(c) 2003 James Zug
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Squash Magazine senior writer James Zug has spent the past several years diligently combing through library aisles, sorting stacks of dusty photographs and record books, and literally walking the paths to some of the most storied squash institutions in the world. All in a quest to trace the history of the game that we love: squash. Zug has turned his labors in to the first tome on the sport’s history in America, Squash: A History of the Game. The book is the best such compendium, in our perspective, of this cultish court game.
We may be a bit biased. We are, in part, the reason for the book’s existence. Zug joined our staff as a senior writer in the fall of 1998. In April 2000 we ran one of his profiles of the two oldest living national champions, the Pool brothers, which received much national acclaim. This article led Zug to explore other aspects of the history of the game, including our cover story for August/September 2000 on the origins of squash at Harrow. In time, Zug interviewed more than two hundred leading figures in the game, spent two weeks examining the archives in the USSRA offices, uncovered rare magazines, books, letters, memoirs, photographs, films and scrapbooks and even became the first person to study the outstanding squash collection at the University of Notre Dame’s sports library.
The oldest known squash trophy in America; 1896, won by Richard Sears; Photo by Ben Collier
Like other barometers of success such as television contracts and prize money at pro tournaments, this book is a landmark event for our sport. Scribner, the esteemed New York publisher, feels our sport is large and passionate enough to embrace a major book.
The book covers all aspects of the game—hardball and softball, amateurs and pros, men, women and juniors, singles and doubles, from the first open-air courts at St. Paul’s School in 1884 to the portable glass courts at Symphony Hall in 2003. It’s nearly 400 pages of prose, including 16 pages of incredible photographs and a 17-page appendix listing the tournament winners of everything from the nationals to the Hyder to old Pacific Coast Championships. George Plimpton, the famous sports journalist and editor of the Paris Review, wrote an insightful and hilarious foreword.
What follows is the prologue from James Zug’s exciting new book, Squash: A History of the Game.
--The Editors
Schoolboys created the game out of three simple things. They swung crude racquets shaved off at the handle. They hit gray rubber balls, sticky, misshapen, punctured, smelling of brimstone. They battered stone walls stippled with windows, ledges and pipes. Three items were the sole prerequisites, and a century and a half later it is the same: a bat, a ball and a wall.
King Arthur obtained Excalibur from a beautiful woman who stood sentry at the shores of a lake in which the sword was submerged; a squash player’s relationship to his weapon is equally shrouded in the mists of romantic myth. It is a scythe you swing in a white field, a rapier that cuts to the quick, a rifle for a soldier, a hammer for a carpenter. You envelop your bat in a fetishistic aura. You pamper it. You kiss it after a lucky shot. You grip and regrip it, winding wafer-thin blue ribbons around the handle, tying them off with a red stick of tape. You bandage the head with protective tape. You tap it against the wall before you serve, like a blind man touching the sidewalk with a cane. It gives your bearings. You string and restring, and you straighten the strings in between points like a master weaver. You are loath to let someone borrow it. You are superstitious and save a magical racquet for crucial matches. You stick it first into your squash bag when you go away for a tournament. When you come back, you stash it head down in your locker. Squash is a tough sport. Racquets split and crack. Players retire. Memories fade into the back corners of the mind. When your racquet finally breaks, you do not throw it away. You bury it in an upstairs closet to be found by a grandchild. What was this, Grandpa? This, you say as you again heft the glorious weight and swing it whistling through the air and ponder a life not guaranteed, this was my squash racquet.
1953 US Women's Wolf-Noel squash team sails aboard the America to Southampton, England. Photo courtesy Barbara Clement Hunter
The ball the schoolboys originally swatted was a globe of vulcanized India rubber pierced with a hole. At the turn of the 20th century, it became a gutta-percha ball, then the Hewitt, the black Seamless, the Cragin green diamond, the revolutionary blue Merco 70+, the Slazenger fuchsia ball, and now the black Dunlop Revelation Pro XX Yellow Dot. The ball has always been small and quick, an effulgent moonrock flashing and floating through the white space of the court. It cruises like a nuclear pinball. It ricochets like bees shaken in a jar. It darts like a scared serpent. And then it dies upon command. Like the faddish board game from the 1970s, squash is the Othello of games: It takes a minute to learn but a lifetime to master.
The walls were originally made of stone quarried from the earth. They did not enclose as much as draw a line across nature. They were open to the clouds, the spitting rain and golden bars of sunlight. Now squash is inside. The court is a cage. You run on a floor made from northern maple, with the unpainted boards set on edge for speed. Lights dangle from a fluorescent ceiling. The four walls, constructed of gypsum plaster and concrete or high density composite panel, are incapable of causing distraction or prompting reverie. They are niveous and functional. The only interruptions are a few firehouse-red lines and a piebald, carbon smear pockmarking the walls with the signature fingerprint of squash. The walls are Piet Mondrian in an unhappy mood, meant to be played upon.
Squash: A History of the Game is available September 23, 2003, for $30. ©2003 by James Zug. Published by agreement with Regal Literary as agents for the author. For info on how to order, please click here.
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