I’ve been playing squash since I was 11. It’s an extremely fast-paced sport requiring a lot of skill. What I’ve never understood is why squash is oten equated with snobbery in American popular culture. Frasier and his snooty brother played squash. Woody Allen’s Manhattan friends play. Michael Douglass played squash in Wall Street. In Fracture, the DA tells the main character that he won’t fit into the corporate law firm he’s joining because “those guys play squash”. And whenever they actually show the characters playing, they look like they’re dressed for cricket and clearly have no technique whatsoever.
When you look at the top squash players in the world, they are just down to earth people from UK, Australia, Egypt, Malaysia and other commonwealth countries. For many years, the game was dominated by Pakistani players from extremely poor backgrounds. How then do Americans figure that it’s a rich person’s game?
Question posted courtesy of: Rich Benvin
October 30th, 2005 at 7:51 am
becuz in america its only the rich white people that play it
October 31st, 2005 at 9:51 pm
who said it was snobby? been playing squash since a kid and while faster than racket ball, never though it snobby
November 1st, 2005 at 2:45 am
This is a great question. I’m from the U.S. and played on my high school and college teams in the ’80′s. I think the short answer is that in the rest of the world, I’m not sure squash is considered much different from badminton or table tennis or snooker. I’ve played in the UK with regular guys who kept a pint outside the court to freshen up between games.
In the US historically I think it’s a different story. Squash mostly became a game played in prep schools and Ivy League colleges and private clubs, and has been for most of its history centered in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, as well as DC (where I played after college). Until the 1990′s, the game was different in North America than in the rest of the world: the ball was harder, the court smaller, and the scoring differernt. This North American “hardball” game didn’t mix the the international “softball” game. But after the international game took over, the game may have lost some of its American whiteness.
Still, I don’t think it’s spread too far into the general public, and is mostly an upper middle class game for Americans as well as for the kinds of educated non-Americans who come here to work in academia and professional jobs.
It’s a pity if that’s true, because it’s a beautiful game more people should know about.
Hope that helps.