Four years ago, there was just one thing that came to mind when you heard the phrase Richmond squash: the Price-Bullington Invitational. The PBI is a classic amateur tournament that features top college kids who are flown in from their campuses to the Country Club of Virginia for the weekend. (Started in 1970, it was originally the Holt Bullington, named in honor of the eponymous Richmond junior who died the year before.) Otherwise the Virginia SRA was molasses-slow world, with not a single twenty-one-foot court in Richmond and barely any league or junior play. Richmond’s main claim to fame was that it was the home of the good reverend, Bob Hetherington, who was a top amateur forty years ago. And then everything changed. 

Ted Price, the Old Dominion squash kingpin who now shares the honors of the PBI name, brought in journeyman teaching pro Gus Cook (France; Lakeshore Athletic in Chicago; Birmingham Athletic in Detroit; Meadow Mill in Baltimore), and Richmond squash blossomed. Cook started five days before Christmas in 2003 and a month later he had organized a pro squash tournament, the Virginia Open. Each winter Cook added a PSA star to the prize money level and increased the budget (from $19,000 in 2004 to $175,000 in 2008). After two years at the Country Club of Virginia, Cook moved the tournament down the road to the home of the Spiders, the University of Richmond. For the next two years, the tournament had a glass court plopped down in the Tyler Haynes Commons, UR’s student union which famously had fifty-foot high windows looking out on the a tree-banked pond.

While this was going on, Richmond squash exploded. The CCV put in three softball court and other clubs began the process of converting or adding courts. One intriguing new club is the Wood n Racket, which is a half hour outside Richmond on the way to Charlottesville. Besides some grass tennis courts, it has one squash doubles court and plans for a second one.

This week the Davenport Open, as the pro tournament is now called, is up the hill from the pond, at UR’s old Millhiser gym. It has a 400-seat capacity, cozy and slightly quaint with the worn brick and wooden rafters. With the huge draw (twelve of the top twenty in the world), it feels like just another big international tournament: The McWil truck (”Glass Court on World Tour”) is sitting outside; Martin Bronstein is interviewing the players as they leave the court after their match; local shutter babe Patricia Lyons is snapping shots; and Jean Delierre is tremendously busy fixing cameras and snaking cable lines for his television filming. Fans from as close as Norfolk and Chapel Hill and as far away as Baltimore and New York are coming into town.

Only at times it is a sleepy scene, like when there was a fifteen-minute gap between matches on the first afternoon, and Ramy and Hesham Ashour got on court to hit. Ramy was about as casual as possible: in his socks, borrowing one of his brother’s racquets and his long sweats dragging underfoot. Yet he still looked, with his flicks and flips, like a magician.

The biggest excitement so far has been the opening round match of Patrick Chifunda v. Cam Pillay. Chifunda is now based at CCV and running junior clinics all over town and got enormous home-crowd ovations—at introductions, after the warmup, after some of his airborne swan dives and after his match.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 12:10 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

February is the quiet month in American sports. Except for the squash community, when it is nuts, with two or three marquee events each weekend. Living in Washington, one tournament I like to catch is Baltimore’s famous—or rather infamous—BIDS. 

Baltimore has a rich squash history and none more interesting than its fierce, sometimes absurd involvement with hardball doubles. There was the brothers tandem of Joe and Jim Lacy who won numerous state and club championships despite both being left-handed. The city’s first court appeared in 1937 at the now-defunct University Club, but the court was built not at the U Club’s clubhouse on Charles Street but in a hotel around the corner on West Madison Street (it disappeared in 1964). In 1939 the first Baltimore Invitational Doubles was held and it has occurred sporadically ever since; the 2008 edition was called the 65th, but in reality it was more like the 40th (war years; squabbling amongst Baltimore’s clubs; and they like to count the ten times the city has hosted the national doubles).

The highlight of this year’s BIDS was the action at Meadow Mill. Players got to watch an exhibition between Wade Johnstone and John White on Saturday afternoon, followed by dual match between Navy and Franklin & Marshall. This was one of the first (or the first?) on-purpose neutral-site college squash matches. The varsity were followed by Navy’s junior varsity playing against Meadow Mill; half of the JV were women—Navy is planning to add a women’s team in the fall.

The BIDS has a notorious reputation for fun. Players come from around the country. At the Saturday party, I talked to friends from Texas, California, a half dozen East Coast states and even a couple of guys from DC (we have no doubles court here). The BIDS program, compiled by John Voneiff, was packed with gossip, lists and history. Voneiff lovingly recounted a number of classic Southey Miles stories.

Miles, a BIDS bon vivant, was the head referee at the 1960 BIDS and the stress of the match and some of his bad calls led him to head to the bar after the fourth game to fortify himself with one of his trademark cold gin martinis; he never returned and, Voneiff says, no one saw him for five days. Two years later at the BIDS he received, Voneiff colorfully wrote, “a nasty spider bite while mistaking a giant flower arrangement in the foyer for a urinal.” Miles died in 1973 of a cerebral hemorrhage while on vacation in Austria at the age of fifty-two. His eponymous award, interestingly enough, has not been given out at the BIDS for nineteen years. Where have the spiders gone?

The 2008 BIDS added two more members to the Maryland State SRA’s squash hall of fame: Joe Fitzpatrick and Geoff Kennedy. They joined fourteen other Maryland greats (as well as four honorary members). Fitz was in rare form, parading around the party with a seven-week-old, perfectly composed, bow-tie clad grandson in his arms. Good to get them locked in early.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 12:31 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.