Prologue Schoolboys created the game out of three simple things. They swung crude racquets shaved off at the handle. They hit gray rubber balls, sticky, misshapen, punctured, smelling of brimstone. They battered stone walls stippled with windows, ledges and pipes. Three items were the sole prerequisites, and a century and a half later it is the same: a bat, a ball and a wall.Squash breeds zealots. People fall in love with the game to the point of obsession. Something about it captures the imagination.

Each of the tripartite aspects of squash is so basic and so uncomplicated that the love runs pure and deep. Time does not leaven the passion. Decades later a squash player can instantly retrieve the memory of that first day he connected on the sweet spot of a racquet and drove a squash ball hard into a wall.The bat, as a racquet used to be called, is the chief tool of the squash tradesman. At first it was a sawed-off bamboo stick. As the game grew in sophistication, it became a hoop of second-growth white ash, bent by steam, strung with gut and red silk cord, with a pillowy calfskin grip at one end and the stern admission on the side: Squash Racquet Not Guaranteed. Prossers. Wright & Ditson.

Spalding. Bancroft. Snauwaert. Cragin. Feron. Unsquashable. Manta. Slazenger.

Dunlop. Wilson. Head. Prince. Today racquets are made from high modulous graphite, hyper carbon and titanium. They swoosh through the air with oversized heads, with a powerscoop shaft, microfilament, eighteen-gauge nylon Ashaway strings and a cushion-fit faux-leather grip. The bat is long and light, but capable of delivering satisfying force upon the ball.King Arthur obtained Excalibur from a beautiful woman who stood sentry at the shores of a lake in which the sword was submerged; a squash player's relationship to his weapon is equally shrouded in the mists of romantic myth.

It is a scythe you swing in a white field, a rapier that cuts to the quick, a rifle for a soldier, a hammer for a carpenter. You envelop your bat in a fetishistic aura. You pamper it. You kiss it after a lucky shot. You grip and regrip it, winding wafer-thin blue ribbons around the handle, tying them off with a red stick of tape. You bandage the head with protective tape. You tap it against the wall before you serve, like a blind man touching the sidewalk with a cane. It gives your bearings.

You string and restring, and you straighten the strings in between points like a master weaver. You are loath to let someone borrow it. You are superstitious and save a magical racquet for crucial matches. You stick it first into your squash bag when you go away for a tournament. When you come back, you stash it head down in your locker. Squash is a tough sport. Racquets split and crack. Players retire.

Memories fade into the back corners of the mind. When your racquet finally breaks, you do not throw it away. You bury it in an upstairs closet to be found by a grandchild. What was this, Grandpa? This, you say as you again heft the glorious weight and swing it whistling through the air and ponder a life not guaranteed, this was my squash racquet.The ball the schoolboys originally swatted was a globe of vulcanized India rubber pierced with a hole. At the turn of the twentieth century, it became a gutta-percha ball, then the Hewitt, the black Seamless, the Cragin green diamond, the revolutionary blue Merco seventy-plus, the Slazenger fuchsia ball, and now the black Dunlop Revelation Pro XX Yellow Dot. The ball has always been small and quick, an effulgent moonrock flashing and floating through the white space of the court. It cruises like a nuclear pinball.

It ricochets like bees shaken in a jar. It darts like a scared serpent. And then it dies upon command. Like the faddish board game from the 1970s, squash is the Othello of games: It takes a minute to learn but a lifetime to master.The walls were originally made of stone quarried from the earth. They did not enc.