Words: James Zug
If you go by purpose-built, playable and regularly used courts, squash is a game of the masses, with its tens of thousands of courts.
Other racket sports seem quaintly obscure: real tennis has forty-seven courts in five nations; racquets has twenty-seven in three nations; and stické tennis has two, both in England.
Yet there is a game with a richly impressive history that has just one active court: squash tennis.
Squash tennis an American invention, is basically playing tennis in a squash court. Today it is a completely unknown game but just over a century ago it was as popular as squash.
From the start, squash tennis was the step-brother of squash. The first squash courts in the U.S. were built in November 1884 at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. The teacher who put in the courts modelled them after what his college roommate had told him were the proper dimensions for squash courts—the roommate had gone to Harrow School, where squash was invented in the 1850s.
But the requisite squash balls and rackets, imported from London, were held up at Customs House in New York. The St. Paul’s boys decided not to wait for their English bats and balls but grabbed what they had lying around, and in the winter of 1884-85, that was going to be tennis balls and rackets. Tennis was all the rage in those Gilded Age years, and so the schoolboys slipped onto the new squash courts with tennis balls and tennis rackets.
The squash equipment eventually arrived, they dutifully switched over and played squash, but when they left St. Paul’s they went out into the world knowing two distinct games, both squash and squash tennis. At the turn of the twentieth century across America, both sports were in vogue.
Hundreds of courts in each variant were built, in country clubs, city clubs and private estates. The standards, agreed upon before the First World War, were that squash was an 18.5 foot wide court while squash tennis was a 17.5 court. (Both American sports hewed closer to the original court size and type of ball used at Harrow, while in the 1920s London squash players standardised a much wider court and a much much slower ball. But that is another, sadder story.)
The telltale difference in the two courts was in squash tennis there was a line that ran in the middle of the court from the front wall to the back wall. This was for serving: the ball had to drop onto that side of the court.
Squash in America only gained ascendence in the 1920 and mostly because squash tennis shot itself in the foot, speeding up its official ball and making it almost impossible for beginners to pick up the game. By the 1930s squash tennis shrunk to just New York, but it hung on tenaciously there, with more than a dozen clubs with courts in Manhattan alone and a very active winter league. Still, after the Second World War, the game declined as squash became a national sport in the States.
In the 1960s Dick Squires sparked a last-gasp revival. Squires was an ebullient New Yorker who infamously brought a gaggle of friends to the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City to play in one of the demonstration sports, a version of Basque pelota. Squires restarted the national squash tennis association, ran tournaments and published a promotional pamphlet.
In the 1970s, a Cuban-born member of the Princeton Club of New York, Pedro Bacallao, became dominant and in the 1980s Dick’s son Gary started playing. Bacallao v. Squires was the standard lineup for the finals.
Then the game faced an existential threat. Squash tennis courts had been slowly disappearing over the previous decades, getting converted to spin rooms or pilates studios or just torn down. (I grew up playing squash on a squash tennis court at my Philadelphia club, but it was taken down in the mid-1980s.) In the 1990s the U.S. switched from hardball to softball, which meant the 18.5-foot-wide hardball courts, which squash tennis had borrowed for decades, didn’t exist.
When I moved to Manhattan in 1996, I heard that there was still a remnant rearguard of squash tennis being played at the Yale Club of New York. Bill Rubin was the ringleader. Rubin, then in his late sixties, had been a top squash tennis player in the 1970s—he had reached the finals of the national championships in 1976 and 1979, only to be beaten by Bacallao.
Rubin took me out to one of the Yale Club’s about-to-disappear hardball courts, gave me a junior tennis racket and pulled out a low-compression tennis ball. He taught me a few of squash tennis’ rules—bouncing the ball as you served and scoring to fifteen (whether serving or not). The ball flew about like angry bees in a jar. A lot of the game was about moving forward, taking the ball off the back wall. And there was a lot of generosity about movement: the court was small and ball fast, so we needed a lot of lets.
In 2000, I discovered a derelict squash tennis court in Lower Manhattan. I pitched an article to The Atlantic, America’s leading monthly magazine, knowing that my editor was a longtime squash player. He accepted it and I went off to track down Gary Squires. We played squash tennis at Apawamis Club in Rye, outside New York City.
After we played, we went back to his house, and he showed me two giant leather scrapbooks containing hundreds of newspaper cuttings about squash tennis from the 1920s and 1930s. His father had been given the scrapbooks in the 1960s and now he had them—literally becoming the keeper of the game’s history.
The Atlantic article came out in mid-December 2001. In the piece, I outline the history of the game and its slow demise. I mention, nonchalantly, that squash tennis annually appeared in the New York Times feature in its sports pages on the Sunday nearest to New Year’s Day.
In it they listed the national champion of every possible sport. Squires told me that the Times would call him every December to ask who had won the squash tennis national championships and he’d say he had won it, whether the event had been held or not.
It was with great trepidation that I picked up the Times on Sunday 30 December 2001. I immediately got out the sports section and flipped to the national champions feature: “2001: LOOKING BACK; A Year of Champions: The Fastest, the Strongest, the Best.”
In cold agate they listed the champions of dozens of obscure sports: arm wrestling, bathtub racing, elephant polo, kickball, snowmobile racing, stickball, street luge. After squash racquets and before Steeplechase, there was nothing—squash tennis had missing. Squash tennis was officially dead, and I had put the final nail in the coffin.
I killed a game. And now I have helped bring it back to life.
I did try to make amends right away. In my 2003 history of U.S. squash book, I devoted a half dozen pages to squash tennis, giving it the most thorough historical examination it has ever gotten. But it was all in the past tense.
A few years ago at a junior squash tournament, Gary Squires’ sister Pam met me in a parking lot and handed over the two giant squash tennis scrapbooks. I deposited them in the archive at the Arlen Specter US Squash Center.
In October 2024 my wife and I moved to England for a six-month sojourn. We settled in a village near Moreton Morrell. Moreton was built by an American, Charles Garland who had come to England, married an Englishwoman, erected a real tennis court in 1905 near his mansion.
Since he was a New Yorker and it was 1905, he also tossed in a proper squash tennis court: 16.2 feet wide by 32.1 feet long, with the signature line up the middle.
It would be the only bonafide squash tennis court ever built outside the States and today it’s the world’s only active court. There are a couple of extant squash tennis courts left in the U.S. (the one that triggered the Atlantic article in Lower Manhattan was converted into condos in 2005). I have walked on one in Aiken, South Carolina, in a house called The Squash Court.
It originally had two squash tennis courts: one was converted into a living room, the other, 16.8 feet wide by 31.7 feet long, with a gorgeous skylight, could be playable. On Cumberland Island in Georgia, the Plum Orchard mansion has a court.
Built by the Carnegia family in 1903, it measures 15.2 by 32.7. It is well-maintained and the final stop on the daily tours of the mansion but hasn’t been used for decades in large part because it is situated in an historic museum on a remote part of an unpopulated island forty-five minutes by ferry from the mainland.
When I came to Moreton last October, I was thrilled to see that around 2010 the club had decided to restore the squash tennis court. The beautiful mahogany wood was gleaming. They even had a new courtside banner explaining the game—the information came from my 2003 book.
There was a table tennis table in the middle of the court—in the winter, Moreton uses the squash tennis court for its ping pong league team. In 2012 and in 2015 Moreton had staged a self-styled World Squash Tennis Championship. Both draws had featured only British players. Assistant professional Lloyd Pettiford dreamt up the idea to have another world championship. I thought it was a great idea but only if we could get an actual squash tennis player to enter.
I connected again with Gary Squires. He harbored no ill-will about the New York Times fiasco. He was now sixty-eight, living in Connecticut, recently retired from his job as a tennis pro and a happily involved grandparent.
Squires graciously agreed to come over to the world championship; in fact, he left New York on a Friday, landed in London on Saturday, played in the tournament on Sunday and flew back on Monday.
Equipment was an experiment. For rackets we tried court tennis and regular tennis bats. Squires brought over a handful of junior tennis rackets, twenty-six inches long and light and they played the best. We used the closest approximation to a proper squash tennis ball, which turned out to be a padel ball.
The one-day tournament was brilliant with competitive matches and a leisurely lunch in the middle. On court there was a beautiful balance between power and finesse, with many angled shots, engrossing, back-and-forth rallies and opportunities for the occasional put-away winner. It was a bit like a combination of squash, squash 57 and padel.
Squires, seeded one in honor of his championship pedigree, and I faced off in the semifinals, and I escaped with a four-game victory. In the finals, I played Philip Shaw-Hamilton, a longtime squash and real tennis player who had captured the event in 2012. We also had a nip-and-tuck four-gamer that lasted an hour and a half before I won the last point.
We came off court and everyone said the same exact thing: that was fun, let’s do it again.
