Like so many ball sports, hardball doubles was invented by an Englishman, and, better yet, an Englishman with too many sisters. 

The court tennis and racquets professional at the Racquet Club in downtown Philadelphia, Frederick C. Tompkins, created doubles in 1907. At the time his family was the greatest name in the ancient sport of tennis. His great grandfather and grandfather had kept the tennis court at Merton College, Oxford (his grandfather was world champion in the 1860s), his father managed the court at Brighton, and for most of the nineteenth century a Tompkins was the best tennis player in Great Britain. 

Freddie Tompkins 

Before coming to Philadelphia in 1904, Freddie Tompkins had coached court tennis in London and racquets in Malta and was, therefore, intimately knowledgeable about the leading racquet sports of the time. And about how to work in tandem with others: he was the youngest of seventeen children. He surely knew something about sharing. Tompkins was, nonetheless, a true Englishman. When Jimmy Dunn arrived at the Racquet Club in 1928 as an schoolboy assistant, Tompkins took one look at him and reportedly said, "You're Irish, you're a red-head and you're a southpaw—you'll never make it." Dunn soon broke his left arm playing football, became a right-hander and managed to stay on at the club for the next fifty-five years, becoming one of America's most beloved racquet sports pros. 

Creative Floor Plans 

In the autumn of 1907 the Racquet Club decamped from its original home at 923 Walnut Street (at Twelfth Street) to a new building at 215 South Sixteenth Street. It put in five singles squash courts, a court tennis court and two racquets court on the clubhouse's fourth floor. Across from one of the racquets courts and next to the stairs leading down to the locker room was an unused space. It was much too large for another singles squash court and too small for a third racquets court. Tompkins knew exactly what to do. "Why, you have just the right amount of space," he told the club managers, "to build a court for that grand old English game of squash doubles." There was no such grand old English game, of course, but the club, ever attuned to things Anglo, agreed to put in a doubles court. 

And so it came to pass that in the winter months of 1907-1908 in the new Racquet Club, Tompkins paced out a enclosure forty-five feet long and twenty-five feet wide, laid down some red maple walls, shoved four men inside, gave them a dark blue ball and told them to hit it as hard as they could. Where did Tompkins get the idea? Perhaps from his childhood, from having to share everything with his sixteen older siblings. But perhaps from the fact that for many years in the nineteenth century there were two standard sizes of open-air racquets courts, a sixty feet by thirty court for singles and an eighty by forty court for doubles. Playing doubles in a larger court worked for racquets. Why not for squash, the game created from racquets? Slow Start on a low court Like many new games, doubles had a shaky infancy. 

The United States Squash Racquets Association had just been created, and squash was barely holding its own against the more popular winter court game of squash-tennis (basically tennis in a squash court). In 1907 the only city in the U.S. besides Philadelphia that had squash courts was Boston. After the First World War, as squash overtook squash tennis, doubles still took a distant back seat. The doubles court at the Racquet Club was not exactly a perfect showcase for the sport, for the clubhouse roof was directly above the right wall, making lobbing impossible. Few other clubs had courts and if they did, doubles tournaments were haphazard adjuncts to singles tournaments. To fill the draw, pros had to enlist first-round losers and the usual assortment of cocktail-lifting, bow-tie-wearing gallery gadflies. No one took it seriously.

Rockaway and Greenwich 

In the 1930s doubles suddenly became fashionable. The Gold Racquet Invitational, held in Cedarhurst, Long Island, inaugurated an "Informal Doubles" draw in 1930. A year later a second doubles tournament, the Invitation Doubles Championship, played at the Greenwich Country Club in Connecticut, was added to the fixtures list. On the last weekend of January 1931, Roy R. Coffin and Neil J. Sullivan,II, both Germantown Cricket Club players, won the sixteen-team Greenwich Invitation, beating R.F. DeVoe and D.J. Nightingale in the finals. In 1932 Coffin and Sullivan repeated their win at Greenwich, topping Prescott Bush and W. Stopley Wonham in the finals—it clearly was a prerequisite for doubles players in those days to have a plummy name. In 1933 the U.S.S.R.A. anointed the Greenwich tourney as the nationals. Coffin & Sullivan, per usual, won the inaugural tournament, thrashing Lanthrop Haskins and Robert Goodwin in three games, six, eight and twelve. 

Women also played in the first nationals at Greenwich, with Sarah Madeira and Anne Page, Merion Cricket Club players, winning the title. More tournaments in Buffalo and Baltimore and Toronto and Minneapolis and most notably in New York with the Brooklyn Heights Casino Open (now called the Johnson) came into existence. In 1934 the Racquet Club hosted the nationals and pushed it back to its now-traditional date of the third weekend in March "The final, held on Sunday, March 18, and played before a packed gallery of about two hundred, was productive of the finest doubles play that has been seen this year at least," reported Squash-Badminton, a monthly magazine, in April 1934. It was Coffin and Sullivan versus Perry Pease and old Wonham. "The Philadelphians won in three close games. Although there was little to choose between the four players, Sullivan's genius for bringing off winners from many positions, because of his great versatility, gave the defenders a slight edge." 

Burst of Doubles Excitement in Britain 

What was most astounding was that the wave of excitement over doubles washed upon the shores of the birthplace of squash singles, Great Britain. In 1935 "the grand old English game" that Tompkins spoke of came into existence when three courts were laid out following U.S.S.R.A. specifications: first at St. John's Wood Squash Club and Ladies' Carlton Club in London and the Edinburgh Sports Club in Scotland. In addition, Prince's Club, the Knightsbridge, London club that dated from 1853 and was the nineteenth-century nursery to court tennis and racquets, maintained a non-standard doubles court fifty-four by thirty feet, with a cement floor. 

Starting in 1937 the Squash Racquets Association held a national tournament. The amateur winners that year were W.B. Scott and R.D. McKelvie. Don Butcher, the leading English player between the wars (and the last English player to win the British Open), was always on the winning side of the professional draw. Butcher was so good in part because he was the head professional at St. John's Wood. (He also was the first person to make an instructional squash video, which he filmed on the St. John's Wood doubles court in 1938.) 

Dreams of international competition were realized: the 1935 and 1937 British women took the U.S. women's doubles championships, and England and Scotland played an annual Test match against each other in doubles. 

Post-War Blues 

Alas, the Battle for Britain in 1940 killed doubles in London. Both St. John's and Ladies' Carlton were blitzed and destroyed, and Prince's closed its historic doors. In Edinburgh the court fell into disrepair during the war but play resumed in the late 1940s. The court hosted one particularly noteworthy event: in 1950 the U.S. beat England in doubles, which remains the only time America has beaten the English on their own turf in any sort of squash contest. Today, over a hundred members, according to their club manager, regularly use the Edinburgh court: they play doubles with American racquetball balls, which the members don't like, or the new Dunlop oversized beginner balls, or, as their website demonstrates (www.edinburgh-sports-club.co.uk) they string up a net and play badminton. Either way, the game once enchanted the Pommies. "It is magnificent, and it makes Squash seem an infinitely greater game even if one merely contemplates the empty court," the editors of Squash Rackets, Fives, Tennis and Rackets, a London monthly, wrote of the St. John's doubles court in January 1937. "There is no doubt at all that doubles at all games are infinitely superior to singles if only because they introduce that element of team spirit and combination which are so essential to sport. With the introduction of doubles there should really be no limit to the playing life of the happy Squash player." 

Why do we love doubles? 

For the court's long expanse of white with red trim, this great bright ocean liner plowing through the winter seas? For its infinite shotmaking capabilities—the high-flying Philadelphia shot,the astonishment of the reverse volley three-wall-dead-into-the-nick, the risk and glory of the double boast, the bread-and-butter,you-hit-that-loose-stuff-I'm-going-to-hit -this-till-the-cows-come-home reverse corner—shots that have sadly disappeared with the end of hardball singles? For the truth that there is, with doubles, no limit to the playing life of the happy squash player, that the game's most loyal players are nonagenarians? For the pleasant sight of mixed doubles? For the regulation, in 1933, that the doubles ball, "shall be pneumatic and at a temperature of sixty-eight degrees shall have a rebound upon a steel plate of thirty-six inches from a drop of one hundred inches"? For the fact doubles means two, team spirit and combination, first man and second man, your ball, I'll cover those hard cross-courts over your head, thanks for bailing me out, yessssssssssssssss PARTNER? 

Yes, for all this, but also for the fact that squash doubles is a quintessential American game. Of all the national games involving a racquet—save the blasphemous game of racquetball—only squash doubles is born and bred, U.S.D.A. certified, prime-cut, red-blooded American. 

Doubles explained 

A doubles court, a box of 22,500 cubic feet, is exactly the right amount of space. It creates a remarkable situation where creativity is contained and constrained by the law of gravity. Doubles works because of limitations. The game is one of close-combat violence. Four players, all standing in close proximity to each other in the middle of the court, bash a little rock at each other. To the novice spectator, the violence looks random. The angles and combinations of ricochets, the volcanic spray of drives, rebounds, volleys and drop shots, cloud the newcomer's eye. To the initiated, doubles bears zen-like fruit. The two right-wall players circle each other throughout the point. So do the left-wall players. The unspoken rule in squash doubles is that if one team is striking the ball, the other team gets room in front to stand and wait to return the ball. Therefore, both groups of two players are constantly revolving, like two gears in a machine, like two couples dancing, like two pinwheels side-by-side blowing in a hurricane wind. High-school geometry dictates what these spinning vortexes can do. 

The brutal simplicity of the game—a box and a ball and a stick—demands orthodoxy. Parabolas of drives, tangents of drop shots, swirling cosines of caroms are all predictable. Speed and spin can vary slightly, but once the ball is played, any seasoned player can immediately decipher where the ball is going, when the ball will bounce back and what would be an appropriate response. Responses, naturally vary, and within one point (many rallies last more than one hundred hits) the momentum can shift a dozen times as players dig themselves in and out of trouble. The sense of balance There is always a sense of balance with four people on one court. 

"Successful doubles results," wrote Al Molloy, long-time squash coach at Penn, "when one partner supplies the power and the other the finesse." That is the usual pattern, which is why the mid-1990s combination of Gary Waite and Jamie Bentley, two of the hardest hitting doubles players in history, was so lethal. It was power and power, and their three-year unbeaten streak was a testament to turning Molloy's dictum upside-down. Of course Waite & Bentley also won because both men could hit good dropshots. "All of the greatest doubles champions have been shot makers rather than retrievers," wrote three-time national doubles champion Victor Niederhoffer in 1979. "Diehl Mateer, who won the doubles titles on eleven occasions, is probably the greatest left court player. He goes for winners at least once in four hits." Doubles calls for the sharpshooter and the sniper, Dirty Harry with a Dunlop triggerfinger. 

The doubles court is large and long, one hundred and thirty-eight percent larger than a singles court. All that room up front is too tempting. Why lob and hit the ball deep in hopes of one's opponents coughing up a loose shot? Why be predictable? Stop this nonsense of one hundred-hit rallies. Shoot. The American cat and mouse That mentality thus produces a game where players are trying to prevent shots. "The essence in doubles," continued Niederhoffer, "is to place your team in an area where it's impossible for your opponents to go for the point with a high percentage shot." Instead of patiently waiting for a loose shot, players try more to prevent their opponents from being tempted by a shot. This cat and mouse is what makes the game truly apple-pie-stars-and-stripes. The individual is waiting to bust out with a stylish shot that declares, "I am here, I am a great player. I can break the mold." All the other racquet sports reward consistency and patience and endurance, keeping the ball in play and waiting for mistakes and unforced errors. But doubles rewards the bold. That is why we love doubles. It is so American.