Daily Squash Report – Memphis Flyer

To anyone who plays racquet sports, the news that Prince is bankrupt is like hearing that Wilson failed at footballs or McDonald’s flopped at making burgers.

Prince may not have invented the oversized racquet, but for my money — a few thousand dollars in various racquets and other equipment over four decades — nobody tried harder or did it better. As a player, I appreciated the quality and durability of their products. As a fan, I am grateful for their sponsorships. And as a wordsmith, I marvel at their ability to make racquets that are virtually identical to other Prince racquets and other manufacturers’ racquets seem exciting, cutting edge, different, performance-enhancing and, of course, new. Entire issues of tennis magazines are devoted to racquet hype.

The real advances in racquets in tennis, racquetball, and squash came when small wooden or metal racquets were replaced by ever-larger and ever-lighter composite racquets. Within eras, the racquets were more alike than different. The unenviable job of the Prince marketing and sales departments was to make each innovation of a few grams of weight, change in balance, a few inches more or less in head size, and different shapes seem as exciting as a new Corvette or the latest offering from Apple.

“After considering several business options, the board of directors and the senior management team firmly believe that the Chapter 11 filing is not only a necessary step but also the right thing to do to ensure a secure future for Prince,” said Gordon Boggis, president and CEO of Prince Sports Inc. “We have a long history, and are planning for an exciting future, focused on game-changing, product innovation, engineered to take players’ games to the next level. Securing this protection will help us to continue to focus on that vision.”

Now, about that vision. Can better equipment change your game or take your game to the next level?

Tennis coach Vic Braden, who is one part teaching pro and three parts psychologist, wit, and salesman, once said at a clinic in Memphis that “it’s not the racquet, it’s the turkey on the end of the handle.” A killer marketing phrase, or rather a killer-of-marketing phrase, if there ever was one.

In his book “Open,” Andre Agassi said the biggest change in the game in his final years was not bigger racquets or bigger players but the new elastic polyester string that imparts more spin on the ball.

Sarah Hatgas, tennis coach at Rhodes College, says “New tech in racquets makes it easier on the elbow! The game has developed into a power game from the baseline and volleying is becoming a lost art.”

Senior player Nancy Gates says “I would in no way consider myself a racquet sports expert, but at my age my primary concern is about how badly my body gets destroyed by the sport, and how equipment may or may not exacerbate the pain. There are some racquets that are stiff and cause my elbow to hurt, so I stay away from those. Other than that, any racquet, once I get used to it, probably has no effect one way or the other on my game. I have one bad foot, so shoes are key for me. If I don’t have the right shoes, I cannot play. In fact, I have given away two different pair of brand new shoes after only one wearing, because they weren’t quite right – hundreds of dollars wasted.”

Randy Stafford, a former racquetball pro, said that rule changes adopted by the sport in 1997 increased racquet size about 25 percent which resulted in 50 percent more hitting area for more power. “This change was made in racquetball due to the manufacturers’ demands to increase sales and royalties. No question, the changes to the racquet size changed the game from a control and manageable power game, to one of excess speed that not only changed the original design and intent of the game, but increased the speed of the ball to a level that is quite unmanageable for the everyday player.”

Ted Gross, former squash pro and editor of the Daily Squash Report, says, “Nothing to back this up but my opinion is racquets (assuming we are comparing only top-of-the-line models) make a difference in tennis but not in squash. Hitting a tennis ball well is substantially more complicated than hitting a squash ball well, and differences in frame stiffness and head balance and even grip shapes are therefore quite apparent. The grip over-wrap is the most important piece of equipment in squash, because before the invention of the Tournagrip you couldn’t hold onto the racquet no matter what you tried.”

I’m with Gross and Gates. The most underrated piece of equipment is a $2 roll of grip tape. I don’t see how players did without it, especially tennis players in the hot and humid South back in the days of wooden racquets with slippery leather grips or gauzy overwraps. Second place is shoes with gum soles that are much lighter than those Goodyear-rubber soled clodhoppers you see on the tennis court. Gum-soled shoes are designed for indoor court sports but once you get used to them anything else is like putting on ankle weights.

To the extent that overgrips extend the life of racquets by making players less likely to discard them, Prince was doomed not by faulty marketing or Internet sales or all those fancy $200 racquets produced by its competitors but by a $2 piece of tape.

John White (2nd from right)

Baseball fans have their fantasy camps where they pay big bucks to put on uniforms and spikes and play a few innings with Hall of Famers. Golfers have their 18-hole pro-ams. Tennis pros have hit-and-giggle exhibitions with club players. And “Dancing With the Stars” has retired jocks like Martina Navratilova and Warren Sapp learning new moves.

There are adult camps for almost every sport including squash, an indoor court sport that combines the athleticism of tennis with the power of racquetball, the stamina of marathon running, and the grace of dancing. Last week, Memphis squash players decided that rather than go to camp, we would bring the pro to us. With a key assist from Ted Gross, publisher of the Daily Squash Report, the pro we decided on was John White, ranked #1 in the world in 2004, and now coaching at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

It’s a small sport but it’s a big world. Squash is mainly played in private clubs and universities in the Northeastern United States but has much broader appeal in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Middle East. When we went shopping for a pro, we wanted the best one we could afford. At 38, White is younger than Shaquille O’Neal, Brett Favre, and Andre Agassi and the same age as Derek Jeter. Some of the pros he used to beat are still on the tour.

When he was on the tour, White was known as the hardest hitter ever. He would go for ridiculous shots, dive for balls, give away a few easy points, cuss once in a while, smash an occasional racquet, and laugh about it afterwards. As White’s contemporary Jonathan Power said of him, “You can’t bet on John but you can’t bet against him either.” Now he’s a husband and parent of four kids worried about making the baseball or track team. In other words, he is, in some ways, just like us.

Most important, he seemed like a guy who would drink some beer, get on the court and give us some pointers, put on a show, and encourage the fantasy that, despite our physical limitations and our advancing years, we could still achieve a higher level of mediocrity. We had seen White on DVD’s and YouTube clips but never in person. As one of our players said to him while we were watching one of his matches on a DVD, “You look like you don’t give a shit.” It was meant as a compliment about White’s refusal to play a mechanical game, and that is exactly how it was taken. It so happened that White lost both of the matches we watched that night, and someone said “Are there any DVDs of matches you won?” He laughed, raised a beer, and we knew we had our man.

And for two days on the squash courts at Rhodes College and in post-workout dinners, he gave us our money’s worth. Our ranks included three doctors, three professors, a barbecue restaurant manager, a journalist, two businessmen, and a doctoral student. Our ages range from 30 to 62. All of us have been playing at least eight years and most of us get on the court three or four times a week when not injured.

He played a couple of games with each of us and managed to invent ways to “lose” a few points while also giving us a taste of what a ball going 150 miles an hour on a court 32 feet long and 21 feet wide looks like. He put us through conditioning drills that left us winded and sore the next day. He played our best player, Egyptian Mohamad Elmeliegy, and made him look as outclassed as most of the rest of us are when we play Mohamad, a 30-year-old with several years of professional training.

It was a reminder that world-class athletes are not like the rest of us, or even like good college athletes. John paid Mohamad the compliment of playing hard and pushing him to the limit. He retrieved balls in the corners with ease, rarely taking more than three steps. On the rare times when a ball got past him, he simply turned, flicked his wrist, and slammed it off the back wall while he reclaimed his position at center court as the ball floated to the front wall. His movement, perfected by tens of thousands of hours of practice since he was a young teenager in Brisbane, Australia, was flawless and effortless. Honestly, it was more like “Dancing With the Stars” than sport.

In our strategy and beer-drinking sessions (minimal difference), he opined on racquets (more alike than different), shoes (still likes Prince NFS), American squash pros (unlikely to crack the top 25), balls (under some conditions, pros hit them so hard they expand to almost 150 percent of their original size and bounce like tennis balls), Egyptian dominance (take the ball early), Aussie decline (his hometown once boasted 200 court complexes but now has a dozen or two), squash getting into the Olympics (unlikely unless the host country grants a wild card), sportsmanship (he once saw a player disqualified in the warm-up for not hitting the ball to his opponent often enough), college recruiting (go international), the legendary Jahangir Khan (a near-supernatural ability to know where his opponent was going to hit the ball), and Trinity College Coach Paul Assainte and his team’s 252-match win streak which was broken this year by Yale (class guy and team).

And, of course, those pointers. Most of which I have already forgotten, which is probably of little consequence. The one I do remember came when I asked if a senior player was going to try to improve one thing, should it be strength, flexibility, fitness, or skills?

He just smiled and pointed at his head.