serve/serve-return) but, infuriatingly, he won enough points just on
those lob serves to make the difference.
Whatever the results that afternoon
with Jack and the others, I left the building bubbling with the hope
and the alluring thought that it was at least possible (I didn’t trust
myself enough to go beyond “possible”) that, however accidentally, I
may have finally found my sport after all. I had an exhilarating
certainty that something very good was going to come of this, a feeling
that was so bright and compelling that it even seemed to have colors on
it, bright colors that illuminated my Spartan dorm-room setting which
for more than a month had borne witness to nothing but torpor, boredom,
illness and dissatisfaction, rather than the adrenalized excitement
that infused me that evening.
