Courts & Racquets

Anybody in the U. S. with a $1.98 racquet and a pair of sneakers can find a lawn tennis game in season. But the four indoor ball-and-racquet games--court tennis, racquets, squash racquets and squash tennis--are still the exclusive pastimes of folks on the sunnier side of the railroad tracks. In all the U. S., for example, there are perhaps fewer than 500 persons who have ever taken a cut at a court tennis ball. Racquets players have been so few that one ball maker, a man named Jeffries Mailings, until his death 20 years ago, made all the balls required by all the world's players in his two-story home in Woolwich, England. His firm still carries on.

Of all the court games, squash tennis is the only one made in the U. S. A. Boston-born in 1890, it has since been squeezed out there and almost everywhere else by simpler & slower squash racquets, nowadays is largely the hobby of a fairly small group of players in the Manhattan area. It is played with a green, net-covered, two-and-one-half-inch rubber ball and a ten-ounce lawn-tennis-style racquet on a 32-by-18 1/2-ft. court. Players alternate in serving against a wall, score points only while in service.

The Babe Ruth of squash tennis is the New York Athletic Club's 31-year-old Harry Florian Wolf, who has held the so-called national amateur championship for nine years. Last week, on the slick white courts of Manhattan's Harvard Club, Slugger Wolf pasted his way through a bracket of 37 aspirants to his tenth championship, but as far as 99.44% of U. S. sport followers were concerned, he might as well have won the ash-barrel-rolling title.

Parent of all the racquet games is court tennis, which Nausicaa and her maidens reputedly played by batting a ball with their hands. For the last 700 years it has been played with a lopsided, gut-strung racquet that looks as if it might have been left out in the rain. Once the game was a pastime of the European masses, but like other mass delights, it has become much too good for them. Since the 15th Century every British and French king worth mentioning has played it, moving one of its chroniclers to write: "It is the characteristic game of the men who organize states. . . ." Others have professed to find in it the philosophic satisfaction and infinite variety of chess, viewing it as a sure-fire equalizer of the bully type and the foxy shot maker. One of its stratagems, a shot-placing gambit called the "chase," is said to have a philosophy all its own.

What keeps the average sedentary young executive from toning up at court tennis is mainly that there are only twelve courts in the U. S., and a proper court costs some $100,000, must be plastered with a secret British cement apocryphally said to be made from silt from the bed of the Thames. Courts are 110 ft. long, 38 ft. wide, with a net-covered recess behind the server's court called a dedans, in which the spectators sit. On the left of the server's court, and continuing along the same wall beyond the low-slung net into the hazard court, are other recesses called galleries and doors. Behind the receiver is another slot called a grille. Sloping down toward the court over these recesses and over the wall behind the receiver is a shedlike roof called a penthouse. The server serves the ball with a mighty cut, the deadliest trick being to make the ball backspin when it hits the penthouse roof and drop to the court "like a poached egg, limp, lifeless and with little bound." If this fails and a rally starts, the players may try to sink the ball in certain of the apertures for points.

Craftiest player in the U. S., and perhaps in the world, was the late Jay Gould, whose father imported the world's best professionals to teach him the game and who was supreme in this country from 1906 through 1925. Ogden Phipps is the game's current U. S. ranking amateur.

A racquets court costs only $50,000, has no royal recesses, is a 60-by-30-ft., four-wall court in which its few devotees play the fastest racquet game of all. The bats have small circular heads with long shafts, cost about $8, break at an alarming rate. The balls, worth about 60-c-, are made of tightly wrapped strips of cloth wound with twine and covered like a baseball, are slightly smaller than a golf ball, have put players' eyes out. With recovering, costing about 10-c-, balls can be made to last for 100 years. Played like four-wall handball, kin to pelota, pallone and other Basque games, it was probably originated by bored debtors in Fleet Street prison about 1800. Like court tennis, it was soon taken over by the notably solvent, is now the luxury of a comparative handful in the U. S. on 14 courts in exclusive clubs. Main U. S. racqueteer is a Manhattan broker, Robert Grant III.

Squash tennis and squash racquets are played on the same size court, are pretty much the same game, a foreshortened variety of racquets with not so much breakage. Courts can be built for as low as $3,000. Squash racquets is played with a shorter, sturdier variety of racquets bat. The ball looks about like a handball but is lighter.

Far ahead in popularity is squash racquets. Its votaries have increased in number some 5,000% in the last decade. Now there are countless courts in most important U. S. cities, usually in clubs and hotels, but often in Y. M. C. A. and lodge buildings. Favorite short-order exercise for the not too tired business man, a half-hour of squash racquets, which everybody calls squash, is equivalent to three times as much straight lawn tennis. Ideal for winter exercise, it can be learned in six months, is low on breakage and not too strenuous for any active man. It has recently attracted many women players. Most notable: British Margot Lumb, who beat Tennist Helen Jacobs last fall in the women's tennis at Forest Hills. The U. S. amateur championship, contested last month in Chicago, was won by Donald Strachan of Philadelphia.

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