Two articles in last Sunday’s New York Times recently caught my eye.
One was the big spread in the Magazine about Paul Assaiante and the Trinity squash streak. Paul Wachter, the writer, spent some time with the 2010-11 team, traveling to a couple of matches. I met him when Yale came to Trinity.
Two Times photographers flew in from LA to spend a full twenty-four hours on the team. One was originally from Sweden. Where? I asked when they got to the squash courts. Malmo, he said, it is a city in…. I know, I said and grabbed Johan Detter, a Malmo native who was twenty feet away and said, this guy’s from Malmo and in a second they were chatting about neighborhoods and bridges and women legally swimming topless in city pools.
The other photographer told me he was from Paris. Sorry, I said, I can’t hook you up—twenty nations from around the world and yet Trinity never had a Frenchman on the squash team.
The piece isn’t perfect: it quotes passages from Run to the Roar without attribution and has a couple of tiny errors (it was 1998 not 1999 when Trinity first beat Harvard in a dual match, and Harvard had won five national titles in a row, not eight, when Trinity ended their streak in 1999). But it is a good story and well told and has a cool Scandanavian/Gaullic photograph at the front. As the saying goes, any publicity is good publicity.
The other piece was another Christopher Gray gem in the real estate section, about the fact that a squash tennis court (no need for a hyphen, Grey Lady) was built on what was the fifteenth floor of an apartment house at 160 East 72nd Street. It was built by Kingdon Gould, Jay Gould’s brother. Jay Gould, who was known to play a lot of squash tennis in the 1920s after his court tennis career began to wane, surely played on the court. There are a number of these old squash tennis courts still haunting buildings around Manhattan. A piece I did in the Atlantic a decade ago lead off with another one of these ghostly remnants. But in an apartment, that is a rarity.
(See: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/magazine/20Squash-t.html?scp=1&sq=assaiante&st=cse
and http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/realestate/20streetscapes.html?scp=1&sq=kingdon&st=cse
The sport casino built by Kingdon Gould’s father at his estate Georgian Court in Lakewood, NJ contained a rosewood squash tennis singles court and a squash tennis DOUBLES court as well. It also contained a court tennis court which was recently restored, a racquets court which is now a fitness center for students, a swimming pool, an indoor polo field which has been floored-over for the main college gym, and bowling alleys. Jay Gould was a racquets champion as well as being many time national court tennis champion, and world champion as well. Not sure whether Kingdon Gould was a champion, but he definitely played. Both sons were coached by Frank Forrester from the time of their youth. THey were also wonderful polo players. The polo field is now the site of a dormitory at Georgian Court College.