When I started playing squash, I was an 8-year-old kid growing up in suburban Philadelphia. It was 1990, the first George Bush was president, and I played squash on dark, underground courts that were invariably freezing. The ball was hard as a rock. It was made of fuchsia rubber, and its bounce can only be described as aggressive; it flew off the walls like a tiny killer drone. If you accidentally hit your opponent you’d leave bruises that developed overnight into complex, multilayered bull’s-eyes, shiny white at the center surrounded by a ring of angry red, giving way to orbits of purple and green and bilious yellow.
I learned that the major winning shot was a “kill”: It involved slamming the ball hard and low, just over the tin strip at the bottom of the front wall. You could also win, I learned, on a shot called a “killer boast.” The coaching I received at tournament matches was somewhat gladiatorial. The basic mantra was to “move forward,” “get aggressive,” and “take the ball at the top of the bounce.” The aim was to end the point quickly. You had to “volley everything.” It was imperative to get in front of your opponent and “bury her in the back corner.”
That was the pugnacious racquet sport I started at 8 and soon began to play quite seriously, competing at the national level. When I won my first Junior National Championship I was 10, and I had no idea that the sport at which I’d begun to excel wasn’t actually squash, at least not in the international sense of the game. It was, in fact, American squash, or hardball, a heretical strain of the sport that was standardized in the U.S. and Canada in the confident postwar 1920s and played exactly nowhere else on the planet.
Though the game originated in England, it had spread to North America in the 19th century and picked up popularity as the decades passed. Around 1920, in an effort to consolidate the rules of the sport, court sizes in the U.S. were standardized at 18 and a half feet. At once, clubs up and down the East Coast began to construct their new courts according to official dimensions, so that squash enthusiasts could compete against one another on an even playing field.
From that point on, the sport began to grow in popularity, at least among East Coast elites. These early American players—like me as an 8-year-old child—believed that the game they were playing was squash. They rejoiced in their expertise at whacking that vengeful little red ball and moving around that rectangular court. They grew confident enough, in fact, that the United States Squash Rackets Association (USSRA) decided to invite the British national team overseas, hoping to beat them at their own sport.