Last weekend I lived the dream. It’s not a dream that many share, I grant you, but it qualifies nonetheless. It’s the dream of the racquet-sports-junkie. On Saturday and Sunday morning I planted myself on the couch and watched the women’s and men’s singles finals of the Australian Open. I’m guessing you did the same, though you probably didn’t do it exactly the way I did, leaning forward the entire time, notebook in hand, scrawling borderline-indecipherable fragments like “RF: going inside-in a lot, saves 3 breakers, sw, holds 2 aces, cat mouse rallies.”
What else could a racquet-sports lover ask from one 24-hour period? Only this: an opportunity to brave freezing weather and a 90-minute train ride from New York to Princeton, N.J., so he could plant himself on a hard wooden bleacher in a superheated underground gym and watch the university’s squash team play.
My uncle Bob, a retired professor and fellow tennis and squash player, had invited me. I’d been to a few of these matches in the past; for someone who loves the sport but rarely gets to see it played at a high level, it’s a chance I can’t pass up—the Ivy League has the best college squash players in the nation. Which really shouldn’t be a surprise, considering that there isn’t a whole lot of college squash played anywhere else in the United States. The sport remains for the most part a province of the Northeast’s old-line private schools and clubs. When it was decided, close to two decades ago, to abandon the version of the game that had been traditionally played in America, hardball, for the international softball game, it wasn’t the professionals who led the way. It wasn’t the colleges or the teaching pros or the national USTA-style organization, either. It was the prep schools.
Princeton was playing Yale, an Ivy rival as well as a rival for the NCAA title in past years. It was standing-room-only in the cramped, boxy squash center. As always, the crowd was a mix of aging WASP (think side-parted hair, toothy smiles, wide-whale corduroys, scuffed loafers) and fraternity (think backwards caps and hangovers). Each time I’ve visited, there’s also been, wedged in between these two groups, a fashionable, well-coiffed, high-cheekboned couple, a young man and woman who were surely the king and queen of their respective high school proms and will someday be at the center of a Ralph Lauren ad campaign. This time, however, the girl who fit this description was sitting by herself as the match began. A little later I spotted the guy who fit the description; he was also by himself, on the other side of the bleachers. I knew it was only a matter of time. At the end of the first game, the girl got up and walked over to sit next to him. He put his arm around her. They walked out later hand in hand. All was right with the universe; or at least in the lucky gated universe that the young, the rich, the smart, and the hot call home.
Like all of the other upper-crust racquet-sport temples I’ve visited—Merion Cricket Club outside of Philly, the Queen’s Club in London, the Harvard Club in Manhattan, the Tuxedo Club in upstate New York—there’s a certain deliberate and just barely discernible shabbiness around the edges of the Princeton squash courts. There’s an aristocratic sensibility at these places, rather than a commercial one: You shouldn’t seem to be trying too hard to impress. At Princeton, the courts aren’t sparklingly clean; their sidewalls are as black with ball marks as any I’ve seen. And there’s no attempt to hide or cover the Spartan concrete blocks that make up the rest of the space’s walls. Still, there’s something swanky about it to my eyes. I’ve always glimpsed the Ivy League from just outside of its gates, just close enough to romanticize it, just close enough to want to be part of it. And as a former college athlete, I was awed by the giant plaque that listed all of the All Americans who had played for the school.
We sat behind the largest show court, where the matches pitting the top three players would be held. The No. 3s for each school stepped out onto the court. On the surface, neither fit the preppy bill. The Princeton player was tall, the Yalie shorter, but each was stockier and less rangy than the norm for squash players. They went through their warm-ups with the extreme casualness common to everyone who knows how to play the sport well. What always amazes me, though, is how a good squash player won’t appear to be any less casual during the match itself. That was true with these two as well. They seemed to be walking around the court, even as they covered every inch of it.
Unlike tennis, I learn more from seeing what squash players at this level, rather than the world-class level, do on court. The pros play, as they say, a game with which I’m not familiar. There doesn’t seem to be a ball anywhere on the court that they can’t get. Which leads me to wonder: How do you construct a point? What possible strategy can you use? From what I know, the primary tactic is to make your opponent more tired than you—that would never work for me.
College squash players make incredible gets and play exhaustingly long points, but with meticulous patience they can create openings for winners—you can see a point to the points. And this match turned out to be a dramatic one. The Princeton player won two tight games to start, but he began to tire badly in the third. He threw away that game and the fourth. I felt for him; getting tired in the middle of a squash match can be an alarming experience. You have to keep playing, even if you can’t walk a straight line from one side of the court to the other. And it was happening to the Princeton kid in front of a hundred spectators, his coach, and his teammates.
As riveting as the match was—I was exhausted just watching the rallies, as well as being absurdly nervous as it drew to its close—there was another element to it that I found even more striking. When these two players bumped into each other or got in each other’s way, which happens constantly in squash, they didn’t glare or mutter or throw their hands in the air or roll their eyes. In fact, they never failed to pat each other on the shoulder or back. When one of them hit what could have been perceived as a lucky shot, he invariably put his racquet up to signal, tennis-style, his apology.
This was new. Squash players generally don’t apologize for mishit winners. Coming from tennis, I’ve always done it, to the point where some of my opponents become exasperated and say, “What are you sorry for, winning the point?” On occasion, a ball will land in the “nick,” the spot where the wall meets the floor, and carom wildly or not bounce at all. The first time I played the sport, I hit a high-arcing lob that landed right where the back wall met the floor. The ball stopped dead and I won the point. As I started to put my racquet up to apologize, my opponent said, “Never apologize for perfect length.” (“Length” being the equivalent of “depth” in tennis.) These kids were apologizing for perfect length.
I remembered the first time I’d come to see a Princeton squash match, against Harvard in 2003. There was a cutthroat mentality on display, and a taunting attempt to intimidate opponents. I hadn’t been surprised at all, having spent my teenage years happily engaging in the crude mind games of junior tennis. It was the new civility that was the stunner this time around. While the players still exhibited frustration with the referee's decisions—one Yalie drilled a ball into the glass back wall, eliciting a round of boos from the scandalized Ivy audience—there was very little tension between them in the matches I saw.
I recognized the upheld-racquet apology from tennis. But I also recognized the respectful, no-harm-done, we-know-it's-just-a-game shoulder tap, and the pat on the back. These came from professional tennis as well. More specifically, they came from the way today’s pros greet each other at the net after a match—with a nod, a half-smile, an upward-gripped handshake, and a tap on the loser’s shoulder from the winner as they walk toward the chair umpire. It hardly seemed a coincidence that the earlier taunt-filled match I’d seen had occurred in 2003, right before the current men’s generation took over the sport, when the face of the game was changing from Lleyton Hewitt’s to Roger Federer’s and Rafael Nadal’s. What other racquet sport do these squash kids see on TV? It’s certainly not their own.
If squash is now in the grip of Federer and Nadal, it was once even more deeply under the spell of John McEnroe. The most famous and popular squash player of the last 15 years was a red-headed, hot-headed Canadian named Jonathan Power. He was known as the Johnny Mac of squash, and he never met an argument he couldn’t prolong—sometimes to comic effect, mostly to irritating effect. Power retired a couple of years ago, but not having seen much professional squash since, I wondered if his sport’s McEnroe Era had gone with him. I had my doubts; those guys can be pretty ornery. Something about being right next to your opponent seems to get people more agitated than when they’re separated by a net.
The week before I went to Princeton there’d been a professional squash tournament at Grand Central in Manhattan, but I hadn’t been able to get over there to see any of it. A woman I play with regularly, Lissa, had seen a few sessions. I asked her how it was, and without any prompting, she said, “What I love is how respectful the players are to each other now.” Maybe, after all these years, the stereotype of a professional racquet-wielder is no longer a wild-haired McEnroe-esque ranter. Maybe Federer’s serene warrior has taken its place.
As I’ve written here, I prefer the new code of tennis behavior, but not without the occasional reservation. I feel like the respect Federer gets and inspires has at times worked in his favor by muting the desire of his opponents to beat him; that removing everything personal from the competition can lead to conciliatory tennis (the same has been true at times with Nadal among his fellow Spaniards). And I like a little immature, heat-of-the-moment conflict from time to time—competing involves everything we’ve got, the pretty and the ugly, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But I had to agree with Lissa when she said, of the squash pros’ mutual respect, “It’s so nice to see that.”
In the fifth and final game in Princeton, the Yalie went ahead 9-5 (the first to 11 wins). He won the next point and, thinking that the match was over, threw his arms in the air as if he’d won. When he realized his mistake, he grinned in embarrassment. His Princeton opponent, exhausted, hands on his knees, breathing hard, flashed him back a grin. It was a human and friendly gesture. While their gets and rallies amazed me, this moment did something different, and maybe even unexpected at a sporting event: It made me feel good.
Distracted, the Yalie lost the next four points to make it 10-9. The tension was higher than ever. It broke in a wave of disappointment when the home-team player put the next ball in the tin and handed the match to his opponent. The two of them shook hands, nodded, patted each other on the shoulder, and walked slowly toward the referee behind the court. Does that remind you of anyone?
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Have a good weekend.