The Racquet Game

By Allison Danzig

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harrison Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781528764391

Book preview

The Racquet Game

By

ALLISON DANZIG

With an Introduction by

HERBERT N. RAWLINS, JR.,

National Amateur Squash Racquets Champion, 1928;

Metropolitan Champion, 1928 and 1929;

Canadian Champion, 1929

© Wide World Photos

The New York Racquet and Tennis Club, 370 Park Avenue, New York.

PREFACE

ALTHOUGH the American history of two of the games discussed in the pages that follow dates back more than fifty years and over a quarter of a century in the case of the other two, very little is known about them except by their players and immediate followers. This is owing in part to the strict privacy that has surrounded the championships and to the disinclination of those conducting them to make public spectacles of the matches. Particularly has this been true of court tennis and racquets.

Of recent years the barriers have been let down to some extent. While the general public still has little opportunity to witness them, all four games have grown vastly in popularity, and two of them, squash tennis and squash racquets, now draw their following from an ever widening circle instead of from the membership of a few exclusive clubs as was the case formerly.

The reason for the growing vogue of these games is not difficult to explain, in spite of the restrictions that have militated against it. They offer the opportunity for the business and professional man to get in half an hour or hour of invigorating exercise between or after office hours without the necessity of going out of the city, and during the winter season, when the lawn tennis courts and golf courses are closed, they furnish a physical outlet that is unexcelled in the enjoyment and exhilaration derived from playing these games.

In the opinion of the author, the time is not far distant when squash tennis and squash racquets will take their places among the most popular of winter diversions, although racquets and court tennis can hardly hope to gain so wide a following, because of the expense attached to them. That time will be hastened with the realization on the part of the public of the real character of the game of squash and of the fascination it holds for those who are fortunate enough to have been introduced to it.

It is with the purpose of aiding in the work of the National Squash Tennis Association and the United States Squash Racquets Association of bringing home this realization to those who know of squash tennis and squash racquets, if at all, only by name, and of narrating their hitherto untold history in America that this book has been undertaken, as well as to relate the story of their more exclusive and fascinating cousins, court tennis and racquets.

The American literature on these games is extremely limited. England and France have produced practically all that has been published between covers about court tennis and racquets, these works touching only in the barest way upon the games in the United States, while nothing has been written about the history of squash tennis and squash racquets. A few brief chapters in The Book of Sport, published in 1901, by J. F. Taylor and Company of New York; a handful of magazine articles, most of them printed in Outing, and a manual of instruction on court tennis and racquets, written in 1909 by Frederick C. Tompkins, professional to the Philadelphia Racquet Club, constitute the entire literary output on racquets and court tennis in America. For a comprehensive survey of their history in this country one will seek in vain, as he will also for even scraps of printed information about squash tennis and squash racquets, aside from two or three technical treatises. Indeed, it is even impossible to uncover a printed list of the national champions in racquets and court tennis unless one has access to English publications, while there is no published list in circulation of the champions in squash tennis. Only in squash racquets does the national association list the winners of its tournaments in a year book.

Because of the scarcity of published records, the author, in order to obtain the facts, has had no alternative but to seek the cooperation of those who have been identified with the early history of these games in America or who have preserved in their private collections magazine and newspaper cuttings from the years before their day. This coöperation has been extended most generously, and if this work may lay claim to any merit or to serve any useful purpose it is only because of the interest and painstaking efforts that scores of amateurs and professionals in various parts of the country have made to obtain information from private sources that would have otherwise been inaccessible.

Before listing these players, to whom my obligations are so great, I wish first to make a few other acknowledgments. I wish to express particularly my debt to the Racquet and Tennis Club of New York for its courtesy in extending me permission to use its library, to Mr. Clarence C. Pell of New York, through whose kind offices this privilege was granted, and to Robert J. Henderson, of the New York Public Library, private librarian to the Racquet and Tennis Club, whose interest in the book and whose research work in assisting me to gather together my material was characteristic of one who has shown such zeal in helping to make the club’s court tennis collection the finest in America.

To John Davis, manager at the Racquet and Tennis Club; to George Standing, retired racquet and court tennis master at the club, and to Frank Forester, formerly private tutor to Mr. Jay Gould and the late Mr. Payne Whitney at Georgian Court, Lakewood, and Greentree, Manhasset, L. I., respectively, go my thanks for many of the pictures in this work.

I wish to acknowledge, further, my appreciation of the courtesy extended by Mills and Boon, Ltd., of London, in permitting me to quote from their publication, First Steps to Rackets, and my indebtedness to the authors, the late Mr. E. B. Noel and the Hon. C. N. Bruce (now Lord Aberdare), for the information obtained from this work. To the Oxford University Press of London, the publishers, and to the late Mr. E. B. Noel and Mr. J. O. M. Clark, the authors of A History of Tennis, I make the same acknowledgments with grateful thanks.

Without the aid of the chapters on court tennis and racquets written in The Book of Sport by Eustace H. Miles of England, the late T. Suffern Tailer of New York, George Richmond Fearing, Jr., and Lawrence M. Stockton of Boston, Edward La Montagne of New York and Walter Rogers Furness of Philadelphia, it would have been impossible for me to have collected much of the information that is herein contained on the history of these two games prior to 1900. The chapters in The Badminton Library on court tennis and racquets have also been among my sources of information on the facts of these games in England prior to 1900.

In the second part of this work, which is devoted to the history of racquets, is included a separate chapter on racquets in Canada, written by Mr. Kenneth F. Gilmour of Montreal, one of the game’s most loyal votaries in that country, and I wish to make public acknowledgment of my debt to him for his valued contribution.

I now list those who have assisted me in the work of collecting the material from which this history of the four games has been compiled. In New York: Clarence C. Pell, Clarence H. Mackay, Herbert N. Rawlins, Jr., Hewitt Morgan, John W. Prentiss, George M. Rushmore, Dr. Alfred Stillman, Arthur H. Lockett, E. M. Byers, Reginald Fincke, John W. Appel, Jr., Norman F. Torrance, John C. Neely, F. S. Keeler, E. W. (Ned) Putnam and Perry R. Pease.

In Boston: E. Ray Speare, to whom I am particularly indebted; Constantine Hutchins, Quincy A. Shaw, R. L. Agassiz, Amory Coolidge, Harold Jefferson Coolidge, Ralph A. Powers, Henry C. Clark, George F. Wales, Beals C. Wright, Charles C. Peabody, George B. Morison, George W. Wightman, Dr. Richard H. Miller, Frank W. Buxton, Philip Nichols and Walter I. Badger, Jr.

In Philadelphia: Joseph de V. Keefe, Sydney P. Clark and Frank B. Smith, who have been most generous with their help; Stanley W. Pearson, Frank White, Joseph W. Wear, George R. White, Harry C. Thayer, S. French Reeves, George H. Brooke, Harold A. Haines, E. H. LeBoutillier and Rodman E. Griscom. Also, Adrian W. Smith of Buffalo, R. W. Miller of Washington and Stanley S. Mills of Toronto, Canada.

Among the professionals to whom I am indebted for assistance are Fred Tompkins of the Philadelphia Racquet Club, who has given me invaluable help; Jock Soutar of the same club, George Standing, Eddie Rodgers and Frank Blow of the New York Racquet and Tennis Club, Punch Fairs, private instructor to Clarence H. Mackay at Roslyn, L. I.; Walter Kinsella of the Fraternity Club of New York, Frank Lafforgue of the Yale Club of New York, Frank Forester of Greentree, William (Blondy) Standing of Greentree, James Reid of the Crescent A. C. of Brooklyn, Stephen J. Feron, formerly of the Harvard Club of New York, Walter S. Gray of the Seabright (N. J.) Lawn Tennis and Cricket Club, William Ward of the Rockaway Hunting Club, New York, Robert Moore of the Montclair A. C., Montclair, N. J., Charles Williams of the Chicago Racquet Club, Harry Boakes, Jr., of the University Club of Chicago, Harry Cowles of Harvard University, Harry Thompson of the Boston Tennis and Racquet Club, William Pettitt of the Boston Athletic Association, Wallace F. Johnson of Philadelphia and George Healey of the Detroit Racquet and Curling Club.

To all of these the author makes this acknowledgment of his obligations with grateful appreciation.

ALLISON DANZIG

Bayside, N. Y.,

Sept. 2, 1929.

INTRODUCTION

BY

HERBERT N. RAWLINS, JR.

I was recently asked the question, What is the difference between Racquets, Squash Tennis and Squash Racquets? This was not the first time that such a question had been put to me. In fact, I have discovered that very few people, aside from those who have been associated with these games, know anything at all about them.

And why should they? In the first place, the opportunity to play court games is limited to a very few people, mostly to those who are fortunate enough to belong to a club of one description or another. Secondly, matches are not open to the public, as the galleries are capable of seating only a limited number and are quickly filled to capacity by those playing in the tournaments and by the members of the club where the matches are being held. Again, not a single book has been written about these games in America, if we except two or three abbreviated technical treatises.

For those who have never heard of these games and for those who have heard of them but understand them only slightly, Mr. Danzig has performed a great service. It is not a How to Play Squash Racquets book that he has written but a readable story of the history and character of racquet games. Any one at all interested in sports could not help enjoying his chapters on Court Tennis.

For those who are familiar with the subject matter of this book, The Racquet Game fulfills another service. It is, as far as I know, the first complete record of these games in America and might be called The Reference Book for those who are interested in them.

It is my belief that if a Court Tennis court or a Racquets court could be built with galleries to seat thousands, the popularity of these two games would compare with that of Jai Alai and of Lawn Tennis. They are games of exceptional skill, calling for great powers of endurance, and offer thrill after thrill to the spectator as well as to the player. Unfortunately, however, the expense attached to them is large and beyond the means of most persons.

Squash Racquets and Squash Tennis have the same attributes of skill and endurance. The speed of the ball and the amount of action possible in these games are amazing. To play either one of them effectively calls for as high a degree of technical perfection and as much stamina as any sport which we know. Furthermore, these games are comparatively inexpensive (a single bat and ball will often last an entire season) and offer enjoyment and exercise to a steadily increasing number.

More and more tournaments are being played each year, and before long, I dare say, Squash Racquets will be the game played most during the Winter months, for its fundamentals are more simple and can be more quickly grasped than can those of Squash Tennis. The latter game, however, has a large following in New York City and its environs, and its future there is secure.

All four of these games offer real enjoyment for those who do not wish to take them seriously as well as for those who do. The latter will find in them much to challenge their mental as well as physical powers. A Court Tennis player once remarked to me that one could never learn all there is to know about that game. While Racquets, Squash Racquets and Squash Tennis do not present as many problems for complete mastery, they are highly scientific and require constant practice and study.

If the real character of these games could be brought home to every one and if they could realize how much invigorating exercise and fun are to be derived from them, I am sure that there would be many more people interested in them than there are at present. Mr. Danzig’s purpose has been to awaken public consciousness to these benefits and I am very glad to have the opportunity to second this purpose. As one who has followed these games and written about them for years, Mr. Danzig is well qualified to tell their story authoritatively and he has done so in a manner to make it intelligible and enjoyable to the uninitiated, as well as to the players, who will appreciate his grasp of the subject.

Writing such a book as this was an undertaking the size of which can hardly be overestimated. When one realizes how extremely little has been printed about these games in the United States, how much research was required to gather the facts and how much effort was expended in checking them both by correspondence and personal visits to all parts of the country, one can appreciate from the great mass of information which he has collected the monumental proportions of the task. Mr. Danzig has rendered an almost invaluable service to all four of the games which he has treated and everyone who plays them and has their best interests at heart should be most grateful to him.

HERBERT N. RAWLINS, JR.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION by Herbert N. Rawlins, Jr., National Amateur Squash Racquets Champion, 1928; Metropolitan Champion, 1928 and 1929; Canadian Champion, 1929

PRELUDE

APPENDIX

RECORDS OF CHAMPIONSHIPS

LIST OF COURT TENNIS AND RACQUET COURTS IN U. S.

PLAYING RULES AND COURT DIMENSIONS FOR SQUASH RACQUETS AND SQUASH TENNIS

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

RACQUET AND TENNIS CLUB, NEW YORK

JAY GOULD

JAY GOULD AND TOM PETTITT

EAST COURT, RACQUET AND TENNIS COURT

TENNIS COURT, PHILADELPHIA RACQUET CLUB

T. SUFFERN TAILER

JAY GOULD, GEORGE STANDING AND FRANK FORESTER AT LAKEWOOD

GREENTREE OPENING PICTURE

TENNIS COURT, CHICAGO RACQUET CLUB

JAY GOULD AND W. H. TEVIS HUHN

HEWITT MORGAN

A PHILADELPHIA TENNIS GATHERING

PIERRE ETCHEBASTER

FREDERICK C. TOMPKINS

CLARENCE C. PELL

BILLY DEVOE, FRED FOULKES AND WILLIAM GRAY

HARRY BOAKES AND JOSEPH GRAY

ROBERT MOORE AND WALTER GRAY

CLARENCE H. MACKAY

STANLEY G. MORTIMER

RACQUET COURT, BOSTON TENNIS AND RACQUET CLUB

PROFESSIONALS AT RACQUET AND TENNIS CLUB, 43RD ST.

CHARLES WILLIAMS AND JOCK SOUTAR

WILLIAMS AND SOUTAR, CHAMPIONSHIP PICTURE, 1913

HARRY BOAKES, SR., AND HARRY BOAKES, JR.

SQUASH RACQUETS COURT, RACQUET AND TENNIS CLUB

SQUASH TENNIS COURT, FRATERNITY CLUB, NEW YORK

HERBERT N. RAWLINS, JR., AND MYLES P. BAKER

HARRY L. COWLES

JOHN W. PRENTISS

ROWLAND B. HAINES

WALTER KINSELLA AND FRANK WARD

THE RACQUET GAME

THE RACQUET GAME

PRELUDE

ON the fourth floor of the Racquet and Tennis Club in New York, enshrouded in a gloom that is partially lifted when the rays of the sun at high noon are reflected through the royal dedans from the skylight above the adjacent court, there stands a canopied dais. Upon the dais are mounted a pair of twin chairs, as regal in their severe stateliness as the most majestic Elizabethan.

Lost in the chiaroscuro of the cloistered room, with its velvet-hung walls, the visitor seats himself upon the throne and, enfolded in its draperies, peers about him. As his eyes accustom themselves to the shadowy illumination, objects begin to take shape around him and soon he realizes that he is in a storehouse of antiquity. To the right there is a priceless marble mantelpiece. Directly ahead he makes out a collection of mahogany stools and benches behind the richly carved pew of the dedans. To the left of the stools there is an elaborately carved chest of the Renaissance period, and in the corner, immediately on his left, there stands an unusual looking table, crowded with framed manuscripts, handsomely illuminated, and rare old prints.

As he surveys the scene about him the visitor becomes aware of the fact that he is not alone. Straight ahead of him, through the dedans, he discovers some one carrying what appears to be an enormous round pillbox, with the cover removed, disclosing its contents. He discovers, also, that there are two other men with him, the three of them in white. The two last, carrying what look to be stout clubs, take their places at either end of the long concrete enclosure stretching before the dedans, while the third dumps the contents of his apothecary’s box into a receptacle in the dedans, after which he takes his station in an opening to the left and at the center of the enclosure.

As the figure in the opening peers out from his recess, the one nearest at hand reaches into the receptacle, brings out a handful of what the fascinated visitor now perceives to be cloth-covered balls, and, raising his club, now revealed as a racquet, he sends one of them hurtling along a roofed corridor built against the side wall on the left. In a moment the figure in the opening begins to speak, like an automaton that has been released, while the two others scurry about the enclosure. Entranced, the visitor rivets his eye upon the scene, unable to comprehend what is going on, or to make any intelligence of what is being said.

Hazard side chase worse than second gallery, Chase the door, calls the figure in the opening, and as he keeps up his droning chant in the stilly silence of the court, where no other sound is heard, the visitor, lulled by the monotonous tones and yielding to the soporific atmosphere of the darkened room, dozes off in his chair.

Time turns back in its flight. The throne room becomes peopled with courtly figures in the garb of bygone centuries. Courtiers in silken doublet and hose and ladies in ruffs and jeweled gowns, whose trains sweep the floor, fill the richly cushioned dedans. Behind them the stools and benches are crowded with pages and maids of honor, craning their necks to get a glimpse of the proceedings out in front of the dedans. There, in the concrete enclosure, a regally clad figure is in hot pursuit of the ball which comes to him from the racquet of a high born princeling.

The visitor rubs his eye and looks again. Either he is dreaming or that is King Henry VIII. Yes, it is the jovial monarch! There is no mistaking those heavy jowls or that portly figure. Who his opponent is the visitor is not sure, though he looks like Emperor Charles V, but, that man looking through the grille at the far end of the court! Isn’t that Cardinal Wolsey? Indeed, it is! even though he is supposed to be banished. What diversion can this be of a monarch of four centuries back?

Before he can step down from the throne to get a closer view of the proceedings, the visitor feels a hand upon his shoulder and he awakens to find a figure in white flannels, like the one with the apothecary’s box, standing at his side. It is one of the club markers and he explains the dream and all the other questions that are on the visitor’s tongue.

The elaborately detailed concrete enclosure that he sees through the dedans is the same kind of a court which King Henry built at Hampton Court Palace. The throne room is a reproduction. The stools and benches are the same upon which the pages and maids of honor at court were wont to sit and watch as Henry VIII and members of his court performed. The marble mantelpiece, the dedans and most of the priceless objets d’art about the place were all the gift to the club of the late T. Suffern Tailer, many of them three centuries old and more. A brass plate on the mantelpiece reads, Royal Dedans, Julian Marshall’s Precious Secrets of Tennis, Furnishings, &c., presented by T. Suffern Tailer, 1918.

The marker points out on the wall an original document relating to the game, dating back centuries and kept under lock and key. On a table is mounted a picture of the High Born Prince James, Duke of York (James II.) borne Oct. 17, 1623, representing him standing in a tennis court holding a short handled racquet strung diagonally. A framed plate bears this description by Frissart, written in 1641, In the famous tennis match between Louis XIII. and Philip IV. King Louis wins the critical point of the game by putting the ball in ‘La Lune.’ Cardinal Richelieu refereed.

The game which is referred to is not the mere stripling game of tennis, as it is popularly known in America. It is a game that is less read about than any other of the red-blooded sports. It is a game about the nature of which probably not one person in ten thousand in the United States has the slightest inkling. Of the 120,000,000 people who populate the country not more than five thousandths of a percent have seen it played and less than half that number have a thorough understanding of it. It is a game that one could watch for days and still be unable to give an intelligible explanation of what it is all about, so complicated is it.

It is a game whose history can definitely be traced back for seven centuries, that was once so popular that Charles V. issued an edict against it in France in 1369, that was prohibited to priests in France in 1245, 1485, 1512 and 1673 and that has enjoyed the patronage of many of the celebrated monarchs of France and England, including Louis X., Louis XI., Louis XII., Louis XIII., Francis I., Charles V., Henry II. and Henry IV. of France and Charles I., Charles II., Henry VII., Henry VIII., Edward VII. and George V. of England. Because of this last fact, it is fitting that the game should be known as royal tennis, as it is sometimes termed in England. In America it is the game of court tennis.

This royal and ancient sport, with its seven centuries of history, is but one of four ball games that have been played in the United States for upward of three-quarters of a century and yet have managed to remain almost a closed book to ninety-nine and nine tenths percent of the population. Only in the larger cities such as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit, Buffalo, St. Louis and Washington has so much as a line been printed about them in the press, and yet for action, speed, and physical combat they yield to few other games, either as a spectacle to be watched or as a game to be played. Moreover, there is a finesse and a technique to these games that make them more than a test of physical strength, and in the case of court tennis it may be said that it typifies the highest artistic development which has been attained in all sport.

Of court tennis it has been said that it is a game of moving chess, that it combines the exactitude of billiards, the coördination of hand and eye of lawn tennis and the generalship and quick judgment of polo. A writer in the London Spectator, 1912, declared of it, It is not only the sum of ball games. It is the absolute in games. No one, it is probable, has yet sounded the depths of tennis, and players of the greatest genius cannot master its fine potentialities.

De Gersault, one of the earliest to contribute to the literature of this game, states in his L’Art du Paumier-Raquetier, et de la Paume, 1767, which was adopted by the Académie Royale, La Paume is the only game which can take rank in the list of arts and crafts, the description of which has been undertaken by the Royal Academy of Science.

The three other games which have been relegated along with court tennis to innocuous desuetude, or rather which have always been in that state so far as the public is concerned, are racquets, squash racquets and squash tennis. All four of them have so much in common that they may be said to belong to the same family. They have as their common denominator a racquet and a ball, all of them are played in a roofed, four-walled court, though in each case of varying dimensions and not all of them of the same material, and each of them may be said to put as great a premium upon physical endurance as any game known to man. Indeed, with the exception of ice hockey and jai-alai, it is doubtful if there is any other game quite as fast as racquets and squash tennis, in which the play is sustained at so terrific a clip as to make the fastest game of lawn tennis seem almost mild by comparison.

One might take it for granted from the foregoing that these games are for the young alone and that the squash court and the racquet court are no place for the man who has reached the age when he ceases to worry about his waistline. But on the contrary, there are more players beyond the thirty-year mark than there are short of that age, and, except in squash racquets, the best players are in the former group.

It so happens that these games are played largely by university graduates, many of them men who have made their mark on the football field, on the cinder path or as oarsmen. For them squash and racquets furnish a solution of their problem during the colder months of how to keep in the fine physical trim they maintained as undergraduates after their school days are over. So we find thousands of them, forty years old and over, in shorts and gym shirts, taking off weight and enjoying relaxation from the mental grind of the office, in the courts of their clubs almost every afternoon during the fall and winter.

Of recent years, with the boyish figure in vogue, women, too, have taken to the game of squash racquets, invading precincts which formerly were sacred to the stronger sex, and in spite of the speed and strenuousness of the sport it has found as much favor with them as it has with the men. In Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Greenwich, Conn., and Ardsley-On-Hudson, N. Y., the game has gained so many converts that the same problem is arising that raised its head in the golf clubs not so many years ago. Either a great many more courts will have to be built or the men will have to assert their masculine prerogative and restrict the women to certain hours of play on assigned days.

But even before the ladies discovered squash the courts were already becoming congested. The game had taken on rapidly at the universities—at Harvard University alone there are more than thirty squash racquet courts and close to a thousand students using them—and each year’s graduating class has sent its quota of players to the various clubs, with the result that the demand for courts has far exceeded the supply. In 1928 and 1929 there were more squash courts built in New York than in any previous ten years.

Formerly, courts were to be found almost solely at colleges and country clubs. Now, however, the game is spreading to preparatory schools and to athletic clubs, indicating the widening of its circle of popularity. Captain Victor A. Cazalet, member of the British parliament, prophesied on a visit to the United States several years ago that the time would come when every factory would have squash courts for the recreation of its workers.

Unlike racquets and court tennis, squash tennis and squash racquets are within the means of the man of average income. The expense attached to them is less than that of lawn tennis. A single racquet may last for a season without restringing, and the cost of the racquet is considerably less than of a first grade lawn tennis bat. In squash racquets a single ball will sometimes suffice for a season, and the only additional expense, outside of the purchasing price of these implements, is the charge for the use of the court, which is almost negligible.

The cost of building the court is the big item, but, borne by the club membership, it is carried as easily as the cost of a lawn tennis court, and there is no expense for upkeep. At present courts are to be found