Two pretty cool surveys crossed my path this week.
One is from my cousin Ben Collier who is doing a masters thesis at Columbia on urban squash programs. Fill this out and be groovy: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/squash
The other comes via Ben. It is a pretty interesting, conventional-wisdom busting on-going survey:
RealTennis.tv is on the move.
They are fundraising in the modern, crowd-sourcing way, in order to broadcast more court tennis and racquets this winter. Very worthy cause.
www.pleasefund.us/projects/realtennis-tv
This weekend they are streaming live from the French Open in Paris. Right now I am watching another installment of the Riviere v. Virgona rivalry:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/french-open-2011-paris
And then next weekend they will be broadcasting some of the matches on the most unusual and until recently obscure courts in the tennis world, three pelota courts in southwestern France:
http://www.tennisandrackets.com/Editable/UploadedContent/20010-11%20Season/Te…
A month ago I got a nice tip from Josh Easdon, the filmmaker and squash coach, about a story on Toronto television relating to Jonathon Power and a Pakistani woman pro, Maria Toor Pakay, ranked 179 in the world.
http://www.thestar.com/sports/article/1039040–squash-prodigy-flees-taliban-to-toronto
Brett Erasmus has well-dissected this story:
http://www.brettssquashblog.com/2011/08/power-of-one.html
Interestingly, it is her coach not herself (Maria hasn’t played a WISPA tournament since May) who has been making news lately. Power played last night in the Showdown at Symphony in Boston and also found himself in a bit of hot water after getting outed for testing positive for drug use while playing squash in Italy.
http://www.insidethegames.biz/latest/13942-exclusive-squash-stick-by-new-amba…
http://www.insidethegames.biz/latest/13996-squash-drops-drug-tainted-former-w…
Last week Diana Nyad was at it again. The open-water swimmer got enormous attention for attempting to swim from Cuba to Florida. She failed about halfway, after swimming for twenty-nine hours. Nyad will be sixty-two on Monday. Staying awake for twenty-nine hours would be a challenge at that age, let alone swimming thse so-called shark-infested waters.
She had some famous swims in the seventies (she swam around Manhattan in under eight hours in 1975 and set a record for non-stop swimming without a wetsuit, one hundred and two miles from Florida to the Bahamas in 1979, that lasted for twenty years).
Nyad played on the women’s pro hardball tour in the seventies as well. In 1976 she famously opened the Manhattan Squash Club in the Grace Building with an exhibition match against George Plimpton. She was a fierce player (broke a rib once) and I ended a chapter in my squash book with a lovely quotation from her in 1978: “It is a game of aggression and intimidation. And women need to learn that they can go out and push somebody out of their way and hit the fuckin’ ball.”
See: http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/08/09/nyad.103.mile.swim/index.html
Hosting a major international tournament always attracts the odd legend from the past. For a long time, it looked like the one great player on hand at the world juniors in Allston, Mass. was Vicki Cardwell. The coach for Australia, Cardwell won four British Opens and one World Open in the eighties.
And then one afternoon the doors blew open, literally, and in walked my old friend, mentor and step-sister Aggie Kurtz. Ag of course was there at the start of quite a lot of U.S. women’s squash history (the founding of the women intercollegiate singles and then teams; founding Dartmouth women’s squash; and playing on the last Wolfe-Noel squad and the first U.S. women’s professional tournament, the Bancroft Open in 1977).
In tow with Aggie was another legend, someone she was dropping off at the tournament after hosting in Hanover. She introduced herself as Sue King. Didn’t ring any bells. After a few minutes of chatting, it was clear this was a former British Open winner. I said, hesitatingly, “What was your maiden name?”
“Newman.”
Ah, that explained it. Sue got to the finals of the Bancroft Open, that inaugural pro event. And she’s the answer to the trivia question about who won the first British Open after Heather McKay retired. A feisty Aussie, Sue told me about her first club. I said, “Oh, the usual, right, two courts and a bar?” And she said, well, sort of: two courts that her father, a car mechanic, built above his garage.
Not too many British Open champions can claim that for their first courts.
Some good coverage of the world juniors:
Only a Game, the weekly radio show, had me in 2003 when I was in to talk about my book about squash. Host Bill Littlefield had dated Vic Niederhoffer’s sister and had some questions about the notorious champion. Now they are back and talking Egyptian:
http://onlyagame.wbur.org/2011/07/30/womens-squash-championship
Bloomberg checked in about the bounce a college program gets from hosting a world championship.
I sat with Jack Wyant, the U.S. coach, during the finals of the world championship individuals up in Allston, Mass. After about four points, he murmured: “racquet preparation.” Both Nours are exceptional, for their age (El Sherbini is just fifteen) in this regard. A lot of it is the accumulation of hours. They’ve been playing forever. El Tayeb started playing tournaments more than a decade ago.
And they’ve been training under some serious coaches. Amir Wagih, the Egyptian national coach, told me after the Nours finished their final that this was his eighteenth world title as a coach, starting in 1999. Eighteen from men and women, adults and juniors, individual and teams. This all might change in the long run, in the post-Mubarek Egypt, but for now they know what they are doing.
And they are serious. I asked El Tayeb if she’d take a few weeks off when she got home, to socialize and see friends and just luxuriate in achieving her goal. She said, well, no. because the day they land in Cairo is the first day of Ramadan, so a month of fasting will be upon her.
The death of George Wadsworth last month has led some to ponder the future of the Copa Wadsworth. The annual squash match between the U.S. and Mexico was started in 1990 and has become a wonderful fixture on the calendar, helping cement ties between the two nations and sending players all around North America. Anything that gets the U.S. ambassador to come and present trophies is a good thing.
George presided over the Copa as a gentle spirit, not as someone who managed every last detail. The tournament began as the brainchild of some Mexican squash players, including three ex-presidents of the Mexican squash association. Purdy Jordan, who played in the first Copa in 1990, helps greatly from behind the scenes and, stateside, Ken Stillman, who first got involved when he was the president of the USSRA, and Alan Fox, who has played in it since 1993, keep an eye on all things Copa.
This year’s was in Louisville, keeping to the general plan of moving the U.S. match to small, but vibrant squash locales (Atlantic City in 1991, Colorado Springs in 2001, Santa Fe in 1993 and 2003)—though it is often in the big city too. Next year it is in Mexico City.
With the demise of hardball singles and the increasing globalization of squash, the Copa is even more important to the health of the U.S. game, quite literally as important as its sister, the Lapham-Grant. And with a couple of doubles courts in Mexico City and one in Tijuana, it is also the route for expanding doubles to other countries besides the U.S. and Canada.
A friend recently mentioned seeing something in the Economist that would interest the many readers of RacquetSphere. I thought it might be “squash head” a new kind of high explosive munition.
http://www.economist.com/node/18750636
I couldn’t find anything in particular, though I did locate perhaps the best-titled piece of the year: “Your Mother Smells of Elderberries.”
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/05/sport_and_social_networks
This piece discusses the taunts fans can now source from Facebook pages of players. Someday this social-media sharing will come back to haunt you.
Speaking of Hal Baker, another discussion point was the legendary story of Anil Nayar’s arrival at Harvard, about how coach Jack Barnaby did not know that the world’s #1 junior had applied and been accepted at Harvard, let alone arrived on campus in the fall of 1965. (The story appears on p.133 of my squash book—“I don’t have the red carpet here today, but I’ll have it tomorrow.”
It was the ultimate recruiting job, at least at Harvard: do nothing and you shall receive.
This story has been questioned by one person, since it seems so crazy. How was it possible that the coach didn’t know that such a great player was coming? But not only did both Jack and Anil corroborate the story with me, but it appeared in the Boston Globe in the 1970s.
After all this time, it was Hal Baker who supplied the motive. Hal said that Barnaby found out that his friends over in admissions kept Anil’s application secret, to play a joke on him. For the ebullient Barnaby, he must have roared with laughter when he got the admissions people on the phone.