I stayed up late on Sunday night a week or so back, virtual non-golfer
that I am, to watch the magnificent Gerry Lester Watson win his second
Masters green jacket. You don’t need to be a media expert to know that
across the world there were millions of other non-golfers in front of
their TVs, enjoying the unorthodox skill and fortitude of Bubba (sadly,
not Ramy) Watson. Television is the bastion of the wealthy game of
golf, and every one of those millions will have been on the edge of
their seats enjoying the drama, balls in the water, birdie
opportunities, mighty ball striking and the outrageous skill of the
putting.
Television should also be the bastion, the bedrock if you like, of the
far from wealthy game of squash. At present, it’s a precarious bedrock,
supporting not the equivalent of Augusta National’s opulent clubhouse
but a spartan municipal shack. While squash will never rival golf as a
spectator sport, in order to thrive it needs to do a whole lot better
to attract the general public. Following the Olympics rejection, the
sport should be asking itself some tough questions. Why doesn’t the
game attract sponsorship? Why are too few youngsters inspired to take
it up? Why, to manufacture just one example, did Oriental sports fans,
about five time zones in advance of the Middle East (like me and
Augusta GA), NOT stay up late to watch the final of the splendid El
Ghouna International tournament over the weekend?
And this is the big one, why, oh why, did the Olympics decision turn out to be so sadly negative?
I don’t want to sound too depressed. Squash is acknowledged to be a
fine sport. Forbes Magazine famously rated it as the most healthy of
all games. The Olympics bid highlighted the millions of participants,
across all five continents. Squash has thriving professional tours. Pro
squash has developed the world’s ultimate goldfish bowl, the
demountable all-glass court, and installed it in truly spectacular
locations. On a global level, squash is included in the world’s second
largest multi-sport gathering, the quadrennial Commonwealth Games. The
World Squash Federation Ambassadors Programme in its first two years
has already targetted many countries across Europe, Africa and South
America. At grassroots level, to take an example, you may have seen A J
Kohlhepp’s recent “What’s On My Mind” piece about the way the urban
squash movement changes youngsters’ lives. There’s a whole lot that’s
positive about squash.
And it’s not as if the game has been resistant to change. A couple of
decades ago the administrators made a key move to address squash’s
overly defensive nature at pro level: they changed the balls and
lowered the tin. More recently, they altered the scoring system to make
it less confusing (more of this later). Refereeing for the professional
game has recently been improved, and an experienced ex-pro, Lee Drew,
has been engaged to work further on court discipline.
With this background, why does squash still struggle to find major
sponsors, even for its marquee events? The answer is obvious: the game
lacks whatever it takes to put English bums and American butts, and
others’, on seats. Broadcasters can’t offer corporations the lucrative
prospect of big audiences, so those corporations go to Augusta or
Flushing Meadow. Admittedly, squash broadcasters these days are doing a
better job of attracting die hard fans. PSA Squash TV streams the big
events live, and rich pickings of highlights find their way onto
YouTube. The quality of coverage, camera angles, editing and
commentary, is steadily getting better. And the PSA has just announced
that they will be offering the historic video archive from
Squashlive.com. More fun for fans.
That’s the point, for fans. All this is fine for the faithful. It’s far
from fine for advertisers. Maybe that was what pushed the International
Olympic Committee in the wrong direction.
So, I want to argue that major changes are needed in squash. One, the
product itself has to change. Two, the way squash is televised has to
break new ground. Three, in the digital age, broadcasters have to take
the opportunity to add interest with the creative use of metrics.
A few words first about the product. I saw a comment recently on how
much more exciting, as a spectacle, North American squash used to be,
with its angles and its shot making. I’ve only a tiny experience of the
game, but I’ll accept that the North American version is a couple of
notches closer to the spectacular, but restrictively elite, game of
rackets, with its rifle shot ball speed. I know for myself, thanks to a
brief outing as a junior partner to the great John Nimick, that North
American doubles is superior to the international game. International
doubles is usually played on overcrowded singles courts. Only rarely is
it able to use one of the few, proper, wider international doubles
courts. In both cases the game can be great fun, and it prolongs the
playing life of many decrepit enthusiasts, but it’s strictly for
players only. The universal adoption of the North American game might
be a logical move if we were introducing squash to Planet Zog, but that
is precluded by the worldwide establishment of many thousands of
international courts.
With pro squash played on international courts the underlying problem
for the uncommitted spectator is the absence of drama. Consider the
most TV-friendly of the other racquet sports, tennis. The game’s
scoring system provides a succession of mini-dramas, at approximately
five minute intervals - at the end of each game. You get service breaks
and break backs and deuces and tension. In a five set match you might
have as many as fifty mini-dramas, plus, at the conclusion of some or
all of the sets, a magnificent maxi-drama involving a tie break. In
contrast, the less TV-successful sport of badminton has three games of
no fewer than 21 points each. It produces at the most three maxi-dramas
and zero mini-dramas in maybe sixty minutes of competition. Badminton
is photogenic and physically spectacular, but in media and television
terms, where is it? Nowhere. And where is squash? Languishing with
badminton. The game doesn’t have enough dramas, a maximum of five
climaxes, spaced out every ten to twenty minutes, with no mini-dramas
to sustain the excitement.
First lesson therefore: do some work on the scoring system. Think the unthinkable. Emulate tennis?
A further word on scoring. I can see the advantages of point a rally
scoring, PARS. Above all PARS has clarity. But with the adoption of
this method of scoring, squash threw away the regular - dramatic -
spectacle of the mighty fight back, with the tension racking up as the
player behind crept ever closer. Older players know how hard it was
under traditional HIHO (hand in hand out) scoring to win the two
consecutive points needed if they’d failed to secure their first
game ball. In PARS, fluking the single winner to finish the game is not
so difficult, even against an opponent fighting his or her utmost.
Often, and this is a major disadvantage of PARS, a player doesn’t fight
at all but meekly concedes the game if they fall too far back. With
HIHO, how easy is it to fluke not one but two points in succession? Not
at all easy. The drama of the big come back is always a possibility.
You are 0-7 or 1-8 down? Don’t give up! In PARS, at 0-10, or even much
closer, say 3-9, usually you’re history. Give it away and regroup.
Could further evolution make squash more attractive? The astonishing
speed of modern pros has transcended the limitations of the current
combination of ball and court. In a recent major pro event the players
were all remarking on the ramifications of the chilly ambient
temperature. Both the defensive and the attacking options were
affected, mainly for the better. There’s a mantra among squash coaches:
don’t ‘take it in short’ too soon. Why? This should not be! Most of the
drama in squash rallies starts with front court play. Let’s encourage
that aspect of the game and give the shot makers more reward for their
risk taking. Let’s not have the game infused with Mogadon.
Lesson two therefore: look at the ball used by the pros; make it
slower. Or perhaps take the tin down further. This is what has
happened, radically, in an attempt to enliven international doubles.
One more word on ball speed and tin height. An outcome of reducing one
or other or both will be shorter rallies, shorter matches. Won’t this
nullify a fundamental aspect of squash, the premium on outstanding
fitness, the ability of players to sustain intense physical pressure
for 120 minutes or more? Strangely, I suspect the answer will be no. I
played a grand fellow called Barry Backard recently in a UK o-55
intercounties match, fourth string. You probably missed it, no matter.
Barry is a converted badminton player and I spent the whole match
trying to counter his relish for NOT doing what the pros are taught. At
every opportunity he would ‘take the darned thing in extremely short’
with his deft racquet work. At the end of the brief four games I was
exhausted. The match was all scrambling. It may have been shorter but
it was a lot harder for all the changes of direction, certainly more
physically demanding than a game involving repeated series of rails.
The broad point is, the game of squash, the product for the media people, has to be made more attractive.
Alongside this, the way the product is presented begs for a dose of
imagination. Here squash has a huge opportunity for leadership. Sports
televising has undergone a revolution in the digital age. You can put
cameras anywhere, as many as you like. You can zoom in for spectacular
close ups. You can pull up instant replays, show great slo-mos. You can
measure all sorts of fascinating detail (I don’t know about baseball,
but with cricket, you can display not only the speed of the ball
through the air, simple stuff, but the rate of its spin, revs per
minute!).
Few sports take advantage of this. Faced with a potential technical
feast, what do we have in squash? The same dreary old pictures of the
backs of players’ heads, and the oh-so-tight accuracy of their backhand
rails. Squash is still filmed from the classic angle, where it has been
watched for centuries. Solid walls used to allow nothing else. To the
uninitiated, viewed from the back, squash looks like a walk in the
park. Suddenly in a close up you wonder what that fluid is dripping
from that chin. Is it drool? No, it’s sweat! Wow, it doesn’t look as
though he’s trying that hard.
I’m exaggerating, but ask yourself this, have you ever seen a photo of
a squash pro in action, taken from behind? No. We get dramatic photos
of strained faces, laser-focussed eyes, prodigious lunges, spatchcock
stretches and india-rubber dives… with one thing in common. They’re all
taken from the front. We’ve done the difficult bit. We’ve invented the
goldfish bowl. And now we don’t take advantage of it. As squash people,
we’ve grown up watching from the trad angle. It tells us experts the
story. We understand what’s going on. But does a ten year old kid? Will
he or she be inspired? What does an average sports fan think, casually
flicking through the channels and landing on squash? Will he or she
stay till the next commercial break? No way. A succession of pinpoint
rails, same shot after same shot, two athletes strolling? Where’s the
drama? The drama’s on the golf channel.
Of course we shouldn’t abandon the classic view, but here are some
suggestions. Camera angles: optimise a front wall camera position and
make major use of it (watching the brilliant ToC has shown me how
exciting it can be to see the game from the front). It may be that
there should be two or even three front wall cameras, one to give the
general view - the story of the game - with the other two positioned at
each side where the photographers sit. Next, if spectator arrangements
allow, optimise and use one or more side wall cameras (I realised
recently at the UK National Championships how well the side view
displays player movement). Shoot from above - why not? Overhead cameras
are sometimes used for decision reviews, and again, from above you see
the movement.
Once the idea has been accepted that we need to abandon the tradition
of watching squash from a gallery at the back of the court, so many
possibilities open up. Maybe we can try head cams on the players?
Seeing faces is vital for the drama of the competition. We need to
ensure that players’ faces are well lit. This could mean providing
illumination through the floor of the court, or from the bottom of the
side walls, somewhere that doesn’t compromise the game for the
participants. We must show slo-mos of the decisive moment of each point
(PSA Squash TV, to its credit, is getting good at this). Of course, if
the scoring structure is changed, there should be more opportunities
for detailed slo-mo analysis between games. Table tennis moved from
five games of 21 points to seven of 11 points some years ago. The
result? More end-of-game drama. With mikes in the court, we could enjoy
the entertainment of the banter. Come back Jonathon Power!
Something else that squash hasn’t even touched yet is gathering and
presenting game metrics. Modern technology enables the speed of shots
to be measured, and average speeds could be calculated from this.
Average distance from the wall of rail shots would be fascinating, and
not outside the bounds of technological possibility. So would reaction
times, and patterns of movement: how far up the court are the players
hitting the ball? How far are they having to move for each shot? Who is
having to cover more of the court? Where are the rallies being won and
lost? Who has made more errors, and where? How many shots were there
per rally in that game? Let’s get the audience involved with lifetime
stats for each player. Let’s display player heart rates (if they can be
persuaded to have this information broadcast). Calibrate court
‘bounciness’ using the equivalent of a Stimpmeter, following which,
work out who prospers on slower courts. Who on faster ones.
Above all, if we want to boost the TV audience, and accordingly boost
the game itself, we must remember that we are not primarily
broadcasting for squash fans. We are doing it for sports fans, the
young ones to get them involved and the older ones for the advertisers.
These are the key considerations that should drive and dominate
decisions about the game’s future.
One day we might have a multimillion dollar squash tournament, with
drama in every match, played in a glass court set up among the azaleas
at Amen Corner, the week after the Masters. But that’s only if squash
is prepared to take risks and turn itself into a game for the 21st, not
the 19th, century.
Aubrey Waddy is
an English writer and squash player, now past 65 and what-happens-next!
Aubrey is a consultant in the medical device industry, and apart from
this and writing, spends his time titrating squash against the
diminishing capacity of his bad knee. He returned to the game twenty
five years after retiring from a moderately successful amateur career,
and surprised himself by achieving selection for the English o-60s
Masters team in 2011, and subsequent o-65 teams in 2013 and 2014.
Aubrey’s writing credits include the first ever novel to be set in the
world of competitive squash, “Sex and Drugs and Squash’n’Roll”, about a
young player trying to make it on the pro tour, and in 2012 he
published his second novel, “Just Desserts”, a humorous story of the
rivalry between two doctors, over their patients… and the gorgeous wife
of the good guy. The books are available on Amazon, Kindle etc. A scary
children’s Hallowe’en ghost story followed in 2013, "Jon Lantern’s
Nightmare", available on Kindle.
Aubrey has three sons, and lives with his new partner Alison, by
fortunate chance - or judicious selection - a physiotherapist, outside
of London.
