Squash Magazine: Ivy Pochoda: Me and My Manta

Me and My Manta Making do and doing well By Ivy Pochoda, WISPA No. 64

I learned a lot of things from my college coach, although the lessons I learned often weren't by design. Throughout juniors, I was on the Prince sponsorship package, which meant that I could call their headquarters in New Jersey, fight my way through a tangled phone tree and demand to speak to someone in the “Elite Athlete” division. I'm not ashamed to admit that this made me feel pretty important when I was 16, despite that the sizes of the packages that arrived on my doorstep grew smaller and smaller. But in college everything changes and the needs of the individual, including sponsorship, are sacrificed for the greater good of the team. (This would be a lot easier to swallow if squash were not inherently an individual sport.) To this day I'm not sure of the legalities of college racquet sponsorship deals. It all seemed very back-of-the-van to me. Psst lady, you want to get hooked up with Black Knight? Don't sign anything, keep your mouth shut, and remember that we never had this conversation. And, please don't call me a princess here—there never seemed to be enough racquets to go around. Towards the end of my final season, the racquet supply had reached a critical low, and each racquet our coach handed us was accompanied by a few words of caution. But as I saw it, if I played my best, worked my hardest and broke a few racquets in the process, a suitable replacement would be found. And I believed, most incorrectly, that my No. 1 position on the team guaranteed that I would be kept in the style to which I was accustomed—a style which meant that at any given moment I would have a racquet bag filled with three first-generation Prince PowerRings. So it took no small amount of wind out of my sails to see the last two PowerRings—a racquet used by only three women on our team—handed out to the seventh and tenth players on the ladder. When my final racquet bit the dust, I was left on court empty handed. And so just before the most important tournament of my college career, what did my coach do? In front of my whole team, a team delighted with their Princes, HEADs and Dunlops, he handed me a...Manta!—and, at that, a used Manta that I had spied sitting in his locker for months. It was factory strung and had a grip in need of serious refreshment. I felt like I was changing horses in mid-stream and getting a mule. I had never heard of Manta and I certainly didn't like the looks of the example that I held in my hand. It was garish—a veritable black and gold splatter painted club. And, adding insult to injury, it bore an embarrassing name, the Sorcerer. I don't usually go for racquets with proper names (two exceptions are the Prince Big Boy and the Saxon Happy Hooker—popular here in Holland). Cryptic numbers and fabricated compound words sound much more trustworthy and seem to allude to the racquet's hi-tech engineering instead of the sorry sense of humor of low level marketers. And worst of all, printed on the side of my Sorcerer was the boast that it was “The Official Racquet of Men's Intercollegiate Squash.” Having seen no Mantas in action the whole season, I had to investigate this claim, and was interested to discover that the Trinity Men's team did play with Manta, though a better model, one that had a wonderfully kitschy wood paneling paint job. Despite my misgivings, my club, my magic wand as it were, served me well. Together we won the Intercollegiate individual championship. But when the Tennis and Squash shop in Cambridge called and asked for my winning racquet to hang on their champion's wall, I balked. Not only did I not want to be remembered for my Manta, I couldn't part with it at the time since it was my only racquet. (By that time I had acquired an official Manta bag for my Sorcerer that looked like an instrument case forgotten by a member of the Electric Light Orchestra.) So I gave Tennis and Squash a shattered Prince. I thought this decision was a prudent one at the time, but every time now that I walk into the shop and search out my racquet I feel disingenuous. What did Prince have to do with my success? My victory was an all Manta affair. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a craftsman who tends to blame or credit her tools. But I learned something from my Manta, something which I'm not sure my coach was trying to teach me. (I believe that his lesson had more to do with not expecting special treatment.) I learned to go with what you've got and not to worry about what's missing, be it a decent drop shot, a good night's sleep, or even the racquet of your choice. My Manta became a sort of metaphor for all the inconveniences and missteps that I could encounter during a tournament. My Manta showed me that I could ignore and overcome all these minor obstacles. Everything down to the seemingly all-important racquet you use is small stuff. And sometimes it's easy to lose sight of something so simple. Thinking back, my coach's inadvertent lesson was doubly delivered since, as I recall, I also played the tournament in question in a pair of his old shoes. And I'm not sure which is more remarkable, that I was given a pair of his used footwear, or that the shoes actually fit!

Me and My Manta

Making do and doing well