From media guru Beth Rasin, I got the links of media hits around the 2012 J.P. Morgan Tournament of Champions. Pretty impressive. Nice, especially, to see Ming Tsai’s collegiate squash mugshots.

Here are the highlights:

New York Times – print – Thursday, January 19, 2012

Weekend Miser – High-Level Track and Field and Squash to Enjoy

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/sports/high-level-track-and-field-and-squash-to-enjoy.html

New York Times Sports – print – Saturday, January 21, 2012

With Athleticism and a Deft Touch, Egyptians Put Their Mark on Squash

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRSbETFI3hA&list=UUMliswJ7oukCeW35GSayhRA&index=5&feature=plcp

World-class squash in Grand Central draws discerning fans, plus some average people

Squash, a Growing Sport, and Nutritious, Too

Another magical finish to the ToC last night in Grand Central.

Packed to the gills in the bleachers (defending U.S. national champions Julian and Natalie up in the cheap seats) and six deep behind the front wall. Everyone in their seats ten minutes before the men’s final. It really was sold freaking out. 

A mob of media people. Richard Eaton was the UK journalist on site this time, here for just for his second ToC. Cameramen everywhere. I counted six photographers on court after the women’s final, although one was Natalie Grinham’s sister Rachael snapping a few shots for Mum back home—Rachael said to me that her mum gets so nervous that she can’t watch either of them play unless they are playing each other. 

I had trouble extricating myself from the post-match chit-chat—some of it with Tim Garner about his regular back-page column in Squash Player that focuses on transportation mishaps that continually plague pro players—and got over to Penn Station forty minutes after my train was scheduled to depart. Oddly, it had been delayed for some reason and was in the last minute of boarding when I walked into the foyer, so I gladly jumped on to it. Sometimes it pays to be blow off your schedule.

In the midway that is Vanderbilt Hall during the 2012 J.P. Morgan Tournament of Champions, a lot of talk happens and it all seemed medical this weekend:

—Gilly Lane is retiring. The twenty-six year-old Philadelphian has a serious back issue (something about C-4 and C-5 not being nice to each other) and is stepping back from the PSA tour. Gilly got to 48 in the world (in May 2010) which is the third highest in U.S. history. The first, second and fourth guys on the all-time list also went to college, so perhaps one lesson of Gilly’s career is that U.S. intercollegiate squash is not the horrible, mung-encrusted abyss from which no budding squash player can return.

—Frank Stella, world’s greatest squash player who is also not bad at art, has been recently grounded by two back surgeries, one hip surgery and double knee replacements. But all is well now, although he’s not back out on court yet. 

—Will Carlin’s mother is a saint. Will retold me the story of his eye surgeries, the first coming more than twenty years ago when he was the number one player in the U.S. He had to lay in bed with an eye patch on and not move for ten days. Then a few years later he had to do it again, another ten days in the dark, with his mother helping him get food.

(When I told this to former world racquets champion Neil Smith, he responded with his own tale of thirty days laying on his side; both Carlin and Smith have had numerous eye surgeries which, having gone through one last month, I can attest are very much not fun.)

—I had a long chat with Jonathon Power up in the stands during the Lexington Partners Legends Showdown event on Thursday evening. I asked him if he trained much for these Legends events. He scoffed with a giant laugh. “Not at all. The last time I played squash was October. I’ve got only so many matches left in my body. I’m not going to waste them on training.”

That has got to be one of the classic squash quotations of all-time.

Last night Trinity lost. It was the first time since 22 February 1998 that the Trinity men’s team lost a dual match. Two hundred and fifty-two straight wins. Five thousand and seventy-eight days. Wow. 

Yale beat them 5-4. The last match was between John Roberts of Yale and Johan Detter of Trinity, the younger brother of Gustav who played a central role in saving two previous 5-4 nailbiters.

The past two Januarys I have traveled to the Yale v. Trinity match because both times it looked like the Eli were poised to beat the Bantams. Both times Trinity won. So this winter I gave up trying to be present when the streak was broken. 

I talked with Paul Assaiante this morning. Normally he gets a couple of hundred emails a day. By nine this morning he had already gotten over one thousand and had already done phone interviews with ESPN, the New York Times and NCAA.com. A huge story.

“Now we look to Harvard,” says Assaiante. “We lost a dual match, but this is like the NCAA basketball tournament—we are focusing on our next dual match and on the nationals. But congratulations for Yale and Dave Talbott.”

http://espn.go.com/college-sports/story/_/id/7477790/trinity-men-squash-loses…

Earlier this week I wrote an article for the Hartford Courant about streaks that attracted a lot of attention:

http://www.courant.com/news/opinion/hc-op-assaiante-trinity-squash-winning-st…

Last night Paul and two other well-known Connecticut coaches (Geno Auriemma and Jen Rizzotti) spoke in Hartford to more than seven hundred and fifty people:

http://www.courant.com/sports/uconn-women/hc-ct-forum-0113-20120112,0,7466374…

The golden anniversary of the William White was last weekend. Fifty amazing years and, because of the one-year hiatus due to Merion Cricket Club’s 1995 conversion from hardball to softball, fifty amazing events. 

I did the tournament program this year. Because of a wealth of information and insightful interviews, it ballooned into an eighty-page booklet. I got to talk with doubles giants like John Hentz, Bill Danforth and Joyce Davenport. I got to talk with my first serious coach, Joe Coyle, for the first time in a quarter century. I got to talk with four of the five guys who played in the inaugural White’s singles draw in 1962, Ben Heckscher, Sam Howe, Diehl Mateer and Charlie Ufford.

Because of Whitney Thain and Tracy Greer, we were able to dig out and use a wealth of archival photographs for the booklet. Some were just classic shots, including one of Maurice Heckscher & Michael Pierce with the luggage that they received as winners of the doubles in 1977 (when I saw Pierce in the locker room at Cynwyd showering after his quarterfinal loss in at Merion this Saturday, he said he couldn’t remember where the suitcase is now).

The other great photograph was of a snowy porte cochere at Merion. The Whitey (as it has always been called in my family, since Bill White was always called Whitey) is known for its weather-related catastrophes: for example, the 1996 blizzard that dumped thirty inches on the club started during the Saturday dinner dance.

Well, this year it was sixty-three degrees on Saturday afternoon and not a cloud in the sky. 

Most of us know Meherji K. Madan as a leading referee (he famously manned a couple of the matches at the 2009 Princeton v. Trinity men’s dual match in the finals of the national intercollegiates, a part of Run to the Roar). But the Washington squash gadfly, former president of the National Capital SRA and a former manager at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and World Bank is also a filmmaker. 

Posted on Vimeo is a rare and illuminating (and bouncy—what a soundtrack) look at the 1986 Rolex National Softball Championships. Played in Washington at the Capitol Hill Squash & Nautlius Club, the nationals now look tremendously antiquated: the tiny racquets and shorts, the floors sometimes painted white, the hairdos, and even the club (which no longer has squash courts). And some of the people interviewed—Darwin Kingsley, Mehmood Nathani, John Lindquist—do look a little younger a quarter century ago. But Madge’s twelve-minute film does capture the scene at a tournament and has some great quotes, especially from one player’s girlfriend. The late great ambassador, Bill FitzGerald, funded the film and Madge screened it at the Sunday luncheon—talk about turnaround.

Madge was also a co-producer of On Wings of Fire. The 2001 epic, On Wings of Fire starred conductor Zubin Mehta in his acting debut as he searched for the history and meaning of Zoroastrianism, the world’s oldest living faith. It was a lavish, incredibly well-shot and often intense film that covers thirty-five hundred years. It was shot mostly in India. Derek Jacobi narrated. Madge, by the way, not only produced it but was the music consultant and composed the film’s theme song.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0453802/

Recently I ran into some articles about the old Princeton tennis coach, Mercer Beasley, who also helped out with the Tigers’ squash teams in the 1930s. The articles were interesting, especially this July 1957 piece from Sports Illustrated: 

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1133367/index.htm

And the Daily Princetonian:

http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2007/02/22/17422/

Yet both of them avoided what was the bizarre and well-known scandal at the heart of the Beasley story. In 1938 Beasley’s wife Audrey famously divorced Beasley to marry his longtime protege and their foster son, Frankie Parker. She was in her forties; he was twenty-two. You hear about coaches getting involved with their players, but less so the coach’s wife.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1133367/index.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/28/sports/frank-parker-us-tennis-champion-81.html

This might explain what Jack Kramer wrote in his memoirs about how Beasley changed Parker’s forehand for the worse, turning him from topspin to underspin and causing Parker’s ranking to plummet as a result. But Parker went on to be the great U.S. champion of the 1940s. Moreover, apparently everyone was amicable and friendly afterwards, with Beasley sending Parker congratulatory telegrams, and Audrey and Parker remained married until she died in 1971. 

Squash is heating up:

In New York the Racquet & Tennis Club hosted the Silver Racquets. In the squash dubs draw, Baset Ashfaq & Gustav Detter beat 2010 national champions Steve Scharff & Dylan Patterson on their way to the semis; Whitten Morris & Addison West won the draw.

In Montreal the weekend before, the twenty-fifth and final Smith Chapman was played. Seventy-five teams came for another great Smitty. Smith Chapman was a giant on the court in the sixties across the continent and administratively afterwards. He died in 1987 after an heart attack at the end of a squash match. They are shutting down the tournament, which honors one of the giants of our game.

http://www.clubatwater.ca/an/smitty/smittybio.html

And in Philadelphia last weekend, SquashSmarts celebrated its tenth annniversary with a gala evening at the Racquet Club of Philadelphia. It was tremendously fun with almost three hundred people. I played in a court tennis exhibition, down the hall from serious squash doubles action (the Pierce family filling out one match by themselves). Then downstairs we had a live auction, a viciously competitive silent auction and a lot of good chatter. I ended winning a bid on a Dartmouth squash tee-shirt—COLLEGE!

http://squashsmarts.org/

You just have to love Trinity’s first practice of the season, at 12:01am on the first of November. Just hope that the NESCAC’s don’t decide to switch the first practice to say 25 October or 5 November…..