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overseers, leaders, political representatives. They did not always maintain clear or clean boundaries between the different kinds of authority and power that they wielded. The company was saved by F. A. Szarvasy of the British Foreign and Colonial Service (Jones 1984, p. 44) and the Du Cros family was ushered out. The expansion that followed was pursued in relation to the parallel growth of the other major rubber manufacturers and the relationships that each of these giant multinationals had to the nations that they claimed as homes and as territories. In 1985 Dunlop Rubber was acquired by its longtime competitor British Tyre and Rubber (BTR). BTR proceeded to spin off—sell—most of the company’s subsid- iaries and then renamed itself Invensys, as part of a transformation into a conglomerate of companies that focus on software, industrial automa- tion, energy controls, and appliances. But the name Dunlop, which was first printed onto dirt roads in 1891, and the Flying D logo, which was launched in 1960, persist. Today, they are used by companies around the world that sell Dunlop tires, conveyor belts, golf balls, tennis rackets, mattresses, and footwear. In acquiring the right to use the Dunlop brand these disparate companies have acquired a common lineage while having no other necessary relation to each other. Their wielding of the brand can in turn render the lineages of the current companies (Goodyear, Sumitomo Rubber, the Ruia Group, Pacific Brands, Sports Direct) a little harder to see. We could think of this game of hide and seek as another kind of vulcanized play.
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produced the tennis balls for Wimbledon and most of the company’s squash balls for many years. Production was moved to a factory in the Bataan Economic Zone in the Philippines, a move that included the machines from the Barnsley factory being shipped to Bataan. Cinven eventually turned the brand over to the Bank of Scotland who in turn sold the brand to Mike Ashley and his company Sports Direct in 2003.
Before Ashley went into the sport retail business and became a billionaire by buying and selling brands, he was a county-level squash player and later a county-level squash coach. By the time he purchased the Dunlop Slazenger brand, Ashley was running the largest sport retail business in the UK. Sports Direct’s business model is based on brands and bargain.
The Channel 4 Dispatches episode, “The Secrets of Sports Direct,” docu- mented the company’s misleading pricing policies including regular
“slapping [brand logos] on anything they like,” as well as their practice of keeping a majority of their employees on zero-hour contracts (Dowling 2015).
The balls in El Welily’s photograph (see Fig. 1) are marked “Pro” and carry the stamp “WSF PSA WISPA” identifying the ball’s standing as the official ball of the World Squash Federation (WSF), the Professional Squash Association (PSA), and the Women’s International Squash Players Association (WISPA). But WISPA had been renamed the Women’s Squash Association (WSA) in 2011 so the balls pictured are either two or more years old at the time of the photograph (and thus almost as old when El Welily used and discarded them) or the factory failed to change the stamp when the association changed its name. Was this a case of dumping factory seconds or old stock from recently defunct factories in England and South Africa? Or was there a problem at the factory in Bataan? Andrew Shelley, chief executive of the World Squash Organization, does not remember the specifics beyond some problem with quality con- trol and that the balls were “losing nap” too quickly. (Nap being the name for the texture on the surface of the ball that lets players control the ball when it hits their rackets strings [A. Shelley, personal communication, Jan 7, 2019].) Some period of time after the professional squash organizations made an appeal to Dunlop, the balls began bouncing prop- erly again. In 2017, Ashley sold the Dunlop Sports brand to Sumitomo Rubber, which already owned the rights to Dunlop Sport in Japan,
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Taiwan, and Korea as well as the rights to Dunlop Tires and Dunlop Tyres in Asia and Africa.
True bounce is a quality that depends on regular objects, surfaces, and environments. The notion of true and false bounce appears in early twentieth- century American and British discussions of sport. A New York Times article from August 21, 1914, titled “No Cause for Worry:
European War Will Have No Effect on American Sporting Implements,”
describes the difference in quality between English and American tennis balls as “a trifle in resiliency or ‘true bounce’ that only the most expert player can detect” (1914). Another article from the same year in the London Times details a dispute between the British and American Davis Cup tennis teams. The Americans were wearing steel points (what we would call cleats) that were tearing up Wimbledon’s painstakingly pre- pared grass and of course impacting the bounce: “Steel points … produce false bounds, and the more false bounds the worse for the British Isles players, who allow the ball to bounce more often than the Americans do”
(1913). The writer describes the difference as a difference in style of play, and says the Americans are understandably anxious about “their foot- hold, which depends upon wearing what they are accustomed to; and their foothold is as much to them as the true bounce is to us” (Ibid.). In this case the ball is true but the surface, marred with holes from the steel points, has become false. One way that true bounce is assured is through regular testing. Since the mid-twentieth century, Dunlop has used “robot players”: machines that strike balls continuously with a racket such that they “rebound from concrete surfaces back again on to the machine which strikes them again. In this way the playing quality of the melton [fabric exterior] is measured in a very short time and special balls can be designed for use in parts of the world where different climatic conditions would affect their performance” (Dunlop Rubber Company 1957, pp. 58–59). Supplying true bounce is an important part of what sporting goods and tire manufacturers do.
While the World Squash Federation does not have the resources to regularly test the bounce of Dunlop’s balls against their established specifications, better resourced ball sport organizations do. In the case of tennis, any company may submit balls to the International Tennis Federation (ITF) for testing and, if they pass, the balls from that particu-
True Bounce: Stories of Dunlop and the Rise of Vulcanized Play
36
lar production line are sanctioned by the ITF as proper. For big tourna- ments, samples of the already sanctioned balls are retested to ensure the quality of the batch. The bounce facility at the US Tennis Association (USTA), the American cousin of the ITF, exists for the sole purpose of testing balls and surfaces for “trueness” in the sense of consistency and reliability. The ITF is in charge of testing the balls that Dunlop makes for Wimbledon every year. Specifications are given in ranges rather than exact numbers: they name the degrees of difference that are considered tolerable or “true enough.” Balls are strange objects to test for “truth.”
This is especially true of pressurized pneumatic objects. They are physi- cally unable to stay constant to themselves. The tennis balls in the USTA bounce test facility are simply representative samples, standing in for all the others. Over 90,000 tennis balls are used during a single US Open tournament. The organizing bodies that set the rules and specifications of play and the global industrial supply chains that run from plantation and processing plant to factory and distribution center usually garner less attention than the spectacle of the players’ performances. But these insti- tutions produce the equipment and build the venues for sport that serve as the fixed ground that these athletes depend on and depart from.
Athletes develop their highly channeled virtuosities around reliable objects and environments. At least in the case of ball sports, this kind of reliability makes possible their regular extraordinary demonstrations of the limits of human capacity.
True bounce continues to be achieved through standards, specifica- tions, quality control, plantation agriculture, well-secured global supply chains, and dramatically unequal systems of labor and distribution. The Dunlop Pro squash ball is a small thing—a minor player in the ongoing story of globalization. But now picture all of the balls used for tennis, golf, basketball, volleyball, baseball, soccer, football, handball. Picture all of the ball pits, Walmart bins, and supermarket vending machines filled with bouncy balls. These ubiquitous objects connect our everyday ges- tures to global histories (Fig. 3). They are histories of children’s play and organized sports spectacles, histories of the material technologies of rubbers and plastics, histories of industrial manufacturing including pneumatics systems and injection molding, and histories of colonialism,
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postcolonialism, and the persistence of imperial power. These histories are the conditions of existence for so many seemingly simple objects that are so deeply embedded in our lives. I call this an era of vulcanized play rather than vulcanized sport, because it is not just our institutionalized forms of play that rest on rubber. What these histories of John Boyd Dunlop, Dunlop Rubber, Dunlop Sports, and the Dunlop Pro squash ball let us begin to understand is just how much of our formal and infor- mal movements rest on and revolve around rubber, and what that mate- rial attachment ties us to. Rubber mediates contact and impact and, in doing so, structures both how we want to and how we are able to move.
Acknowledgments Thank you to all of the squash players who spoke with me about the behavior of the Dunlop Pro squash balls, to Mary McDonald and
Fig. 3 Balls collected by the author and Cuauhtli from the streets of Los Angeles (Photo by C. Wing, 2019)
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Jennifer Sterling for running the sports and technology panels at the annual 4S conference and for inviting me to contribute to this volume, to Hannah Zeavin and Jessica Feldman for reading drafts of this chapter, and to Cuauhtli for col- laborating with me in rescuing many abandoned balls from the streets of Los Angeles.
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© The Author(s) 2020
J. J. Sterling, M. G. McDonald (eds.), Sports, Society, and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9127-0_3