James Zug is a senior writer at Squash Magazine (www.squashmagazine.com)
and is the author of Squash: A History of the Game,
published by Scribner in September 2003.
I - FIRST THERE WAS REAL TENNIS ...
The origins of squash are in the ancient game of real
tennis. In the twelfth century in France boys and girls
played ball games in the narrow streets of their
villages. They slapped balls along the awnings or roofs
that lined the street or into shop and door openings.
Rules depended on local geography. In time these street
games migrated up to cloistered monasteries. Every
Lenten season young brothers strung a fishing net across
the middle of their courtyards and patted a ball back
and forth with their gloved hands. The balls - a patch
of leather with dog hair sewn inside, later cloth
stuffed with soil, sawdust, sand or moss-bruised and cut
hands. Monks added webbing to the gloves and then
extended their hand by picking up a stumpy stick, a
branch of a tree, a shepherd's crook. At the end of the
fifteenth century the Dutch invented the racquet.
The game was called tennis and it became the national
sport of a dozen European nations. In 1580 the Venetian
ambassador to Henri III of France walked around Paris
counting tennis courts: he stopped at eighteen hundred.
Gambling and violence sadly became the norm (Caravaggio,
the Italian painter, killed a man at a tennis court in
Rome in 1606) and tennis slowly retreated to royal
palaces. Lawn tennis, as played by Hewitt and the
Williams sisters, was invented in 1873 in Great Britain
as an outdoor version of real tennis.
Tennis begat rackets. In the early eighteenth century,
prisoners at the Fleet, London's notorious debtor's
gaol, created an outdoor version of tennis. It was
called rackets, and it involved no more than smacking a
ball against one or two walls. The ball, unsqueezable,
was made from wound cloth and was similar to a golf
ball; the racket was a stretched tennis bat. Soon
rackets spread across Great Britain and was a common
pastime as workingmen played in tavern yards and alleys
and schoolboys played outside their classrooms.
Britons started building rackets courts, as opposed to
just playing in a convenient corner. These courts were
unadorned affairs, roofless, rustic, usually just one or
two stone walls and a paving stone floor. Inclement
weather drove players toward a court with a roof. In
1830 the Royal Artillery built the first known covered
racket court at their Woolwich depot. The Marylebone
Cricket Club, the home of cricket, built one in 1844
next to their tennis court at Lords, and in 1853
Prince's Club opened its historic doors with seven
covered rackets courts. Rackets spread to the colonies.
The first covered rackets court in Canada was put in
Halifax in the seventeen-seventies; in India in 1821;
Australia in 1847. In 1793 Robert Knox, a Scot, put up
the first covered court in America on Allen Street,
between Hester and Canal, in lower Manhattan. A few
years later the Allen Street court had a nearby rival
that was called, due to the predominant profession of
its membership, the Butcher's Court.
Accompanying rackets was another socially-lubricated
ball and wall game called fives. Named for the five
fingers of the hand, this ancient version of handball
was more or less the game of rackets without the racket.
Many men played both sports in the same court. Fives
grew so popular at English public schools that the two
leading forms of the game derived their standards
entirely from the quirky spots on campus where the boys
played. Eton fives, first played amid the mossy
drainpipes outside the school chapel at Eton, had a
court twenty-five feet and three inches by fourteen with
many buttresses and hazards, while Rugby fives, created
at Rugby School (where the sport of rugby football also
was started), had an unadorned court twenty-eight feet
by eighteen, with side walls that sloped towards the
back wall and a two and a half foot tin on the front
wall.
II THEN THERE WAS FIVES ...
The combination of rackets and fives sparked the
creation of squash at the Harrow School outside London.
Harrow boys were addicted to rackets. The chief place to
play at Harrow was in the schoolyard that surrounded Old
Schools, the main school building. One special nook of
the schoolyard was called "The Corner." It had two good
side walls and a front wall with a buttress which
dropped the ball straight down and a waterpipe that
might send it anywhere. In 1850 Harrow built two
open-air rackets courts. Court time was hard to get for
younger boys. They had to be content to play in the
tiny, stone-walled yards at their boarding houses or in
village alleys. The yards and alleys, like the Corner,
boasted peculiar hazards: water pipes, chimneys, ledges,
doors, footscrapers, wired windows and fiendishly
sloping ground. Split-second decisions and speedy
hand-eye coordination were essential. Rackets, with its
long, heavy bat and bullet-hard ball, was difficult for
an inexperienced boy to learn in such cramped
conditions. With typical English flair, the young boys
at Harrow invented something new. Rubber had just come
into use and Harrow boys grabbed a rubber ball, sawed
off the butt of their racquets and played a slower,
easier game in their house yards. This bastardised
version of racquets was called "baby racquets" or "soft
racquets" or "softer." (In those days the word
"racquets" was spelled properly.) Baby rackets was
perfect for the Harrow boys. On 20 January 1865 Harrow
officially opened a new complex of rackets and fives
courts.
The boys loved the new rackets court (it is still in use
at Harrow). The fives courts had a mixed reception. The
four new Eton fives courts immediately were filled with
activity, but the three new Rugby fives courts never saw
any fives play. Instead, Harrow boys jumped on and
played their new game of baby rackets. And this game
became the game of squash.
III SQUASH SOON SPREAD
Squash soon spread. Other public schools, notably
Elstree, picked it up. In 1883 the first private court
was built by Vernon Harcourt, Harrow class of 1855, at
his home along the Cherwell in Oxford. It was
thirty-eight by twenty feet, with a tin of thirty
inches. They played with a black ball, a red ball and
ball with a hole in it. Other early courts ran the
gamut. At Lord's, the squash court was forty-two feet by
twenty-four, with a twenty-eight inch tin; at Cambridge
they divided a sixty by thirty racquets court into three
squash courts, each quite tiny; at the Royal Automobile
Club in London there was a court that was exactly
thirty-two by eighteen and a half-the size more common
in America; Marlborough House, a royal residence, also
had an American width until the mid-thirties; at Queen's
Club, one court, built in 1905 and dubbed "the Long
Court," was thirty-five by eighteen. In the 1920s the
Bath Club in London became the nursery for squash in
England. Lord Desborough built a beautiful court that
was noted for its outstanding lighting and launched the
Bath Club Cup, a squash league for London clubs. League
squash greatly increased enthusiasm for the fledgling
sport, and squash in Great Britain owed its success in
large part to the Bath Cup competitions of the twenties.
Administratively, squash had a slow start in Great
Britain. In April 1907 the Tennis, Rackets & Fives
Association was founded at Queen's and a squash
sub-committee was formed. In 1912 this sub-committee
issued a preliminary set of rules. Court length and
width was considered a matter of local opinion. Cement
or stone were preferred to wood for the materials of the
court. Two types of balls were the best: "What is
required is a fast ball, that bounces well but not too
high, and does not fly about: a very small hard solid
ball or a medium-size thin rubber hollow ball, without a
hole." As far as the rules of play were concerned, the
sub-committee recommended flexibility. Serving could be
either one serve or two, courts could have a cut line on
the front wall or not and most delightfully, the man
returning could have the right of "refusing a service he
does not like". The sub-committee had no power to
enforce its recommendations and another eleven years
passed without any official standards. In January 1923
the Royal Automobile Club hosted a meeting of delegates
from English clubs where squash was played and formed a
"Squash Rackets Representative Committee." The committee
chose the slowest of the half dozen different kinds of
balls then in vogue as the standard ball and declared
the Bath Club court, thirty two by twenty-one feet, as
the standard for English squash. In December 1928 the
Squash Rackets Association was formed to run squash in
Great Britain.
The SRA immediately began slowing the ball down further.
While the Bath courts served as the model for English
squash, the Bath ball, as large and fast as an American
ball, was deemed far too large and fast for English
sensibilities. The officials chose the most inert ball
available and then in a series of incremental changes,
reduced it even more. Between 1930 and 1934 the
association cut the standard ball's speed almost by
half.
IV GREAT BRITAIN
By the time Great Britain formally codified their squash
standards in 1923, squash in America had been played
under a different standard for two decades. The first
squash court in North America appeared at St. Paul's
School in New Hampshire in 1884. Jay Conover, an avid
rackets player, had attended Columbia University in New
York with Hyde Clark, a graduate of Harrow, and Clark
had told Conover about an enjoyable adaptation of
rackets that was popular at his alma mater. Conover's
four squash courts, built outside a building with two
rackets courts, were open to the air. Any pupil who
annually paid one dollar could use them. In 1900 Alfred
Ellis, a Englishman who was the rackets professional at
the Racquet Club of Philadelphia, put in a squash court
at his club. Built entirely of wood, it was perched high
in the rafters of the half story in the three and
one-half story clubhouse. It measured thirty-one feet by
seventeen and a half. In 1902, Jimmy Potter, a St.
Paul's graduate and president of the club, made a
dramatic decision to divide up the south rackets courts
into three squash courts. Each court measured thirty-one
and a half feet by seventeen and a half and were made of
cement, except for a wooden front wall. The total cost
was $1,500.
Within months squash dispersed around Philadelphia.
Racquet Club members built squash courts at their homes.
In 1903 Merion Cricket Club started playing squash on
their three courts. Two city cricket clubs, Philadelphia
Cricket in Chestnut Hill and Germantown Cricket in
Manheim, erected courts at the same time. In 1903 the
Racquet Club offered a cup for the winner of an six-club
team competition. The league was so successful that the
Racquet Club sponsored a "Pennsylvania State
Championship." In 1904 the leaders of the inter-club
league, meeting at the Racquet Club, founded the United
States Squash Racquets Association, the first national
squash body in the world.
The USSRA immediately set the standard squash court
measurements at thirty-one and a half feet by sixteen
feet three inches, with a twenty-four inch tin. Scoring
was originally first-to-fifteen, hand-in, hand-out, like
rackets and best two of three games. "Eternal
watchfulness is the price of success in squash," wrote
Frederick R. Toombs in a 1904 book on squash published
in New York. "Cultivate variety in your style of play.
You will thus keep your opponent in an uncertain frame
of mind. Mix the strong and weak strokes, according to
your adversary's position. Let the side walls and back
wall do their share of the work, and at times you will
find a well-placed cut stroke just the feature needed to
win the rally. Learn that poetry of motion may be
expressed by the squash stroke." In 1907 the USSRA ran
its first men's national championship In 1911 the USSRA
changed the scoring rules to best three out of five, and
one could score a point whether serving or not. This
rule was adopted by the British until in 1926 when they
switched to a nine point, hand-in, hand-out system. In
1920 the USSRA changed its standard to thirty-two feet
by eighteen and one-half.
V AROUND THE WORLD
Around the world squash appeared in a tremendous variety
of guises. The first bonafide court in Canada was built
in 1904 at the St. John's Tennis Club in Newfoundland.
Sir Leonard Outerbridge, whose two brothers were on the
club's building committee, sent the proper dimensions
from Marlborough College in England where he was
studying. The dimensions were, again, of a fives court,
with no back wall. In 1911 three clubs, the Montreal
Racquet Club, the Toronto Racquet Club and the Hamilton
Squash Racquets Club, formed the Canadian Squash
Racquets Association. It soon standardized a thirty-four
by nineteen court (with a twenty-two inch tin). In 1921
the CSRA made formal application to the USSRA for
affiliation and a year later switched to the American
standards. In 1906 the Johannesburg Country Club built
an open-air court that was wider than the American size.
In 1910 South Africa created a national association and
eventually, because of significant heat and altitude in
many parts of the country, standardized a wide court and
slow ball. The Sudan Club in Khartoum had six courts,
all unroofed. Government House in Dar es Salaam boasted
a fine, open-air court, with a stone floor. The St.
James's Barracks in Port of Spain, Trinidad had one
open-air, concrete-floored court that was American-sized
in width. In Kenya the Nairobi Club had two English
standard courts made from knotless cedar, but the
Muthiaga Club nearby had stone floors and an American
width.
In Stockholm the first courts were made with walls of
powdered marble. New Zealand played in an English court
with an American ball, a combination that was not
resolved until the thirties. In France the first courts
were at the famous court tennis club Societe Sportive du
Jeu de Paume, where in the late nineteen-twenties Pierre
Etchebaster turned a rackets court into four tiny squash
courts, each with a cement floor. In 1930 Siemens, the
electronics company, built four courts at its factory in
Berlin.
In 1913 a rackets court at the Melbourne Club was split
into two squash courts. In the early 1920s Mr.
Bjelke-Petersen, later a uncle of the premier of
Queensland, Sir Joe Bjelke-Petersen, built a court in
New South Wales. In 1927 the Royal Melbourne Tennis Club
built a court that was nearly as big as a rackets court.
It was not until 1931 that an Australian championship
was inaugurated, and Australia officially went with the
English size. In 1934 the Squash Rackets Association of
Australia was formed and three years later both Victoria
and New South Wales formed their own provincial
associations.
VI INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION COMMENCES
Squash reached a tipping point in the twenties. No
longer an obscure pastime for schoolboys, it had
national championships and league play and standard
rules. International play started in 1922 when the
Lapham Cup was first contested between the U.S. and
Canada. The Lapham is a fifteen-man amateur competition.
In 1924 England sent a team to the third Lapham Cup in
Philadelphia, inaugurating intercontinental play. Timmy
Roberts, a forty-six year-old Army captain, won both the
U.S. and Canadian nationals while on tour that year.
A dramatic rise in popularity came after the Second
World War. In particular, Australia, in the midst of a
boom of commercial squash clubs, started an Antipodal
renaissance. In the early 1960s Australian men won every
international match in two tours of England, and in
London in 1964 Australian women beat Great Britain in
their first international match. In January 1967
representatives from seven nations (Australia, Great
Britain, Egypt, India, New Zealand, Pakistan and South
Africa) met in London and formed the International
Squash Rackets Federation. Later that year Australia
hosted the first ISRF men's championships. In 1969 the
U.S. and Canada were admitted, despite the different
standard of play in North America. Five nations came to
the world championships in South Africa in 1973; ten to
England in 1975 and fourteen to Australia in 1979. In
1980 the ISRF opened their championships to
professionals. In 1980 Sweden hosted the first world
junior championships. In 1985 the Women's International
Squash Federation, which was founded in 1976 and had
held four world championships, merged into the ISRF. In
1992 the ISRF changed its name to the World Squash
Federation.
The WSF was integral to the acceptance of squash as a
medal sport in the Commonwealth Games, where it was
first played in 1998, as well as the Pan-American Games,
where it was first played in 1995, the Asian Games and
the All Africa Games. Today the WSF has one hundred and
nineteen member nations and is recognized as the
governing body for the sport by the International
Olympic Committee. The WSF is responsible for the rules
of the game, refereeing and coaching standards and
specifications for courts and equipment. In addition,
the WSF maintains a calendar of world championship
events for men, women, juniors and masters players in
both singles and doubles. As a major force behind the
development and growth of squash, the WSF is at the
forefront of the many exciting aspects of the game today
and tomorrow. Jahangir Khan, the ten-time British Open
champion and six-time World Open champion, is president
and Ted Wallbutton is the executive director.
VII THE RISE OF THE PROFESSIONAL GAME
Professionalism has always been the public tip of the
squash iceberg. It began in 1904 when the first bonafide
professional tournament in the world was held at the
Huntingdon Valley Country Club outside Philadelphia.
There were six entries, and Alfred Ellis beat John Friel
3-1 in the final. In 1914 Jock Soutar, the world
champion in rackets, won a pro round-robin in Montreal.
Two years later the USSRA crowned him professional
champion of America after he beat Bill Ganley two
matches to one in a three-leg, two-city contest. Soutar
won $1,000. Ganley won nothing. Four years later Soutar
defended his title against Otto Glockler. In 1925 Soutar
stepped down from his throne. In 1928 a group of
American teaching pros formed the United States
Professional Squash Racquets Association. In 1930 the
USPSRA organized its first national tournament, held in
Boston. Pro squash received a boost in 1954 when the
U.S. Open was started in New York. In 1966 it
amalgamated with a newer Canadian Open to form the North
American Open.
In 1978 the professional hardball association was
renamed the World Professional Squash Association. In
the 1980s the WPSA had a continent-wide pro tour that
reached more than half a million dollars in prize money
and visited more than thirty cities. Americans like Mark
Talbott and Ned Edwards, Canadians like Michael
Desaulniers and Clive Caldwell, Mexicans like Marion
Sanchez and the perennial squash giant Pakistani-born,
Toronto-based Sharif Khan dominated the tour. Pro squash
started England in 1907. Charles Read, the Queen's pro,
beat C. Bannister, the Bath pro, at the Bath Club 15-5,
15-13 and defended his title as English champion three
more times until 1928.
In 1930 that the British Open was started and
professionals had a more formal stage to present their
wares. But it was an amateur, Amr Bey from Egypt, who
dominated the early British Opens, winning five and
earning another when no one challenged him. After Bey
came his compatriot Mahmoud Kerim, the only player to
win the British Open when it was both a two-man
challenge tournament and a regular open draw. In 1951
Hashim Khan, a thirty-seven year-old Pakistani, came to
Great Britain and destroyed Kerim in the finals, 9-5,
9-0, 9-0. Hashim, his brother Azam, cousin Roshan and
nephew Mohibullah won twelve Opens in a row.
Jonah Barrington, a six-time British Open champion and
the first man since Amr Bey to win both the Open and the
British amateur championships, was the first pro to cut
himself off from the clubs and earn his entire living
from tournaments, exhibitions and clinics. In 1970 he
organized a five-man barnstorming tour of Asia that led
to the formation of the International Squash
Professionals Association in 1973 and the gradual
creation of a viable pro tour. The ISPA launched a World
Open championship in 1976. Heather McKay and Geoff Hunt,
two legendary Australians, won their draws. McKay was
famous for not losing a squash match for eighteen
straight years, and Hunt, a seven-time British Open
champion, was renowned for his amazing physical and
mental endurance. Other dominant pros were Australians
like Ken Hiscoe, Dean Williams, Rodney and Brett Martin
and Chris Dittmar, New Zealand's Ross Norman and
Englishmen like Gawain Briars, now Executive Director of
the PSA, and Phil Kenyon. No doubt though, the most
exciting group of players came from Pakistan. Following
in the footsteps of Hashim Khan were such giants as
Hiddy Jahan, Gogi Alauddin and Qamar Zaman (who won the
1975 British Open), and the 1980s were dominated by
Jahangir Khan and the 1990s by Jansher Khan. Both
Jahangir and Jansher have equal merit in any discussion
of the greatest player ever.
In 1993 the WPSA and the ISPA merged to form the
Professional Squash Association. In 2002 the PSA held
more than fifty events with a total prize money of
nearly $2 million. The tour visits its usual spots in
Europe, Asia and North America, but it also holds major
events in exciting locales around South America, Africa
and Dubai and Qatar in the Middle East. Pro women's
squash originated with the American Women's Squash
Association, founded in the mid-1970s. In 1985 the
Women's International Squash Professional Association
came into being and built up a viable circuit. The top
early players were Susan Devoy of New Zealand and Vicki
Hoffman of Australia; Devoy won eight British Opens. In
the 1990s Michelle Martin of Australia won six British
Opens in a row. In 2002 WISPA has a $750,000 tour on all
six continents.
VIII SQUASH DOUBLES
Doubles began at the Racquet Club of Philadelphia in
1907 when Fred Tompkins, the tennis and rackets pro at
the club, erected a forty-five feet by twenty-five
court. In the 1930s dozens of clubs across America built
courts and an amateur circuit of tournaments sprung up
everywhere from St. Louis to Chicago to Denver to
Toronto. In 1933 the U.S. squash association started a
men's and women's national championship. Pro doubles
started with the founding of the Heights Casino Open in
1938 in Brooklyn, New York, but it was not until the
WPSA tour began in the late 1970s that it took off. In
the 1980s the pro doubles circuit included six or eight
events with a prize money of around $100,000; in the
1990s this increased to ten or twelve events and
$150,000.
In 2000 the tour's players formed the International
Squash Doubles Association. In 2001 the Kellner Cup in
New York had a prize money purse of $100,000. In 2002-03
there were twenty ISDA tournaments with a total prize
money of $700,000, including the $130,000 Briggs Cup in
Rye, New York. Today there are a hundred and twenty-five
proper hardball doubles courts in North America. There
is one in Tijuana, Mexico and three in Asia at the Royal
Bangkok Sports Club in Thailand, the Tanglin Club in
Singapore and the Raintree Club in Kuala Lumpur. In 1935
three courts were laid out following USSRA
specifications at the St. John's Wood Squash Club,
Prince's Club and Ladies' Carlton Club in London and the
Edinburgh Sports Club in Scotland. Starting in 1937 the
Squash Rackets Association held national doubles
tournaments for both amateurs and professionals and
England played Scotland in an annual Test match in
doubles. The Second World War led to the destruction of
the St. John's Wood and Ladies Carlton courts and
Prince's closed, but Edinburgh still maintains its
hardball doubles court.
Today softball doubles is the norm outside North
America. In 1988 the Royal Automobile Club constructed
two softball doubles courts at their Woodcote Park
clubhouse outside London. The courts were thirty-two
feet by twenty-five, which was proclaimed the standard
softball doubles width. With sliding wall technology
made common by the German-based court building company
ASB, the inchoate game appeared around the world. In
1997 the first World Softball Doubles Championships were
held in Hong Kong. The biggest showcase was the
Commonwealth Games. At both Kuala Lumpur in 1998 and
Manchester in 2002, men's, women's and mixed doubles
were medal events.
VIII THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT ...
The future of squash has never been brighter. Technology
has forever shattered the inherent limitations of this
racquet, ball and wall game. Racquets are much lighter
and stronger today, making the game more exciting. The
ball is now consistent throughout the world. Canada
adopted softball standards in the late 1970s and the
U.S. and Mexico changed in the early 1990s. The
all-glass portable court came into existence in the
early 1980s. This greatly expanded gallery size for pro
events which helped fuel more sponsorship. Television
also became a reality with the glass walls. Because of
portable courts, squash tournaments have been staged in
stunning locations: in Grand Central Terminal, New
York's famous train station; in Canary Wharf, London's
flashy shopping center; in Royal Albert Hall; at
Symphony Hall, the landmark auditorium in Boston; and
most famously at the base of the Pyramids at Giza
outside Cairo. These high-profile events are the leading
edge of the twenty-first century squash juggernaut. The
game is global. A company from Washington, D.C. is
building courts in St. Petersburg. Most balls were made
in Barnsley, Great Britain until the early 2000s when
production was moved to the Philippines. Racquets are
sold from Denver and London. Germany has gone from a
dozen courts in 1973 to six thousand and boasts two
million active players. More than twenty nations have
players ranked in the top one hundred in the men's world
rankings.
In not quite one hundred and forty years squash has gone
from a schoolboy pastime to the most exhilarating,
exhausting and explosive game in the world.
