Smaller the Ball, Better the Sport
Size Certainly does Matter
When it comes to club sports, there’s only one rule that applies: the smaller the ball, the better the sport, as coined by author Lisa Birnbach.
Anything larger than a tennis ball demands excommunication from clubland, though it appears that tennis balls, clocking in at 2.57–2.7 inches in diameter, are almost an inch larger than regulation golf balls (1.68 inches); the latter loses out to squash by merely a tenth of an inch (1.57–59 inches). Sailing, of course, requires no balls (except those of steel); thus it is the very best of these. I was bred with the express purpose of learning those sports; any career (such as writing or archaeology or philosophy) merely an interlude between games. Of course, nothing here ought to be construed as me being any good at any of this, and for that, I ask for your forbearance.
Tennis
Let’s start with the biggest ball of them all—tennis—and perhaps the oldest. I’ve always harboured a great dislike of tennis for its French origins, originating across the channel from civilisation sometime in the twelfth century, according to the game’s governing body. Of course, the club version of tennis—lawn tennis—was invented by an Englishman, a certain Major Walter C. Wingfield, while the French, antiquated version of tennis, court tennis, lives on in Newport Racquet and Tennis in Newport, RI, and the Racquet and Tennis in Manhattan.
The first club to feature lawn tennis courts in the United States was the still-extant Seabright Lawn Tennis and Cricket Club of Rumson, New Jersey, in 1877, followed shortly after by the New Orleans Lawn Tennis Club in New Orleans, Louisiana; the latter, however, on a technicality, is the first lawn tennis club in the United States, having been founded a tad earlier.
Most club tennis, however, is played in tennis whites: white collared polos and white shorts for men, and corresponding attire for women. In New England, tennis very much remains a Memorial Day to Labour Day activity, though, thankfully for global warming, the tennis season has been known to run through to October in some locales.
Much tennis today is played on artificial clay, also known as Har-Tru, after the Virginia-based firm that makes them. There are, of course, always grass courts, which are much slower and have a lower bounce than clay courts, which always play faster. The maintenance on both of them, however, has rendered them increasingly difficult financially to retain, and Har-Tru courts are the majority of club courts today.
Tennis is an odd game: it is almost always the most visible of all the sports because it is generally played outdoors, and prone to the formation of cliques based not only on ability but also sociability. Each club must have at least one of each of the following characters: the players who insist on playing on the most visible court at the most visible time; the players who only hit to each other diagonally across the court and are loathe to move, digging into the Har-Tru; the players who think that they are the next incarnation of the tennis professional but crumble rapidly under pressure. Cliques on court solidify into cliques at the bar with alacrity.
Even odder than the game and those who play it is how it is scored. You start at love, zero. The first point in a game is fifteen; the next thirty; but somehow the third forty; and finally, game. Six games win a set, and you need two sets to win. If both players are at forty each—a deuce, which somehow comes from two—then a player must win two consequent points to win a game.
Golf
I’ve long preferred the other Scottish invention—scotch, preferably Islay—but much to my chagrin the editors insist that I include this “other” Scottish invention. To my further dismay golf is the club sport with the longest history in the United States, unless one discounts sailing, which is how we got here in the first place (though I sincerely doubt that the passengers on the Mayflower were zipping around in Lasers through the Cape for entertainment and a sense of make-believe adventure). Invented in Scotland, and brought over to the United States by the Dutch, golf was being played in Albany year-round a mere three decades after the Mayflower found refuge in the Cape.
Usually played over eighteen holes, some courses and golfers choose to play an abridged version of the game, at nine. Golf might be the only game where those who are better at it play less: the fewer the strokes you take to get the ball to the hole, the lower your score, and the individual with the fewest strokes to cover eighteen or nine holes, depending on what you’re playing, is the winner. When you step onto the course, you do it with no more than fourteen clubs in your bag, and a handful of tees, upon which you may choose to hoist your ball to avoid scratching and damaging the green.
Squash
Of all the sports in this roundup, squash has the darkest origins: at a men’s prison in the vicinity of Harrow, one of the six holy “public” schools of the mother country. Evidently in the pursuit of some nostalgia de la boue, some Old Harrovians decided to pursue the perfection of this prisoners’ pastime, and thus the game of squash was born. Imported into the United States by the proto-preppies at St. Paul’s in Concord, New Hampshire, the game rose in popularity, until in 1923, Harvard and Yale went racquet-to-racquet at the Racquet and Tennis Club in Manhattan (Harvard wins and never stops gloating). Long seen as the preserve of WASP-y New Englanders, the sport is dominated by a good mix of the old guard and those of some connection to the British Empire (my squash coach is of Rhodesian extraction).
Modern squash is played with a squishy, rubber ball that tends to die upon bouncing unless it’s kept hot by constantly smacking it against the wall. Players play through eleven points to win a game, unless one ties at ten, in which case the norm is that a player must win two consecutive points to win a game. Matches are best of five games; three games to a player renders him victorious. Serves go to the winner of the toss, and then to the winner of the point.
The squash world is incestuous. Most squash players are hackneyed masochists who love being beaten time and time again until they find some glimmer of hope and attack viciously. The learning curve is steep, and very rarely has an adult learnt how to play at any decent level in anything less than a year of dedicated effort, though miracles are known to happen. The cost of playing decent squash is extremely high, and those inducted into the group are usually awarded with camaraderie and friendship that is hard to replicate elsewhere.
Out of sheer partiality I will insist that squash players are the most decent of them all, but the game itself lends itself to decent chaps: players are required to call lets—replays—on themselves by the norms of club squash, or strokes—awarding the point to the other player—depending on the level of interference in gameplay, which is quite unlike any of the other sports. But squash players also trust each other: you’re sharing a small court with a ball whizzing around and racquets swinging rapidly as you scrape past each other to dominate the ‘T’.
Sailing
This is by far the oddest activity in this round-up: how can you be social when you zip past each other in your miniscule Lasers and Sunfish? Well, I didn’t decide what made it past the shibboleth-makers for clubland, and thus, here we are.
When you’re out on the water, the wind’s in your hair, and sometimes feeling like a labradoodle is really all there is to life. The first yacht clubs in the United States were founded in the 1840s; in 1844, the New York Yacht Club cemented the association between New York and Newport, RI on its inaugural journey on the Gimrack (NYYC still maintains clubhouses in both Manhattan and Newport).
Sailing is a curious prediction. The conditions, even on the best of summer days, are less than optimal after being sprayed with salty seawater over the course of a few hours. Even with the best of caution, it is still remarkably easy to hit something in the water: things you can’t see, things that exist in those dark depths that pop up regardless of whether you care for them or not.
The water is a treacherous place, but, when done right, represents true freedom, freedom in a way that seems almost impossible to truly replicate anywhere in the modern world. There’s no technology, nothing—just nature and you. Very few things in the world today remain completely devoid of technology; when you sail innovation lurks in the background, in the materials, but never bubbling up to the surface. But the experience is fundamentally pre-modern: it is man and nature, in communion, once again. You could be sailing down the Nile or across the Mediterranean or on the Sound, and the feeling is liminal, ancestral even.
You know, after all, in clubland, size does ultimately matter: the smaller the ball, the better the sport; the shorter the boat, the better the sailor. Clubland might be the only place where the smaller wins the measuring contest—after all, it is a contest for grace and athleticism, and most certainly not for faux glitz and loudness. The smallest balls of them all, of course, are the olives in your martini—so don’t forget to lift some weights at the bar.