Out on the Run to the Roar hustings: just scribbled my name for the third time at the University Club of Washington's annual author night & book fair. Saw a lot of old friends, including two of my fellow board members from our DC Squash Academy days. Howard Day is in his thirtieth year running the squash scene at the U Club, just a remarkable run. (Howard even had a Jimmy Dunn story or two; he also got to the semis in the B dubs at this year's Dunn).

Each year, people crowd around one author's desk (it was Sandra Day O'Connor my first time at the book fair; this year I sat next to Bill LaForge, author of a massive book "Testifying Before Congress". Bill told me that he actually was in the Supreme Court the day she first sat. What was historic in 1981 is now, less than thirty years later, ho hum.) This year's book fair star was probably Scott Simon. Afterwards, we talked about Quakerism and writing at dawn and astronauts. Scott told me two things that were interesting about space: the Russians land their spacecraft in Kazakhstan, without wheels. Bump.

And that no other country has yet landed a person on the moon. Forty-one plus years and we are still the only ones. Odd.

It was another spectacular Jimmy Dunn weekend just before Thanksgiving. One hundred and sixty-eight players came to the Racquet Club of Philadelphia to play in one or more of the five draws (squash singles, squash doubles, racquets singles, racquets doubles and court tennis doubles).

I entered four of them, everything but my oldest sport, squash singles—I didn't do it mostly because being in five draws is a scheduling nightmare, especially if you end up winning a match or two, which wasn't likely but you never know. In the tennis, my partner Jon Crowell and I played mediocrely and lost our two matches. The two RCOP (my wife likes to call the club "our cop") pros, Barney Tanfield & Rob Whitehouse, won the open division for the third straight year, a remarkable feat.

In the racquets, Jack Shields, a young Pommie, again won the doubles draw, called the Jock Soutar after the former RCOP pro. Last year, he won the Soutar with Alcicia Turner, making it the first time in racquets history, we believe, that a woman won a racquets tournament. This year he took it in a very exciting five-gamer with Tim Proctor.

Because of that extended final, my semi-final in the 40+ squash dubs was delayed about an hour. But Proctor gracefully came next door and he and I won 3-1 and then an hour later won our finals, also 3-1. Three shirts and three wins for Proctor. That is par for the course at the Jimmy Dunn—a lot of laundry. And some looks of "of course" as everyone saw the Proctor & Zug team at the far right of the draw, but thought of Tim's brother and my father.

Speaking of national squash doubles champions, how about the ageless Rich Sheppard? Rob Whitehouse & the young Todd Ruth lost in the finals of the squash dubs open draw 3-1 to Imran Khan & Sheppard. Shep won his first of two national titles in 1987. I was in high school then and now am in the 40+ draw.

The Jimmy Dunn tournament was begun in 1980, while the fiery Irishman was still in the midst of his half-century reign as the pro at RCOP. It was originally a pro-am tennis tourney. A dozen years ago, Whitehouse absorbed the Racquet Club Invitational, a squash dubs touney, and started the Soutar. At 168, this was the largest Dunn weekend yet, and with a black-tie stag dinner and a black-tie dinner-dance, it managed to be quite a busy social weekend.

Like always, some of the talk off-court returned to Dunn himself. As he said to one overly confident neophyte tennis player, with a Camel cigarette dangling from his mouth, "Done? I'm Dunn. You just got started. You won't be finished learning the game for years. Now get outta here."

Last Saturday in New York, the Racquet & Tennis Club hosted the world racquets championship. It was the first leg of a Atlantic-bestriding event, with the second leg being played at Queen's Club in London this Saturday. The current world champion, James Stout hammered the challenger, Alex Titchener-Barrett, 15-11, 15-7, 15-6, 15-9. It could be a long reign for the Bermudian bomber, who is just twenty-six.

The world championship is pretty cool in that it is the oldest continuously contested world sporting title (officially since 1820, though practically only since 1860). I wrote about the sport recently for Vanity Fair: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2009/04/play-surviving-a-racquets-tournament.html.

The Silver Racquets weekend at the R&T was typically amazing. Huge draws. Some new faces: Goose Detter and Baset Ashfaq (two of the young guys featured in my new book http://runtoroar.com/) played in the squash doubles tournament. Some upsets: Pat Winthrop won the tennis singles over Alexis Hombrecher.

Four hundred and forty people came to the dinner dance. A maxed out affair, the club had to turn away about a hundred people because there was no room. Why the interest?

Well, perhaps they heard it is the most romantic way to fall in love. After all, it was on a blind date at the Silver Racquet dinner dance in 1999 that I met my wife.

Today is the 71^st birthday of Gordon Lightfoot. It is also the birthday of my grandmother, who died last year at the age of eighty-nine; and her namesake, our son, who is turning six today.

One of my most stirring squash memories involves Gord. Every year, the Cambridge Club in Toronto hosts a black tie dinner over (the American) Thanksgiving weekend as a part of their annual professional doubles tournament. Hundreds of guys stuff themselves into the bar at the club for drinks, speeches and sometimes some casual betting before heading into dinner. It is a heady time, not just because you are on the eleventh floor.

When I was there in November 2000, the speeches stopped and all of a sudden Gordon Lightfoot was standing on the bar, guitar in hand. He cranked out a beautiful version of Diamond Joe. It is a classic folk song, and it was magical to be standing just a few feet from the legend as he sang and strummed.

Clive Caldwell, the owner of the club and a former squash great, tells me that Lightfoot’s been a member of the Cambridge Club for three decades and that he’s a non-squash player: he lifts weights and runs the treadmill most days. Just before the 2000 tournament they asked him if he might play a song at the party. It has since become a Cambridge Doubles tradition (except when his health breaks down, like seven years ago when he went through a six-week coma, a tracheotomy, four other surgeries and three months in the hospital). In recent years, he’s been wearing a red dinner jacket. Easier to spot the genius.

The game of court tennis is quite obscure but one of its leading practitioners has blown up, as they say on the left coast. Dacre Stoker is a nineteen handicapper, meaning he’s in the top thirty or so among amateur players in the country (there are about a thousand) and plays out of the Aiken Tennis Club, a tiny, genteel outpost in South Carolina. He is also a board member, vice president and membership secretary of the United State Court Tennis Association, the body that governs the game. (He was a former top pentathlonist who coached the Canadian team at the 1988 Seoul Games.)

Dacre is also the great grandnephew of Bram Stoker and has co-authored a sequel to his great great uncle’s classic with Dracula with Dracula: The Un-Dead (Dutton). The book is enormous. It is a New York Times bestseller. It has gotten glowing reviews around the world. It has its own credit card. Dacre has gone on tour around Great Britain and Ireland (luckily the home of court tennis) and now around the U.S.

See http://www.draculatheundead.com/ and http://www.uscourttennis.org/

This morning I got my invitation to the annual meeting of the Amalgamated Squash Chowder and Development Corporation in Keene, New Hampshire.

The ASC&D was founded a half century ago to manage what is perhaps the oldest continuously-used squash court in the country. The clubhouse consists of a hardball court and a tiny gallery. It has been moved three times since it was originally built around 1910. It is still the best squash club in Keene and perhaps in the nation.

The annual meeting, which I attended in 2003, is always great fun: they serve chowder on the court and the business end of the meeting is quite short—mostly they report on which overseas club they’ve bamboozled into setting up reciprocal agreements with the ASC&D.

It ends with every new ASC&D member ceremoniously exiting through the unique fire escape that unwinds from the removable front-wall tin. Sadly, this year’s invitation mentioned that for want of bathrooms, the members have revolted and the meeting will be held at the Historical Society of Cheshire County, which has, I am told, better toilet facilities but, alas, a more standard fire escape apparatus.

The numbers 98—0 have been spinning around my head this weekend. For one thing, that was the number of seasons that the four professional sports teams in Philadelphia played in between the 76ers winning a title in 1983 and my beloved Phillies phinally getting their World Series title earlier this week.

Now, for those of you keeping track, it is the San Francisco Bay Area that now is on the so-called Drought Clock for being the major American sports city with the longest title-less streak (and one that dates merely to 1994).

Of course, everyone can point to the Chicago Cubs’ past century for individual team futility. Yet, I prefer to ponder what might be the world’s longest professional, continous championship-less streak:  Somerset,  the first-class county cricket club in England, that has yet to win the nation’s county cricket championship despite competing for it since 1891.

I screamed myself hoarse after the final strikeout, yelling “we won, we won, we won!” Luckily this was in the basement den. This morning I put Phillies baseball caps on our toddlers as they headed to nursery school. I solemnly told them, “Hey, look, you might have to wait another twenty-eight years before you’ll have another morning where you can say ‘we won, we won, we won.'” They stared at me for a while and then our four-year-old asked, “Is that longer than ten minutes?”

The other 98-0 is the start of one of the most epic matches I’ve heard of. This weekend James Stout, a pro at the Racquet & Tennis Club, is playing the first leg in his challenge for the world championship of racquets. Jamie, a native Bermudian, is quite good in squash as well. A year ago, Matthew McAndrew, a good R&T player, challenged Stout to a squash match: first to one hundred, British scoring, continous play and Mac would start at 98-0. The wager: one thousand dollars.

The match lasted about an hour and a half without a single break. Mac won a scoring point at 98-37 and so had the first of about ten match points. But each time Stout managed to survive, sometimes with frighteningly desperate gets. The gallery was jam-packed. Stout ended up winning 100-99.

Mac didn’t walk normally for a week, his hamstrings were so sore and he couldn’t get back on the squash court for nearly a month. Stout, Mac says, “didn’t give lessons the next day.”

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News flies fast. We—seventy-odd squash guys—were out in Santa Fe for a squash weekend when we heard that Betty Constable had died.

It is hard to think of a more remote squash haven in the U.S. than Santa Fe: deep in the Southwest (you can spot the Rio Grande above town), hardly any direct flights to Albuquerque (a lot of pre-dawn flights from the East and a lot of red-eyes coming home) and then the hour drive north. But once you arrive on East Alameda Street and stroll past the McCune Foundation, you come to the home of one of the country’s endearing squash hotbeds: the Kiva Club.

A kiva is a room used by many pueblo peoples, both ancient and modern, for spiritual ceremonies. In other words, it is a church, and since 1959 the Kiva Club has been ministering to the needs of New Mexico’s squashers. The club has one of each: hardball, softball and doubles (there are twenty-two squash courts of various vintages in the state). Charlie Khan, scion of the famed dynasty, is the pro. The club is most known for its early December veterans doubles tournament, the Kiva Classic. Started in 1990, it is known for its delicious food (courtesy of expert caterer and club member Walter Burke), art gallery settings and very witty tee-shirts. Bones Jones, the good doctor, gave me one to wear for our doubles matches—those aren’t chili peppers there.

During the weekend, we heard that Betty had died. Betty was the greatest leftie woman in the history of U.S. squash. She retired at the top of her game in 1959 after winning her fourth straight title and fifth overall.

Betty lost twice in the finals. Once to Jane Austin Stauffer in 1951, 15-12 in the fifth and once, in a let-filled ordeal, to her sister Peggy in three games in 1953 (the only other time siblings have faced each other in the finals of a national singles tournament was in 1972 when another defending champion, Nina Moyer, beat another future Hall of Fame sister, Gretchen Spruance in another three-gamer).

SquashTalk’s obit had a couple of errors (Gig Griggs donated the Howe Cup, not Betty’s mother; Princeton’s record win streak was forty-three in a row not forty [remember when Trinity’s streak was at forty-three? It was in the previous millennium]) but it did capture Betty’s great legacy as the women’s coach at Princeton.

The Times obit referenced a Time magazine piece about the House of Howe, which has the famous quote about Constable: “She’s like a bulldog.”

In Santa Fe when we toasted Betty, we remembered that competitive spirit. Bulldog, tiger. She wanted to win.