Squash Whites Only
While walking past the University Club on our way to the Tournament of Champions, a friend regaled us with a tale of a sign that once stood on the threshold of their squash courts: whites only. Now, if you’re terminally online, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re more shades of wrong than there are of khaki. The pomp and circumstance of walking through the entrance to the squash courts or to the tennis courts, wearing whites, and then proceeding to play: almost like a uniform, yes, but also, a visual signifier that both players understand the ends and the means that they are about to deploy on court. But it is not merely the aesthetic dimension that ought to grab our eye. There is ritual, much needed and long missed ritual, in the everyday routine of finding oneself on court, serving, playing, winning and losing, and then doing it all over again.
Much of New Haven knows for a fact that for an hour after noon I will always be unreachable, that important things happen either before or after, but with enough leeway to prevent me making my way to the courts, five days a week. But I can adopt Martin Luther’s line of defence and remark, Here I stand, I can do no other—for I can truly do no other.
Lots has been written about sports and its importance in the life of man, but less so about its importance in the life of clubmen. Whoever it was, and I’m quite sure it was some pithy Englishman in the pursuit of jovial entertainment, who introduced sports to club life must be applauded, for sports have been part of the various articulations of English clubs since at the very least the nineteenth century: racquets, squash, hardball, tennis, field tennis, lawn tennis, real tennis, badminton, polo, steeplechase, sailing, and, I wish, jousting (but not duelling). This gentleman understood something that took modern psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists more than a century to discover, that physical exertion and sports produce dopamine, which is the key instrument in creating social bonds. This sagely Englishman was most certainly precocious but not vain.
Amid the critiques of the modern world that are pervasive in our media and intellectual environment today—the modern world is dull, boring, insipid, uninspiring, atomised, lacking in a social fabric, devoid of play—there is still refuge. The clubman makes his last stand, walking to the courts, playing, apologising for drop shots from the back or unintentional shots, and then, at the end, clanging racquets, shaking hands, bumping fists, showering, and then stepping out into the world to face it, yet again. But for that hour on court, it all melts away, and you have two men who sound an awful lot like Julia Roberts in Notting Hill: I’m just a boy, standing in front of another boy, asking him to play squash with me.
What happens off court is equally important. The Professional Squash Association’s diktat—four minutes to warm up before the game, and only one minute between games—is always healthily disregarded; it takes ten to warm up, and at the very least, four between games. When you start warming up on court, you warm up not only your body but also your jaws. You’re about to start yapping, and while you work on your rails, drives, and boasts, the details of the week spill into the open. Performance in a game is a healthy proxy for your mental condition, and oftentimes wise counsel is dished out in the dingy alleys connecting courts. I’ve oftentimes had some of the best advice ever given, professionally, personally, socially, and academically, in between games.
And, then, it all ends. You shuffle to the locker room, chatter about the game, promise to see each other at the same time the following week, and come out of the showers smelling like Clubman Pinaud (there might perhaps be only one club in New England up in rebellion against its scents). You step out into the world, fresh, smelling the same, ready to conquer it again. On the street, you walk past another man with a healthy splattering of Clubman Pinaud, smile inside, and continue: the world has a rhythm to it, a common rhythm to it, punctuated by ritual and pomp and circumstance and tedium in due course. And you know how fortunate you are to be part of it.
To inject pomp and circumstance, to inject ritual, into the banal humdrum of the quotidian: this is the meaning of the sign, whites only.