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-18½-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.