The Direct

The new PSA scoring system (same scoring to 11, point a rally, but simpler way of reporting it when the game goes into overtime) is wrongheaded on two accounts, and it is a travesty that they did not take this opportunity to make changes. My first beef is that they did not get rid of “game ball” and “match ball.” Ever since the fifties (not time immemorial), British scoring has meant that the referee intones, late in a game, “game ball.” And when a player has a match point, “game ball, match ball.”
As if.

As if they didn’t know. As if anyone doesn’t know it’s a game or match point. Are the origins of game ball an odd occurrence after the Second World War in which someone lost a point at 3-8 and when the other player exited the court to fetch his towel and hot toddy, he exclaimed, “hold on, old chap, that’s not the end of the game?”

It is so utterly unnecessary, nonsensical and annoying. Why not say, game ball, match ball, championship ball, when a player is going to win a tournament? More to the point, why say anything at all?
It reminds me of that classic person you have meet, usually on a guided tour or cruise or otherwise enclosed space: He Who Says States The Obvious.

No other sport invites such a dreadful bore to the party. No other sport asks a referee or announcer from on high to tell the world that you are on your deathbed or you are on the verge of victory and don’t choke.

Hockey has the public-address announced final minute of the period and football has the two-minute warning. But those are related to time, not the score.

No racquet sport has it. Television broadcasters of tennis has developed the pesky break-point terminology, but that is John McEnroe or Bud Collins yakking in the booth; the live audience and the players themselves are not subjected to the indignity of hearing some officious spoilsport declare to the world after you’ve dumped the ball into the net at thirty-love, “Love-Forty, that mean’s you’ve got three game points to save buddy or you’re on the fast train to Gonesville.”

The logic of game and match ball is even more bizarre because in regular softball scoring—and in the PSA scoring—there are no winner-take-all game and match balls. One guy has it, one guy doesn’t. There is no confusion.

If you had “game ball” way back when, you would probably not have some of the legendary matches in U.S. squash history. In the early 1930s, Bill Howe won a match for Boston at the national five-man teams after being down 0-2, 0-14 to Squab Kennedy of Philadelphia. The story goes that Lothrop Withington, a Boston teammate, falsely told Howe at love-fourteen that Boston needed his match to win their contest with Philadelphia. Somehow Howe managed to crawl back. The story has an element of the apochraphal, even though the very dependable Harold Kaese wrote about it in the Boston Globe in 1949. For one, Betty Howe Constable, Bill’s daughter and five-time national champion, didn’t recall the incident. Still, imagine the broken-record if the referee had to state the obvious thirteen straight times in that pivotal third game.

A better example is the 1961 nationals at Penn. In the quarters Charlie Ufford was up 14-6 in the fifth against his former Harvard teammate Dave Watts. With his crushing hard serves, Watts pulled the match out in overtime—Ufford wasted a total of ten match points.

Now, place yourself back at Ringe. Late Saturday afternoon. The middle of February. That steeply rising, robin’s egg-blue concrete gallery, the hushed crowd and insidious secret pleasure at watching a player disintergrate before your eyes. He squander ten straight match points. Do you want that deliciously delicate moment to be interrupted, sullied and comprehensively ruined by He Who States The Obvious?

Like in most places of intimate interaction, whether in the bedroom or in the squash court, there are some things better left unsaid.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 10:55 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.