Dinerman 'Selected Squash Writings Volume 2' Reviewed by Sasha Cooke August 23, 2016
Rob Dinerman has been for many years among the keenest observers of
U.S. squash, and for those who have even a fraction of his passion for
the subject, this latest collection will be welcome. While it is
an ostensibly odd mish-mash that includes player and coach profiles,
school team histories, editorial pieces, and even quick views of clubs
or tournaments, all of these are successfully linked by Rob’s deep
sense of the history of the game and his graceful prose.
The longest pieces are histories of squash at Deerfield
Academy and at Harvard during the Jack Barnaby years. These are
written, of course, mostly for alums of the programs, and I must
confess to expecting something on the lines of “Isaac begat Jacob who
lived nine score and begat…” Instead Rob has taken this
unpromising material and given the reader a genuine sense of the
excitement and emotions the teams have felt through the decades.
Rob is drawn to the connections between different eras in the game and
at the schools, so that these read as genuine histories, rather than
lists of players. As a college player himself Rob knows well the
drama of an overset in the fifth watched by two teams, and his
extensive interviews have allowed him to bring us some of these with
telling detail. Fans of the sport will appreciate the agony of a
player hitting back at herself at match ball, or the courage of erasing
a match-point deficit with two double boasts. Those who have
played any school sports will enjoy the flashes of charismatic coaching
(a head- butt, really?!), and reminders of the van rides. Most
powerful, for this reader, were the descriptions of Coach Barnaby’s
work with players who faced physical handicaps, a reminder of the days
when coaches were more purely educators.
Other pieces are less likely to arouse much general
interest. The revival of a club, or the closing of courts are not
subjects that retain their freshness over time. These
pieces are somewhat redeemed by occasional flashes of Rob’s editorial
voice, as here, when he comments on Atlantic City:
“That rowdiness had a
certain charm to it as well, constituting as it did a kind of
refreshingly earthy interlude between the much more sedate and
structured circumstances that invariably attended most of the other
invitationals, nearly all of which were hosted by exclusive private
clubs, with whites-only ambiance to match.”
This is a good reminder of the public perception, and a
not altogether vanishing reality, of squash in America.
Nonetheless, these are passages that might have been left out of this
volume.
Far stronger are the profiles, which in remarkably
little space can give us the arc of a career as if it were a
match. Rob’s best prose can, in only two of his characteristic
sentences, capture the essence of two of the game’s greats:
“Desaulniers from the
outset threw his vintage full-court blitz at Talbott, volleying
everything within reach, nailing his punishing three-wall and cruelly
maneuvering his slender foe throughout their fast-paced 80-minute
shoot-out.But Talbott unflappably weathered the constant barrage,
lobbed and extemporized his way out of trouble, coolly glided to
virtually everything that was hit and pocketed a pair of slightly
desperate Desaulniers tins to seal the 18-16 fourth-game match-ending
tiebreaker.”
These passages are also more journalistic than the school
pieces, so that in chronicling the remarkable achievements of Stu
Goldstein, Rob remarks on Stu’s “outsider mindset”, owing in part to
his Jewish origins, as well as resentment by other players incurred by
his “intemperate” predictions of success. Rob excels in this sort
of balanced commentary, and readers will appreciate his effort to give
a complete picture, not merely to cheerlead.
Occasionally, Rob can be a hair wordy. We might ask,
for example, whether it’s really necessary to list all of Michael
Jordan’s young rivals in order for us to appreciate Sharif’s
longevity. For this reader though, this sort of dalliance only
contributes to the sense that we are sitting at the bar after the
matches are finished for the day, listening to someone who knows the
very best stories of past games, players and personalities. I
don’t know a single player who doesn’t enjoy that.
