You cannot impress a woman—in my younger and more vulnerable years, I have tried—by telling her that you play squash. It is after all the only sport that shares its name with a gourd. And it is, ordinarily, among the obscurest of athletic pursuits. Invented in English prep schools in the mid-nineteenth century, using sawed-off racquets then called bats, squash has never completely transcended its imperial origins; and it has endured, in America at least, largely because of those elite universities, clubs, and rarified Wasp enclaves that still host regulation indoor courts. Popularly speaking, squash is, as a Chicago Tribune reporter last year described it, “the other white-collar sport.” Ping-pong has more street cred.

Then came the announcement by reporter David S. Cloud in last Sunday’s New York Times that squash’s most notorious amateur practitioner is Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who is currently mending from a September 5 procedure on the rotator cuff in his left shoulder, torn as a result of his daily regimen of play. “He was under a lot of discomfort,” the Pentagon’s press secretary told Reuters after the surgery, adopting the tenor of a White House staffer relating a wipeout during a mountain bike sortie around the Crawford Ranch. As usual, the Times is late to the story (oddly, Cloud doesn’t mention the operation that has sidelined Rummy) but goes for broke with his obviously fertile material.

In some ways, squash offers a window into Mr. Rumsfeld’s complicated psyche, revealing much about his stubborn competitiveness and seemingly limitless stamina. Pentagon officials and employees say Mr. Rumsfeld’s play closely resembles the way he runs the Defense Department, where he has spent six years trying to break the accepted modes of operating.

It is not especially surprising that the Sunday Times, where blithe observation passes as a codified métier, would treat Rummy’s jones for an antiquated game—he injured himself—as a political revelation. Still, it’s worth recalling, as Cloud does not, the last occasion on which the secretary’s devotion to squash made the news. In November 2004, when public outrage forced Rumsfeld to begin personally signing condolence letters to the families of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (he had been relying on an automated machine), a Washington Post article mentioned a father who “bitterly commented that he thought it was a shame that the SecDef could keep his squash schedule but not find the time to sign his dead son’s letter.”

Whether or not he realized it, that aggrieved father had gone to the heart of the matter. In tennis, the entire arm, from the shoulder down, affects the direction and force of a swing, whereas in squash, the wrist is the hub of a good shot. War may be hell, but inscribing your full name to a form letter 3,000 times (and counting)—that has the potential to do serious violence to your squash game. Rumsfeld, remember, was under a lot of discomfort.