Dear Dunlop
In the summer of 2013, Raneem El Welily wrote a âDear Dunlopâ letter. Of sorts. The 24-year-old Egyptian squash champion atted Dunlop Sport, tweeting that they were ruining her life. Their terrible squash balls were ânot even round.â She attached photographic evidence of the offending objects. The image shows a collection of Dunlop Pro squash balls, some obviously shy of a regular spherical shape. Many had been discarded with the white stamp of the Dunlop brand still fresh. Other players had also noticed the problem. It was not simply that the balls were bouncing too fast or too slow. Their elasticity, shape, and lifespan were all unpredictable. In an interview in the fall of 2013, longtime top American player Latasha Khan said, âItâs dramatic. Some just take off. And other ones are so heavy that they just die. You canât warm them upâ (L. Kahn, personal communication, Oct 3, 2013). Kahn said this was affecting both the duration of matches and who was winning and losing. Malaysian champion and womenâs world number one, Nicol David, said the ways the balls were changing shape made her think that if the balls did not already have expiration dates, that they should have them (N. David, personal communication, Oct 2, 2013). Davidâs Malaysian compatriot, Wee Wern Low, who had just joined David in the top ten rankings the year before, laughed as she described her coach telling her not to blame the ball during practice. Her reply to him: âNo, Iâm serious. Some of them are really just not round and some are fliers as well. For some reason one ball can be like a normal bounce and from the same box you can get another ball that just keeps flying around like nobodyâs business. It is crazyâ (W. Low, personal communication, Oct 2, 2013). At the time of her post, El Welily was chasing the number one ranking, a spot that had been held continuously by David since 2006. To achieve her quest, El Welily needed Dunlopâs balls to be the constant she had come to depend on, not suddenly strange objects. She needed a true bounce: a bounce that is regular, reliable, and predictable. The Dunlop Pro balls had become untrue.
A squash ball is a small thing, literally and figuratively. Squash is a minor sport that aspires to but has never been included in the Olympics. Developed in England in the early nineteenth century and spread around the world by the British Empire, the gameâs history is reflected in the current womenâs and menâs world squash rankings with top players hailing from England, Egypt, Australia, Malaysia, India, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand along with a scattering of European countries. Squash was the first British game to be played from its outset with a rubber ball. The ball used today is about the size of a table-tennis ball but with a thicker shell. It has almost no bounce until the rubber is warmed up through repeated contact with racket strings and court surfaces. The regularity of the shape, size, behavior, and durability of these small pneumatic objects may matter only to professional squash players. But it matters a lot to them. They spend thousands of hours training their bodies and timing their gestures around this specific kind of bounce. Like all professional athletes, they develop an intimate knowledge of their instruments and environments of play because their fortunes are shaped by the kind of contact they do (or do not) make with the ball at key moments. Squash balls are industrial objects, technologies whose carefully calibrated specifications allow (or, are supposed to allow) players to count on their behavior. The World Squash Federation (WSF) specifications for a ball include narrow parameters for weight, diameter, stiffness, seam strength, rebound resilience, and percentage of allowable change under high and low temperature conditions. Around 90% of the squash balls sold around the world each year are made by Dunlop and the Dunlop Pro is the official ball for the womenâs and menâs professional tours. While the national origins of todayâs top ranked squash players reflect the way the gameâs spread followed the British Empire, the true bounce that El Welily and so many other players around the world rely on depends in turn on the history of the transformation of rubber into an industrial colonial plantation crop and the massive role that Dunlop plays in that history. For the purposes of this chapter, I want to propose that the misshapen Dunlop squash balls in El Welilyâs photograph can stand in for all of the official balls of games played around the world. These small, hollow, just short of round rubber balls hold a sweeping story of the relationship between rubber and sport.
Vulcanized Play
Rubber is one of the foundational materials of modern sport. Indeed, it is a foundational material of modern life. Take a moment to consider the things that regularly carry you across any kind of distance: slippers, sandals, sneakers, shoes, boots, bicycles, motorbikes, wheelchairs, gurneys, cars, buses, planes. So many different kinds of movement rest on rubber. In the world of sports, there is an endless array of rubber. The wheels of almost any vehicle used in road racing are made of rubber. As are the vast majority of the solid, hollow, and inflated balls made for being hit with feet, heads, hips, hands, rackets, bats, clubs, sticks, and paddles. And of course, there are rubberized surfacesâgymnasium flooring, gymnastic tumbling mats, yoga mats, running tracks. Even some kinds of artificial grass are made with rubber backing and crumb rubber (chopped up tires) that sprays up onto playerâs bodies and makes for worse injuries than those that occur on grass (Litman 2014). It would be an exaggeration to say that the world is carpeted in rubber, but it is worth taking seriously the material effort that goes into cushioning impact, and the way this effort has shaped and reshaped landscapes and lives. Rubber has changed the ways we move and the ways we comport ourselves in movement.
When I say that rubber is a foundational material of modern sport and modern life, I use the word modern in part to emphasize the way the concept of sport is tied to the concept of modernity. The English word sport was derived from the French word desport, which meant both entertainment and comportment. These two meanings point toward the way forms of play and sport shape people as embodied subjects. Sport took on a new meaning of physical competition in the middle of the nineteenth century with the rise of organized sports such as football, rugby , cricket, and athletics (Oxford English Dictionary 2019). In the process, the concept became associated on the one hand with set of ideals around athleticism, masculinity, and imperialism that were fostered in the British public schools (Mangan 1981; Mangan and McKenzie 2010), and on the other hand it became the name for new professional kinds of competitions: spectacles that sold seats and merchandise to an emerging middle class equipped with new kinds of leisure (Tenner 2003). Modern sport is a form of institutionalized play and, as such, it contains the shape and form and material conditions of society. More specifically, it is a form of institutionalized play that conditions subject formation and is in turn conditioned by bounce: it is vulcanized play.
With the phrase vulcanized play, I aim to capture some key aspects of the relationship between rubber, sport, and technology by tying the history of play, and especially the formation we think of as modern sport, to the industrial and imperial projects that structure the production of truer (better, more reliable, more standard) forms of buffer and bounce primarily through the material technology of rubber. Vulcanization is the name given by Thomas Hancock, one of the founders of the British rubber industry, to the process of stabilizing, or curing, rubber through the use of high heat, mastication, and additives such as sulfur. The name, which invokes Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and technology, was suggested to Hancock by his friend William Brockedon, a painter, inventor, and author of books such as Italy, Classical, Historical, and Picturesque (Hancock 1857). Brockedonâs suggestion reflects a common practice of the time of drawing on Greek and Latin roots to generate names for new technologies. (Think, for example, of the wealth of optical toys devised in Britain at this moment: the thaumatrope [wonder-turner], phenakistoscope [view- or eye-deceiver], daedaleum [in reference to Daedalus who built wings for his son Icarus], zoopraxiscope [life-by-practice viewer], and zoetrope [wheel of life]). This practice connects British culture to the Greek and Roman empires through the act of naming, often in the process papering over actual origins. In the case of rubber, the earliest technologies were developed by the Olmec (rubber people) and refined by the Mixtec, Aztec, Maya, Tlaxcala, and other pre-Columbian civilizations in what is now named America (Loadman 2005; Tully 2011). Among other uses for the elastic material, these cultures organized spectacular ball games around rubber bounce (Whittington and Mint Museum of Art 2001; Wing 2015). Naming the process developed to cure rubber of its undesirable properties after the Roman god of technology dislocated the technology from its origins in Mesoamerican societies. The phrase vulcanized play carries forward and displays this trouble with names and asserts deep connections between our forms of play and sport, histories of rubber specifically, and histories of technology more broadly. If this volume aims to articulate relationships between sports, society, and technology, this chapter uses the multiple histories of Dunlop to claim material science, industrial manufacturing, and imperial power as underwriting partners of those three terms and to tell a set of stories about rubber and sport.
While for sport, rubber appears as a foundational material technology, for rubber, sport appears repeatedly at its sites of invention, incorporation, production, expansion, competition, and promotion. What follows are three stories of Dunlop. The first is a story of a person: John Boyd Dunlop Sr., inventor of the pneumatic tire and the co-founder of what would become the Dunlop Rubber Company. This is story about fathers and sons, the sport of cycling and its use as a testing ground for a new technology, the problem of antivibration, the power of names, and the massacres at the sites of rubber extraction at this time. The second is a story of a corporation. The Dunlop Rubber Company, built by the Du Cros family, was one of Britainâs largest multinationals for much of the twentieth century and a top supplier of tires for car and cycling...