More About The Ball
from John Branston
http://www.prohandball.tv/videos/haber.html
June 24, 2012 - As the preceeding video shows, the real game is often decided by the pregame. Forty years ago a great handball player beat a great racquetball player in Memphis. The game was played with a handball, and that was all the advantage Paul Haber needed to win. The early racquetballs were much slower than today's ball and the racquets were much smaller and less powerful. A 1970s hardball squash champion might have had a better chance against Haber in hands v. rackets because the ball was more similar. Racquetball pros from that era have told me stories about tricks they would use to get their favorite ball in play. It was ridiculous, but it was the difference between W and L.
And anyone who has thrown a football knows how much difference pressure and humidity and temperature make in how the ball feels. Same goes for basketball, where pros won't tolerate any innovations for good reason.
One of the best descriptions I ever read about the pregame was in a novel called "Hard Rain Falling" by Don Carpenter, from the Bay Area, and written maybe 50 years ago. It's about a convict but there is a terrific chapter about a pool game between a black hustler Billy Lancing and another hustler, a fat white man. Probably influenced the Paul Newman movie. Anyway, once the game is decided -- eight ball or one-pocket or nine-ball -- it's all over but the settling of the bets. Billy loses the nine-ball game and all his money he won in one-pocket. "He had played his best, he hadn't dogged it; it was just that over the long haul the fat man was just a tiny bit better than he was, and so took all the money. It was really very boring."
Back to squash, today in Memphis and probably other places, good players will only use the Dunlop double yellow dot. Nobody else has a chance. In our minds, that is the standard and everything else is not fit to use at any price.
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