Word: courting
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...court games, squash tennis is the only one made in the U. S. A. Boston-born in 1890, it has since been squeezed out there and almost everywhere else by simpler & slower squash racquets, nowadays is largely the hobby of a fairly small group of players in the Manhattan area. It is played with a green, net-covered, two-and-one-half-inch rubber ball and a ten-ounce lawn-tennis-style racquet on a 32-by-18½-ft. court. Players alternate in serving against a wall, score points only while in service...
Parent of all the racquet games is court tennis, which Nausicaa and her maidens reputedly played by batting a ball with their hands. For the last 700 years it has been played with a lopsided, gut-strung racquet that looks as if it might have been left out in the rain. Once the game was a pastime of the European masses, but like other mass delights, it has become much too good for them. Since the 15th Century every British and French king worth mentioning has played it, moving one of its chroniclers to write: "It is the characteristic game...
What keeps the average sedentary young executive from toning up at court tennis is mainly that there are only twelve courts in the U. S., and a proper court costs some $100,000, must be plastered with a secret British cement apocryphally said to be made from silt from the bed of the Thames. Courts are 110 ft. long, 38 ft. wide, with a net-covered recess behind the server's court called a dedans, in which the spectators sit. On the left of the server's court, and continuing along the same wall beyond the low-slung...
...racquets court costs only $50,000, has no royal recesses, is a 60-by-30-ft., four-wall court in which its few devotees play the fastest racquet game of all. The bats have small circular heads with long shafts, cost about $8, break at an alarming rate. The balls, worth about 60?, are made of tightly wrapped strips of cloth wound with twine and covered like a baseball, are slightly smaller than a golf ball, have put players' eyes out. With recovering, costing about 10?, balls can be made to last for 100 years. Played like four-wall...
Squash tennis and squash racquets are played on the same size court, are pretty much the same game, a foreshortened variety of racquets with not so much breakage. Courts can be built for as low as $3,000. Squash racquets is played with a shorter, sturdier variety of racquets bat. The ball looks about like a handball but is lighter...