Excerpt from A
History of Squash at Princeton by Rob Dinerman
September
17, 2017
The World Doubles
championships start later this week in St. Louis. No one knows
who will win, but it is a pretty sure bet that none of the
participating teams will employ the positioning strategy that
Charlie Brinton and his former Princeton teammate Stanley
Pearson Jr. successfully implemented 69 years ago in their run
to the 1948 U. S. National Doubles title. DSR is enclosing a
passage from "A History of Squash at Princeton University."
This book, authored by DSR Editor Rob Dinerman, will be
released in Autumn 2018.
Charlie Brinton was succeeded as U. S. Nationals winner by
his former college teammate Stanley Pearson Jr., whose triumph
in 1948 marked the only time in the history of this event that a
father/son combination has won this prestigious tournament
(Stanley Pearson Sr. won the Nationals from 1915-17 and from
1921-23). Though Brinton and Pearson were often rivals during
their overlapping singles careers, they did team up to win the
1948 U. S. National Doubles championship in Baltimore, and they
accomplished this feat in most distinctive fashion. Both players
excelled on the backhand flank and thus greatly preferred the
left wall; indeed, each had manned that slot while winning this
title during the prior two years, Brinton in '46 with Donnie
Strachan and Pearson in '47 with Dave McMullin.
Rather than having to make a difficult decision as to who
would get to play which wall, the two hit upon the ingenious
compromise of having each player stay throughout the point on
whichever wall he served from! If Brinton began a point by
serving from the right service box, he remained on the right
wall throughout the point, and if they won that point, Brinton
would then serve from the left box and play the left wall during
the ensuing rally. When they were receiving serve, Brinton
played the left wall (since, when receiving serve, players are
not allowed to switch walls during a game), but when they were
serving they employed the foregoing approach. This had the
additional benefit of confusing their opponents, the last of
which, Strachan and Johnny Smith, had no answers in what became
a fairly decisive final.
It is a tribute to the versatility of the two Princeton men
both that each was able to win two National Doubles in the
three-year period from 1946-48 with two different partners, and
that each was able to alternate so successfully from one point
to the next between the left and right walls in the execution of
a game plan that would be unthinkable in today's
specialist-oriented era where often a player acts downright
insulted when asked to switch away, even temporarily, from "his"
wall. Twenty-five years later, when Princeton was designated as
the host site for the U. S. Nationals in 1973, Brinton and
Pearson were named as the event’s Honorary Co-Chairmen. Brinton
was inducted into the U. S. Squash Hall of Fame upon its
founding in 2000, and Pearson is the only player in the history
of racquet sports to win both the U. S. Nationals in singles and
doubles in both rackets (an exotic four-wall game played on a
concrete black floor with a ball that resembles a golf ball) and
squash.
