life lessons

HARE OVER TORTOISE: Squashers Ignore Aesop’s Lesson

My British colleague, Duncan Walsh, once ran the length of a squash court twenty-two times…

…only, instead of stopping, as reason would suggest, he caught his breath and repeated the same feat

FIFTY consecutive times! When he was on his twentieth set, I felt the shame of my own laziness. When he reached his fortieth, I almost felt ashamed to know the guy. One would think that such a self-imposed fate - almost as desperate as that of Sisyphus - would brand the intrinsic value of strategic squash into one’s psyche. Most people would choose to play deliberately, knowing all too well that failure to do so would result in yet another walk down squash’s 384-inch wooden plank.

Or, conversely, you could just go on running-ragged like my friend Duncan does. Jonah Barrington has a squash specific classification for this type of player’s motivation: "inside every great squash player is a secret sadist: there’s nothing more satisfying than to be able to reduce another player outwardly calm and capable to a long dribble of sweat." As they say, there is a fine line that distinguishes brilliance from insanity. While most shotmakers often judge a good performance to be a short performance (Adrian Ezra used to look at his watch at the onset of every match), the opposite is true with the sadist: the more torture, the better. You won’t see the true squash sadist smile until you’ve returned your serve into the ground out of exhaustion. Which side of the coin do you fit on?

The sadist/tortoise/runner versus the shotmaker/hare is the frame of one of the oldest debates in squash. A resounding number of squash players would probably put themselves on the shotmaking side of the coin. Similar to golf’s handicap inflation, squashers will boost their skills either by upping their rating or by bragging about their shotmaking abilities. Squash is still very much a male dominated sport and it is does not satiate one’s testosterone drive if you don’t go for your shots. If you’re riding really high in the saddle, you might wear a holey t-shirt or slip a little bit of trash talk…trust me, it happens more than you think.

Mr. Barrington’s satirization highlights one of the most profound contradictions in the game: although the length is the best shot in the game, there is a certain negative stigma that is attached to players who master it. Having been to at least a hundred squash clubs, it has always perplexed me why squashers associate a good squash player with one who goes for this shot. Other than the testosterone factor, I think another factor is the impact of media and exhibition matches. art of the problem, like anything, is the misconceptions that arise. The disparity between what the public perceives as a function of what is pushed in public versus what the reality is of the game.

The movers and shakers of squash, in any given era, have always sought to improve the game and position it as far into the international public eye as possible. Although we have twenty million players of the game, our relatively small sport has always sought more credibility, by way of Olympic representation, more sponsorship money, and more media coverage. In the 1970s and 1980s, the answer seemed to fit the marketing fad of that time: fitness. Greats such as Jonah Barrington and Geoff Hunt extended the credibility of the sport by training so hard as to ensure that if the rest of the competition wanted to keep pace, they would have to dedicate themselves to the effort full-time. By raising the attritional levels to the highest possible levels, Barrington and Hunt also made such shotmakers as Qamar Zaman more credible by the sheer argument that shots are that much more exciting if someone is fit enough to go retrieve them and give the shotmaker another opportunity to stun the crowd.

But, by the late 1980s, the powers that be decided they had enough of watching Jansher Khan and Chris Ditmar battle it out over one five minute 200 shot rally after another. A few important developments occurred over the next five to ten years to move the focus away from fitness towards shotmaking: unknown sports that have become synonymous with the xgames began to gain credibility by creating a media glitz; Europeans began looking towards America to be the driving force in sponsorship dollars. towards us and get hardball gurus; and

If you put this mix together: the trend of small sports entering the market by being flashy, Americans holding the reins, and the predominantly maleness of the game, there is only one clarion call: shotmaking.

Give the ball to Americans and they will rock the cradle. We love glitz and drama. As George C. Scott said in Patton: "Americans love the big league ball players, the fastest runners, the toughest boxers…" Call it our contrarian nature or our struggle with conflicting values, but if you give a sport to an American, there is little doubt that he will reshape it to make it uniquely his.

For the most part, people tend relate to and support whatever side of the argument that they themselves possess, even if they secretly respect the other side more because of their deficiency in it. Which is a good thing, since it is the nature of the specator spectator is to take sides.

In terms of promoting our game, sure, we need to get the right spin and perhaps even modify the game accordingly (e.g. some argue for changing matches to four out of seven games and playing to seven point with point-a-rally scoring).

squash is not painted in such black and white terms: It’s fair to say that any given era will have shotmakers and sadists. Squash simply wouldn’t be as interesting if that weren’t the case: just as you can’t appreciate evil without good, you can’t appreciate the shotmakers skill without the sadist, and vice versa.

Squash’s preeminent shotmakers (e.g. Qamar Zaman, Brett Martin, Jonathon Power) have been truly great, but the steady patient strategic well-rounded players (e.g. Jonah Barrington, Geoff Hunt, Jahangir Khan, Peter Nicol) have historically been the greatest. Victory speaks for Aesop, but squashers still choose to ignore histories lessons. As Jonah demonstrates, nobody wants to be known as a runner and such an association promotes insecurities. At the end of the day victory speaks for itself: people ultimately don’t remember the nice guy or the best looking guy or the funniest guy; victory speaks for itself.

The next time you have the urge to blurt out "play your shot" after viewing a succession of lengths, if you choose to ignore Jonah’s quip, remember one thing: the T is situated closer to the back wall than it is to the front and, therefore, shots to the back have to be more precise than shots to the front because a player can get to them with fewer steps. Food for thought the next time you see a winning length.