A follow-up about Vic Seixas. A few days after Vic’s 100th birthday, I got a wonderful message from Walter Oehrlein.

Walter, like Vic, is a great athlete in both tennis and squash. While at West Point, he won the 1965 National Intercollegiates in squash; in tennis, Walter won his first round match at Forest Hills in the 1966 U.S. Championships for tennis and in 1967 he lost in a first-round five-setter. For years Walter coached squash and tennis at the Birmingham Athletic Club in Detroit.

He first met Vic in the 1960s at a squash tournament. In June 1973 Walter invited Vic to put on a tennis exhibition at Birmingham. Serving first in the match, Walter pulled out a squash ball and hit that rather than a tennis ball.

They stayed in touch. Vic arranged for Walter to look at becoming a head pro at Greenbrier, the West Virginia resort where Vic had long been the resident tennis director (Walter decided to stay in Detroit). A few years later, Walter and Vic did a squash exhibition at Regency, the fitness club outside of Washington, DC.

They resumed their friendship in February 2021. The death of Tony Trabert, one of Vic’s Davis Cup teammates and a fellow Grand Slam champion, triggered a condolence phone call that Walter placed to Vic. At the end of the call, Vic said, “Let’s talk more.” So a few weeks later Walter called again and soon they were talking regularly, reminiscing about squash and tennis days of yore.

This year Vic’s daughter Victoria invited Walter to come out to San Francisco to celebrate Vic’s 100th birthday at the end of August: two old stalwarts after sixty years of friendship on and off the court.

These past few days have been a rich celebration of two of squash’s legends, the centenarians Newt Meade and Vic Seixas.

The September episode of Outside The Glass, out on the first day of the month per usual, features Newt. We spoke two days after he turned a hundred; yesterday Vic turned a hundred. Quite a pair. I should say that I wasn’t channeling Carter Fergusson when I said on the pod Vic’s full name—Carter had an inimitable way of rolling it out: Elias Victor Seixas, Jr. 

Earlier this month, Freddy Ramirez, an old racquet sports colleague, took me to Juniper Valley Park to play paddleball.

The game, a one-wall racquet sport, is deeply New York. It was invented in the city by Irish immigrants and for a century has been a mainstay in parks in all five boroughs. There is a sixteen-foot-high wall, a small paddle and a ball similar to a racquetball ball and you have to hit it on the front wall above the ground. Simple and complicated.

Juniper is in the Middle Village neighborhood in Queens. It was mid-afternoon on a summer Monday and the park was crowded: a band was testing the sound on a bandstand and some older people were playing shuffleboard. The long handball wall was busy: a young girl was practicing her tennis on one side and on the other was four paddleball courts, three of which were busy with play.

Freddy and I played a couple of matches against some park regulars; we lost 21-9 and 21-14—mostly because I kept hitting the ball wide or letting it go past me thinking it would bounce out. The trash-talking was rich and variegated , the sun hot and the scene was as much about the community as it was about paddleball. It was a fantastic peek into another racquet-sport culture.

And one that is slightly threatened, like so many others, by the arrival of pickleball. In one corner of Juniper, away from the paddleball, two pickleball courts were up and in use. Three days after my visit, the New York Times ran an interesting article about the conflict between paddleball and pickleball playing out in New York City parks:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/nyregion/pickleball-war-central-park.html#:~:text=Now%20he%20is%20Paul%20Owens,a%20narrative%2C%20like%20a%20movie.

Today was the memorial service for Alex Robertson. A victim like Bob Callahan of glioblastoma, he died two weeks ago at the age of fifty-four.

Alex and I were two of the eight members of the largest class of letter winners in the history of Dartmouth’s men’s squash program: Nick Billings, James Bragg, Doug Henry, Raman Narayanan, Jose Suarez and Ben Willwerth.

Alex was the best of the lot. He was ranked eleven in the nation as a senior in high school, in the BU18s. He moved incredibly well for being a big guy—I am not sure when he became “Big Al” but that was probably soon after arriving on campus—and was always gliding around the court seemingly undisturbed by any shot you hit. He had an open stance, a liquid smooth swing and subtle power. As John McPhee wrote, he seemed less tense than a length of string.

He had an eye-crinkling smile. We loved the long van rides, stuffed in the way back as underclassmen, hemmed in by squash bags, going along on winter roads in the dark talking about matters large and small, everyone telling stories. Alex was a leader in those conversations and always tossing in a dose of humor to take the edge off when someone got too serious.

Alex played four and five on the ladder freshman year (going 8-6) and sophomore year (4-4). We were sad when he left to devote himself to Dartmouth’s lacrosse team. In the years since, I was lucky to spend time with Alex, as a roommate in England and at two summer communities.

Now that he’s been taken from us, I miss him terribly.

Recently I was lucky to join an eighty-fifth birthday party in New York for Johnny Greco. His wife, Kathleen Sharkey, hosted a celebratory lunch at Il Corso, a great Italian restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. Held the day after he turned eighty-five, this was a vintage gathering of the New York squash tribe, as you can see from the group photograph taken by Andreas Hofweber.

Johnny has a unique teaching professional resume of just Manhattan squash clubs: City Athletic Club, 1959-1962;University Club of New York, 1962-1978; Broad Street Squash Club, 1978-1982; Harvard Club of New York, 1982-1985; Park Place Squash Club, 1985-1988; Le Parker Meridien Hotel, 1985-1988; Colony Club, 2001-2008; and River Club, 2004-2008. (He also worked for years teaching tennis in Connecticut.) In 2017 he was honored with the Carter Fergusson Grand Master Award.

An inspiring poster child for resilience. Johnny was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2008, but he has continued to play squash, entering the National Singles eight times since the diagnosis, playing in dozens of local hardball and softball events and avidly attending pro tournaments (and giving advice to the players).

An inveterate storyteller, Johnny told great stories at the party about playing minor league baseball in Delaware, about exploits during the O’Reilly pro-am at the University Club and about how the Bigelow Cup, an iconic New York club trophy, mysteriously ended up residing for some time above the bar at Elaine’s.

(l-r) front row: Amy Bigerna, Grace Bigerna, Kathleen Sharkey, John Greco, Mary Todd, Nancy Brenner; second row: Stanley Stairs, Kit Tatum, Cindy Cosmi; third row: Courtney Fuller, Jay Nelson, Charles Maytays, John Cosmi; back row: Lior Grinberg, Scott Fuller, John Beaman, Ned Monaghan, Lance Mald, Jerry Todd, Richard Chin, Valerie Monaghan, Jim Rucinski, Paula Foley, Andrew Foley, Jim Zug.

Last month Coach Paul Assaiante retired after a forty-nine year journey in the squash world. He and I sat down for an Outside The Glass interview, which went up a few days later:

Episode eighty-nine was not the first time he was on OTG. We did an interview, at the U.S. Open at Drexel, that went up nearly three years ago:

And so the record-breaking run is over. His record at Trinity was 511-34 (a .937 winning percentage), giving him an overall career record (along with his eleven years at Army and two at Williams) of 622-98. There is a slight discrepancy with Trinity’s records—they list his Bantam record at 507-29. This stems from his first three years at Trinity when the sports information department didn’t count Trinity’s results at the national intercollegiate team championships, the new playoff system that had come into existence only a few years earlier.

Some of Coach’s records will be broken. He and Jack Barnaby coached seventeen teams to a national title—Mike Way already has fourteen. Someone could possibly win 253 consecutive dual matches. But will any coach accumulate 622 collegiate wins again? That number seems imperishable.

Recently I attended a dinner for Haverford School’s sixteenth Athletic Hall of Fame.

Three squash players were inducted. They followed in the path of a dozen other illustrious squash players and coaches: (in order of induction) Ralph Howe, Fred Thornton, the 1982-83 team, Carter Fergusson, Bill MacCoy, Ed Mack, Steve Vehslage, Sam Howe, Mike Mayock, the 1976-77 team, Bill Prizer, Russ Ball, the 1978-79 team, Rick Campbell and Ed Garno.

This year’s was poignant, as two of the inductees were no longer with us.
Tanny Sargent was an early pioneer of squash in Philadelphia and the best player to come out of Haverford before the Second World War. Sargent was twice captain of the Haverford team. At Harvard, captained the freshman team and then the varsity. In 1934, his sophomore year he reached the finals of the National Intercollegiates to face his teammate and classmate Germain Gladden. Sargent went up 2-1, Glidden grabbed the fourth and then Sargent, in an unprecedented flurry, bageled Glidden 15-0 in the fifth. This was an extraordinary result—Glidden was a giant and a future U.S. Squash Hall of Fame.

Sargent went on to reach the semis of the National Singles in 1935, losing a tight five-gamer to the defending champion, and Sargent & Glidden won the Canadian National Doubles that year, one of the rare times that collegiate players have done that. Lincoln Werden of the New York Times wrote after Sargent appeared at the 1934 Gold Racquets at Rockaway Hunt Club: “Although his cannonading serve was perhaps one of the outstanding phases of his game, Sargent’s anticipation of shots and his excellent racquet work earned him the praise of the onlookers.”

Sargent suffered an ankle injury that put him out of his senior year at Harvard, and then soon after college he had a heart condition diagnosed which put an end to his short but brilliant career.

Another player lost far too soon was Colin Campbell. Colin played on the varsity at Haverford for five seasons (a remarkable achievement considering that the team was the strongest in the country). His senior year he captained the team to a 19-1 record, the only loss coming at the hands of Princeton’s junior varsity. Like Sargent, Campbell went on to play at Harvard, where his team won two national titles. He died of cancer in September 2013 at the age of forty-three.

The third squash inductee was Morris Clothier. Like Campbell, he played on the varsity for five seasons and was captain his senior year. Clothier had one of the greatest scholastic careers in U.S. squash history, going 90-6 in those five years, often playing at #1, with the six losses coming to college players. Clothier went on to be a four-time All American at Franklin & Marshall, a nine-time winner of the National Doubles, a chair of the US Squash Doubles Committee and winner of the 2008 President’s Cup.

Today was the day that collegiate squash started a century ago. The men’s squash teams of Harvard and Yale played each other in February 1923 at the Racquet & Tennis Club. This is the global start of university squash—the annual varsity match between Oxford and Cambridge began in December 1925.

Harvard beat Yale 4-1. The only Eli to win was Luke Williams, then the national intercollegiate tennis champion. Crimson winners included Palmer Dixon, future National Singles champion and Carroll Harrington, who I wrote about here a dozen years ago:

https://squashword.ussquash.com/?m=201104

There is some confusion about whether this historic match was played on Saturday the 17th or Sunday the 18th. The New York Times reported on Monday the 19th that they played on the 18th:

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1923/02/19/100819372.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0

The Crimson, the Harvard school newspaper, also published a piece on the match on Monday the 19th. They said that it occurred on Saturday the 17th:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1923/2/19/squash-team-wins-two-matches-in/

Today, on the exact day—or perhaps a day late—I went to New York to quietly celebrate the centennial. The R&T courts used by Dixon and Williams have long been renovated out of recognition. But I could hear a squash ball being thumped on a court, echoing down long passageways, and I thought this is enough: the sound of a ball hitting a wall, the squeak of sneakers, the call of the score.

Those ten men in February 1923 didn’t know it, but their matches were the start of one of the greatest stories in all of squash.

The Tournament of Champions is on right now in Grand Central. It is the twenty-fifth time it has been held there. Thirty years ago, the ToC was also in New York, just a few miles down the island of Manhattan from Grand Central—the tournament was at the Winter Garden, the palm-tree studded atrium at the World Trade Center. The cover of the 1993 hardcopy tournament program, not findable with a QR code, featured a gorgeous painting.

Will Davies painted it. Davies was a legendary Ontario illustrator and painter, famous for stamps, ads, posters, book covers (he illustrated five hundred romance novel covers) and magazine illustrations. He died in September 2016 at the age of ninety-two.

In 1991, the men’s North American pro tour, just before the merger with the men’s international pro tour, commissioned Davies to create an illustration from a photograph (now unknown, possibly taken by Hugh McClean?). Thirty years later, the painting evokes an earlier era, with the hardball service lines and both men wearing Action Eyes goggles.

The Hall of Fame subjects were Ned Edwards in the background and Kenton Jernigan about to strike the ball. Ned jokes that “unless Kenton hit a very soft, highish roll corner, it looks like I’m in quite a bad spot.”

What of the original painting? For decades it hung in the Dallas home of  Tom Plaskett. The CEO of Continental Airlines, Pan Am Airlines and Greyhound, Plaskett was a friend of Jack Herrick and a supporter of the ToC when it was in the Winter Garden. Plaskett died in June 2021 at the age of seventy-seven.

Twice this fall I’ve come across tiny squash scenes on television.

The Crown—season five, episode two (“The System”)—has a brief squash scene with Andrew Morton and James Colthurst. Both people in real life knew about squash: Morton went to the University of Sussex; Colthurst to Eton.

The scene opens with a delightful shot of a glass door with the two men playing on the court behind it (only a few courts have a plaster back wall but a glass door). Then it moves on court. Both players are all in white, small-headed racquets. It only lasts for a couple of seconds and ends with one player sprawled on the floor, racquet flung to the tin. Then a quick moment half a minute later, more slashing at the ball.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine has a squash scene dripping with sarcasm. It aired on 5 December 2015, in season three, episode nine (“The Swedes”), the one where Neil deGrasse Tyson guest stars.

Holt and Kevin have established “a squash doubles dynasty” at the Park Slope Racquet Club, winning a tournament two years in a row. Kevin can’t make it this year, so can Boyle sub in? Boyle, it turns out, was a three-time intramural champion at Sarah Lawrence. The school newspaper dubbed him “squash’s unhinged lunatic” with a record of 27-0.

Boyle is nervous about playing with his boss. “Squash brings out my competitive side, breaking racquets, cursing, excessive mooning,” Boyle tells Terry. Once to psych out an opponent, Boyle locked eyes and ate a squash ball.

At the Park Slope Racquet Club, the matches occur. They are on a glass-back, converted racquetball court, lined for both squash and racquetball. The side-walls have ads (for Sparkle Mist energy drink and a sporting goods store). The door is on the side but there is a large gallery behind the glass back wall. Holt and Boyle are in all whites.

The first point of the first match starts with Boyle serving to the right-wall side, with Holt standing right next to him. Boyle serves the ball out and then complains vigorously to his opponent.

In the next match, Boyle unleashes the beast, wearing all-black: headband, elbow pads, knee pads, socks and a black glove on his playing hand. He bursts on court and says, “you butternuts ready to get squashed?” At one point, Boyle snaps his racquet in two and then slams the two pieces onto the floor.

Later, they FaceTime with Kevin and show him a nice squash trophy. But they can’t go for No.4 next year because they’ve been banned for life: Boyle snapped the second-place trophy over his knee and threw it in a urinal.