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Squash versus tennis is an age old discussion that has at one time or another gotten the blood churning in most pro squash players of both yesterday and today. The physical and mental demands placed upon a squash player outweigh those of a tennis player. It can be a tender point in the life of an athlete who excels in an area only to be shadowed in recognition and wealth by another racket sport that isn’t nearly as difficult, or is it?

The winner of the most prestigious tennis tournament, Wimbledon, walks away with US$750 000.

Mark Philippoussis the big serving Aussie collects Ferrari’s as one of his hobbies, and what has he won? Granted he has had some good results but we are talking about a player who has never even been in the top five and has so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it You may be asking yourself why does this bother me?

Joe Kneipp tries out the Dutch clay courts (above) as a breather from the normal squash court scene.

I would be lying if I said that it had nothing to do with the me not living in a big house, driving a fancy car and having wads of cash to throw around like so many tennis players. The difference in prize money is upsetting for an athlete in a physically and mentally comparable sport, and when you hear people saying that tennis is a harder game than squash on top of that then it is more frustrating.

It is not a subject that I think about very often at all but since becoming friends with ex-Wimbledon champion Richard Krajicek’s coach, Rohan Goetzke, I have been able to get the tennis player’s perspective on the argument. Rohan doesn’t agree with my opinion but reluctantly concedes that the average squash pro is fitter than the average tennis pro. He hasn’t been able to dissuade my belief that the amount of training and pain a squash pro inflicts upon himself from day to day is without any doubt at a level superior to that of your average tennis pro.

The evidence of such things are indicated by how few retired tennis champions are struggling to simply walk properly because their hips have degenerated to such a level they’re portraying the gait of a man thirty years their senior.

Australia’s Crippled Ex-Champions
I have just come back from Australia where I was attending a training camp in preparation for The Commonwealth Games. Three coaches have been appointed for the event and one of them is the legendary Geoff Hunt. Geoff, along with Victorian Institute of Sport coach Roger Flynn have both had multiple operations as a result of a career of elite squash, including hip replacement surgery.

I have been watching these two men limp around for years and it is not until now that the technology and expertise has become available so that they can walk with a new set of titanium hips and the range of movement befitting of something close to normal. They had been restricted in their movement to such an extent that getting in and out of a car had become a dilemma.

The third Commonwealth Games coach spent the week limping around saying how he had managed to avoid surgery so far but didn’t think he could put it off any longer. Ex-greats of the game Jansher Khan, Rodney Martin, Chris Robertson and others have also had to quit the game either towards middle or end of their careers due to serious injury. Rodney Martin is also a member of the Hip Replacement Squad. I got a bit further into that than I expected but it is shocking how many ex-players have been humbled by this game and a reminder of what this sport has done to people who have trained hard to excel in their profession.

Play and Rest
I am training extremely hard to get myself in good enough shape so that I can win five 1hr 45 mins matches in succession and I know for a fact that some of the other guys are doing more intensive programs with more weight work and drills or more road running, sprints or whatever else. The training we are doing now has reached this point as a result of different factors, the most important ones being that we know a variety of activities or training methods we can do to push ourselves to a level of pain that can help us reach the necessary condition.

One of the other most important factors is that we have learnt from people before us, anyone who has ever heard some of the training schedules of such former players as Geoff Hunt will know what kind of scary extremes players have gone to in the past.

Two that spring to mind are Chris Dittmar taking an exercise machine known as a versa climber into the sauna and training on it to prepare himself for having to take on the mighty Jansher Khan in hot and humid Malalysia. The other is Geoff Hunt urinating blood after playing Jahangir Khan in the final of the British Open. I put this to you , have you ever heard of similar things in the world of tennis?

JONAH
The pioneer of physical training for squash was of course Jonah Barrington. In fact before Jonah came along squash was purely played in the winter months and totally left alone in the summer for the fear of getting "stale". He was to say years later that he had a lot of training failures while experimenting but this was because there was no example to work off or book to follow on squash training.

One of Jonah’s methods was to run around Sloane square until he was sick, an interesting training method if ever there was one! He did weights for the strengthening of the body and was also known to run up to 100 miles per week.. When injured Jonah would train in the boiler room at the Lansdowne club doing push ups, sit ups, star jumps ,etc.

There is a comment that I hear from time to time that I would like to address now, ‘Tennis players are fitter, look how much longer the matches are’ This is one of my absolute favourites.

For anyone who hasn’t ever noticed it, the amount of rest time involved in tennis matches is unbelievable. They get a sit-down break after every two games (which can be as little as eight points). But the biggest breaks really are in between points, when you add all of these up it is by far the majority of the match time. Surprisingly enough, players are allowed to get the ballboys to give them a towel to wipe themselves down between points, and every point if they want.

If you have ever watched much of Greg Rusedski‘s matches then you will know exactly what I am talking about. It used to be that when I would think of Greg Rusedski I would think of his huge serve but now it is of him pointing at a ballboy after a rally to get his towel and wipe his face. A sweaty face is not in fact the reason he is continually going for his towel but more because it acts as a routine of sorts to help compose himself between points, but, how is this allowed or even tolerated? Can you imagine the squash pro’s having someone throw them a towel after every point or even third or fourth point?

They also let the players go to their bags in the MIDDLE of a game and get a small tool to straighten their strings whilst their opponent waits to serve. Even John McEnroe while commentating at Wimbledon has questioned why these unnecessary breaks are not being prevented. Of course not everyone is doing these things during their matches but even the players that play quite quickly have so much time between points, games and sets that the fitness of the players are never really tested in the same way as that of a squasher.

REST AND PLAY
Personally I think that the racket skills of the average tennis pro is better than those of a squash pro and is very physically challenging but we are comparing the two sports and that is something else. There is so much more rest and also less energy exerted compared to squash, mostly due to the nature of squash being more stop-start and explosive as well as the rallies lasting longer.

In order to compare the fitness levels of two similar sports we need to look at the time spent in motion and time spent at rest. With this equation being applied squash has to come in first.

To be certain of the difference we recorded a set of tennis (Wimbledon final 2002 Hewitt and Nalbandian) between two baseliners , this means that the rallies are going to be longer than normal.

The figures are quite staggering when you have them in front of you. The set lasted for 38 minutes (the overall match was one hour forty-nine minutes so this was over a third of the total match time). The average rally length was 6.5 seconds. The average rest between points was 31 seconds. The average rest just between serves (after a fault) was over eight seconds. There were two rallies that lasted over thirty seconds. The total time that the ball was in play for the set was 8.5 minutes. 29.5 minutes of the set no balls were being hit.

Now lets have a look at a squash game. My game against Peter Nicol at the PSA Masters in Qatar. The first game lasted nearly 29 minutes. Ten minutes short of the Hewitt / Nalbandian set. The average rally between Peter and me was 28.5 seconds. The average break between rallies was 15 seconds. The total amount of rest for our first set was 9.5 minutes. The ball was in motion for 19 minutes. Well over twice the length of the tennis set. Our match had 15 rallies over 30 seconds in length and three over a minute. Only four rallies lasted less than ten seconds which was the average tennis rally length.

I heard a great statistic some years back about one of the Wimbledon finals between Sampras and Ivanisevic, the match lasted something in the vicinity of four and a half hours but there was a grand total of 17 minutes of actual play! After working out the statistic of Hewitt’s Wimbledon win I can understand the Ivanisevic/Sampras statistic is likely to be accurate, remembering they are both serve and volley player.

The matches on clay can be a whole different story, some of the matches at Roland Garros are extremely long, physical and draining and could compare with the amount of playing time of a squash match.

This is obviously a complex issue and there’s clear reasons why tennis players earn the big bucks. We’re going to tackle this issue as well as get the tennis player’s perspective in a future article.

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