I found myself wondering this as we sent off Bob Geoghegan this week.

I'd gotten to know Bob properly in more recent years when we were on the council together but I had, of course, been aware of him since the early 70s when he began his long-term proprietorship of East Maitland's Hit-N-Dip Sports Centre.

Hit-N-Dip.

I played quite a bit of squash at Hit-N-Dip. It seemed like everybody did. We used to play on the courts at Bulwer Street too, and the others at the Police Boys' Club.

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There were also courts at Jubilee, Rutherford, the Gaol ... Playing squash was a fairly stock-standard method of keeping fit back in the day.

This would seem - when I look around and consider how thin on the ground squash facilities appear to be today - to no longer be the case.

It strikes me as a strange development in this modern era of gyms going gangbusters.

Curious I took my questions to Newcastle squash player and squash centres owner Don Elsey.

Don described for me Newcastle squash at its peak in the 1970s-80s, a sport that boasted 20 squash centres (not 20 courts - 20 centres!) and almost 3500 registered competition players.

In fact the competition at one stage consisted of 45 grades - A grade down to H, with each grade consisting of multiple levels (H had 8...) And then there were the legions of social hitters.

Of those 20 centres, according to Don, only one remains - the facility at Cardiff.

Don ascribes significant blame for the game's modern demise on rule and equipment changes.

The racquets have grown, the balls are bouncing less and, at some levels, the 'tin' has been lowered from 19 inches to 17. The very nature of the game has changed.

"Squash was a running game," Don told me. "It was a running game because the racquets were timber, initially, and the ball was a very bouncy ball, so you would run, with rallies of 20 or 30 shots to gain a point.

"Today you've got a racquet the size of a tennis racquet and they're using double yellow dotted balls - a very heavy ball. So squash has become a shot-playing game.

"The server plays the ball and the receiver will go for a winning shot. The rallies now consist of only three or four shots."

Squash NSW chief executive Garry Somerville has expressed an alternative view.

Somerville says that squash was the only sport played "almost entirely on privately owned courts," more often than not on quite prime real estate.

"'When the game was big," says Somerville, "and there was a squash court on every corner, the real estate value was not there."

It changed with the real estate boom. Centre owners, often operating on barely sustainable margins, sold their courts to developers.

According to this view squash is a dying sport simply because there is nowhere to play it.

Whatever the cause the numbers are unavoidable. In an environment of rapidly diminishing participation rates in Australian competitive sports squash is pretty much leading the charge.

A recent study showed that squash's "regular participants" have dropped from 178,000 to 59,000 in the last 15 years. A whopping 67 per cent decrease.

I suppose another factor to be taken into account would be what many consider to be the game's limited appeal as a spectator sport.

You can't sit 'around' a squash court. You really do have to just watch from the back, and there's only so much room for that.

The uncomfortable truth would seem to be that squash is a game far, far more enjoyable to play than it is to watch but that we, as a society, prefer by far these days to be on the watching end of things ... just not watching squash.

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