Last night Tom Wolfe and his wife Sheila hosted a wonderful book launch party for Run to the Roar at their home on the Upper East Side. It was a varoom, varoom party, with no Bad Guys.* Our literary agent, David Black, was in a borough-hopping journey, going from his offices in Brooklyn to our party in Manhattan to his own office party in Queens. Jimmy Jones, the president of Trinity, was there, as was filmmaker Annie Sundberg, as was George Kellner, George Weiss and probably some other bold-face people named George.

Two of the guests, photographer Ben Collier and our Penguin publisher Adrian Zackheim, were lamenting the closure, the day before of their squash club, the Printing House.

Founded in the eighties in an old printing factory, Printing House was a legendary part of the New York squash scene: active (tons of league play and very hard to get court time in primte time), hip (it was located in the West Village, almost Tribeca) and raffish (there was a lot of boxing on the ground floor and starlets sunning themselves on the roof). There were originally four hardball courts and five racquetball courts until a conversion in the mid-nineties left the club with some twenty-footers and five years ago they ended the construction with five softball courts. 

Anders Wahlstedt worked there soon after arriving from Sweden. Chris Widney was a more recent pro and the last pro was Sean Gibbons who had ambitious ideas. Sean hosted a men’s pro event, The Village Open, at the club one year and used it as a launching pad to run a U.S. Open in midtown the following year. Sean, we learned last night, is also the son of the former head of Hackley School, where my wife used to teach.

Unlike most clubs with squash courts in Manhattan, Printing House was very diverse, especially gender-wise. It got its women-friendly aura in part because Ellie Pierce and Lissa Hunnisker, among others, taught there, Ellie in fact ran the show for five years.

This fall, the Equinox health club chain bought the club and as of yesterday began converting the courts to yoga studios, spinning rooms, etc. Eastern Athletic in Brooklyn, with its four new squash courts, has offered free membership to the two hundred and fifty suddenly court-less Printing House members. And there is a lot of talk (see their Facebook page) of building a new squash club somewhere downtown. Josh Easdon, another Printing House teaching pro and a filmmaker (he did the great film on Hashim Khan that came out recently) is probably taking his junior program to CityView in Long Island City.

The loss of Printing House is another reminder of the many squash clubs that have come and gone in Manhattan: City Athletic Club, Downtown Athletic Club, St. Bartholomew’s Community Club, Lone Star Boat Club, Fifth Avenue Racquet Club, Doral Inn, Park Avenue Squash & Racquet Club, Brown University Club, Seventh Regiment Squash Club, Cornell Club of New York, British Schools & Universities Club, Park Place Squash Club, First Avenue Squash Club, Broad Street Squash Club. Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, Manhattan Squash Club, Williams Club, Union League Club and the Dartmouth College Club. Am I forgetting some?

It is just brutal, in New York, to ask for six hundred and seventy-two square feet of space for just two people to use.

*The Bad Guys built themselves a little world and got onto something good and then the Establishment, all sorts of Establishments, began closing in, with a lot of cajolery, thievery and hypnosis, and in the end, thrown into a vinyl Petri dish, the only way left to tell the whole bunch of them where to head in was to draw them a huge asinine picture of themselves, which they were sure to like.”

—Tom Wolfe, “There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmmm . . . . . )” 1963

In May 1927 Payne Whitney collapsed on his tennis court on the Greentree estate in Long Island. He was carried into the dedans where he died. The Times said it was “acute indigestion” but failed to note that six years earlier he had an emergency appendectomy. He was fifty-one.

Three years later some friends started an inter-city team tennis doubles tournament in his memory, the Payne Whitney Memorial Cup. Yesterday at the Racquet & Tennis Club, the 78th Whitney Cup concluded, amid much fanfare and excitement. Last year, the two teams in the finals split the first four matches, so it came down to the fifth and final pairs. I was in one of those pairs, playing for Washington, and we lost 6-4, 6-5 to New England (an amalgamation of the Tennis & Racquet Club in Boston and the National Tennis Club in Newport).

This year, I played for Philadelphia and we were quickly shown the door in the round-robin phase, losing both our matches 4-1. In the finals, the two-time defending champions New England faced Greentree/Aiken. Again it went to 2-2. In the final match for the second year in a row was New Endland’s George Bell. Last year, we were tied 40-all, game-ball in that eleventh and final game in the second set. Bell was receiving, and he slammed three consecutive main wall forces at me and Bradley Allen. Brad parried the first two nicely, but Bell slipped the third into the dedans for the win.

This year, he was not so lucky, even if he was playing with Garrett Gates, the USCTA’s most improved player of the year. The crucial eleventh game went the other way as Peter Pell & Bob Hay won the first set and then the match 6-5, 6-2.

It was the first time since 2003 that Greentree, the official hosts of the tournament, had won the Whitney Cup and the first time ever that Aiken will see its name inscribed on the venerable trophy.

It has been quite a journey. In Ireland in 1985 Nancy Gengler, Julie Harris, Karen Kelso, Nina Porter and Gail Ramsay secured a seventh-place finish for the U.S. at the World Championships, our best-ever result for women (the men also reached seventh, in 1981 and 1983). In the next quarter century, we switched to softball, built more courts, brought many more juniors into the game and yet our American ladies never topped that achievement. You'd think we'd do much better, considering the state of American squash, especially softball squash, in 1985, when there were just ten softball courts in the country. But no—other countries were also growing, at a faster rate.

Now we are back. In New Zealand, the women, seeded ninth, came in seventh. With two seventeen year-olds on the squad and all four ranked in the top forty in the world (for the first time), the U.S. ran roughshod and pulled out some classic matches. In their final dual match, the 7/8 playoff v. Ireland, Olivia Blatchford gamely came back from an 0-2 deficit to win in five, and then Natalie Grainger, on the verge of retirement, pulled out a five-gamer as well to notch the historic victory. (Grainger also saved a couple of match balls in her epic 12-10 in the fifth win against eventual tournament winners Australia in an earlier round.)

The Greek Open (http://www.squashsite.co.uk/2009/greek_open_2010.htm) just finished. It was at the Athens Tennis Club. A year and a half ago, I did a story for our Vanity Fair blog about the Athens Tennis Club and its amazing history.

Victoria Lust won the women’s draw. Yes, the twenty-one year-old Englishwoman (ranked forty in the world) does have perhaps the most perfect porn name (http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2001/10/29namegame.html) surely much better than what she’d get from her first pet’s name and the name of the street she grew up on.

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/