What a night. It was incredibly incredible. The U.S. Squash Hall of Fame Gala 2008 rocked. 

It was hard not to compare it to the last time the American squash community had gathered in our monkey suits at a posh Midtown Manhattan ballroom on an October evening. Statistically speaking, the USSRA centennial ball at the University Club in October 2004 was bigger: five hundred and seventy-six people v. three hundred and nineteen; $360,000 raised v. $100,000; fourteen USSRA presidents v. three; eleven Hall of Famers v. four. Worst of all, there were three people with a last name beginning with Z in 2004. This time, just moi.

One number that was close this time was the number of President Cup winners. Last time, there was seven; this time six, including the first winner, in 1966, Charlie Ufford.

But—and this is a huge but—the centennial celebration was a once-a-century party (note that no other national governing body has had their centennial yet) while this year’s gala was meant to be an annual event. You might not ever match up to the 2004 numbers. To do this well, especially with our economy freefalling into a depression and ticket prices actually higher than four years ago, was amazing.

And this one seemed much more forward-looking than the centennial gala. The poster board photos of the new Hall of Famers that greeted you as you walked in were joined by similar shots of our current national champions. The cover of the program depicted our 2008 gold-medal winning teams at the annual Pan-Am Fed Cup (not to be confused, as it often is, with the quadrennial Pan-Am Games). The music was loud; the videos were quick; the gift bag was hip (but sometimes odd—sunscreen for squash players?!).

The scene felt very very young—everyone seemed twenty-something, beautiful and happy. That afternoon I had played tennis with two of the leaders this new generation (Preston Quick and Noah Wimmer) and wondered if they would have a good time at the party, thinking it might be old and stodgy.

Instead, it was I who was antediluvian. I left at a quarter past midnight and headed to the New Jersey Turnpike to drive home to Washington. About an hour later I got a call from Lex Miron at the Whiskey Bar saying that a couple of dozen people had repaired there for a late-night refreshment. That’s young, considering that the gala itself had lasted nearly six hours.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 9:55 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Name dropping has become the modus operandi of journalists when they talk about squash: Roger Federer, Pervez Musharraf, John Dryden. 

The latest media mentions:

—The Times of London ran an interesting piece during the Wimbledon fortnight about how squash has helped out tennis players. It has gotten so common that the Times figures there is a new shot derived from all this squash playing: the wrist hinge. It is a forehand flick. It appears when playing a serve or cross-court “wide out on the stretch,” as the Times describes it and you slice it back with a lot of wrist and a touch of hope. Federer played squash regularly as a child with his father; Andy Murray grew up playing as well. Time to get the U.S. Open finalists to the real U.S. Open—the squash Open.

—Harvard Magazine mentioned in its July-August issue that the university’s oldest alum, Al Gordon, ‘23, was unable to make it to his 85th reunion this June (excuses, excuses….I mean everyone should go to their 85th reunion). Al had his 107th birthday in July. He is also the grandfather of seventy-eighth ranked squash star Chris Gordon. I guess that is like shooting your age in golf: getting your world squash ranking under your grandfather’s age.

—This summer Alex Beam started producing the most interesting, insightful and entirely snark-free squash blog this side of The Direct. Beam, a twice-a-week columnist at the Boston Globe and a high C player, has written more than a half dozen entries at the website for Vanity Fair. Beam, with a delightfully wry tone, dilates on such items as Mushaffarf’s game, Victor Niederhoffer’s daughter Galt, squash at the White House and summer camp at Wesleyan.

My favorite entry was about squash at the New Yorker in the 1970s and 1980s. Very cleverly he got Dan Menaker to do the dilating for him. Menaker remembered the New Yorker’sladder, posted on a bulletin board on the 19th floor of the old offices; watching Sharif Khan v. Niederhoffer at a tournament; and the general vibe of the early eighties: “Squash was a huge deal for a while back then—everybody played or tried to.”

Menaker did mention Herbert Warren Wind, the one renowned New Yorker writer (and former player) but he did forget one classic: the real “Khan,” E.J. Kahn, Jr. This Kahn never wrote about the game for the magazine like Wind, but he did mention squash a couple of times in his famously dishy memoir About The New Yorker & Me: A Sentimental Journey (G.P. Putnam, 1979). Kahn talked about playing doubles with John McPhee at a court in New Jersey (either Princeton or Sea Bright?). He said that McPhee, the great nonfiction writer, had a solid game, “straightforward and first-rate.”

Kahn also had a great story about Allison Danzig, the old squash and tennis writer. He offered to give Danzig, rushing for a train after the finals, a lift from the national tennis doubles at Longwood back to New York. But his brakes froze up. They had to take a taxi from Worcester to Boston (couldn’t have been cheap) and finally arrived back in New York at one in the morning. Kahn doesn’t say this, but it must have been cool to have Danzig alone for that long, to pick the memory of the guy knew more about racquet sports than anyone else alive.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 1:42 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I just spent much of last month talking with and about Mark Talbott, for a cover article in the current issue of Squash Magazine; the eight-page profile is dotted with a dozen vintage photos of Mark from a quarter century ago. I learned a lot more about someone everyone in the American squash scene knows something about, including a couple of great trivia bits. 

Mark wears a size eight and a half shoe. Despite his six foot frame, he has tiny feet. Is this the smallest pair of feet ever to win a major adult men’s squash tournament? His feet are almost a third the size of perhaps the most famous clodhoppers in pro sports, Bob Lanier’s size twenty-two gunboats, which are so big that the NBA made a bronze cast of them.

The other fact-checking item was about the Grateful Dead. Everybody knows that in the 1980s Mark crossreferenced the touring schedules of the WPSA and the Dead. He told me that, contrary to the estimated seventy shows that I wrote in my 1997 profile of Mark for Squash News, he had actually attended more or less around a hundred shows. (Mark has a better sense of how many pro singles tournament wins he garnered—which is officially around one hundred and sixteen and perhaps even more; how many other people have both their pro tournament career win list and Dead show list in triple digits?)

His first show was at Robert F. Kennedy stadium in Washington in June 1973. Two of his older brothers took their just-turned thirteen kid brother down from Baltimore to see the Dead and the Allman Brothers. He said that of the hundred shows, that first one at RFK was still the best of them all. He wasn’t sure which night he went to, the 9th  or the 10th, but you can look at both set lists and the comments and know that they were good shows.

No doubt. My first show was at JFK in Philadelphia in July 1987. It was still the best show I saw—like a crazy-quilt stargown through a dream night wind.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 1st, 2008 at 1:55 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I am sure that all of you are following the story of badminton at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, with the finals of the various tournaments scheduled to start today. No? 

For more than twenty years, the World Squash Federation and its predecessor the International Squash Rackets Federation have pursued with a relentless focus the goal of getting squash into the Olympics. The push really began in the early 1980s and accelerated after the IOC recognized squash in 1986—the 1992 Barcelona Games were the first real effort. Ever since then, squash bodies nationally and internationally have clutched at the five tantalizingly close golden rings as we wheel around on the carousel of squash administration.

The Olympics is a worthy goal, and the corporate support, USOC cash and public attention will all be welcomed, but it has taken up too much of our collective time.

Just look at badminton. It is a huge sport. Everyone has heard of the shuttlecock, most people have played it in their backyards and no one confuses it with a vegetable. More than two million people play competitive badminton at least once a month—many more than the 250,000 who play squash. Badminton is the same age as squash (it was invented in England in the 1870s). The International Badminton Federation has 164 member countries (45 sent teams to Beijing); the WSF has either 124 or 118, depending on how you count. As far as making it bigtime, in Barcelona in 1992, it became an Olympic sport (it was a demonstration sport in Munich in 1972; it has been in every Commonwealth Games since 1966 in Kingston).

Yet, let’s look closer. After five Olympic Games,  our national badminton association has about 2,700 members, about a fifth of what U.S. Squash has. The worldwide pro tour is worth about $1 million, about a third of our PSA tour. Badminton celebrities? Badminton on television? Badminton in the newspapers and magazines? Badminton in Grand Central?

The analogy is not perfect, but it seems close enough to give credence to the argument that the Olympics is not the golden goose that will instantly transform squash. The Olympics would be a good thing, but it would have a much smaller effect than many people have assumed. So sit back and enjoy watching the shuttlecock fly about at 180 miles per hour across the Beijing University of Technology gym. Oh, you can’t find any coverage on television? Oh, it is on Bravo at three in the morning. Mmmmmm.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 3:57 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

George Haines, one of the most successful if unheralded high school squash coaches in the country, died last month at the age of sixty-four. 

George taught middle school math and coached six sports at Haverford School. George’s true love was golf. A scratch golfer, he had won two New Jersey state amateurs and qualified for the 1968 U.S. Open at Oak Hill (where he shot a respectable 78-76 before missing the cut). He wrote for numerous golf publications and played in amateur tournaments around the world (including twenty Canadian and seven British amateurs). His life list of played golf courses totaled over four hundred, which is about three hundred and seventy more than me. His golf teams at Haverford won five league titles.

He was George E. Haines, Jr. in print, as he was sometime confused with another legendary coach, George F. Haines,  a swim coach in California.

But squash was where George had a lasting impact on a generation of squash champions. George coached the Haverford School varsity from 1978 through 1989. Haverford, which had been a perennial also-ran to Episcopal, instantly captured the Inter-Ac league title that 78-79 season (the toughest league in the country). Haines’ teams subsequently never lost a match to a fellow high school team. Haines issued out dozens of top-flight junior, collegiate and amateur players including Andy Ball, Rusty Ball (national U16 junior champion), Teddy Bruenner (only player ever to win the national juniors in softball, hardball and doubles), Scott Brehman, Beau Buford, Colin Campbell, Ricky Campbell, Bob Clothier, Morris Clothier, Dan Cornwell, Alex Cuthbert, Bernie Halfpenny, Tom Harrity, Bruce Hauptfuhrer, Bobby Hobbs, Bruce Hopper, Dan Hutchinson, George Krall, Steve Loughran, Alex Marx, Austy Murray, Matt Olgesby (national U16 junior champion), John Pruett, Rodolfo Rodriquez (two-time national junior champion), the Spahr boys (Chris, Terry and Wes), Bob White and Wistar Wood. Nine members of the 1982-83 squad captained their college team (some, ahem, Cuthbert, even wore clothes for team photos); six from 1986-87 captained their college team.

And you can toss me in that list, as someone who played #7 senior year, when Haverford beat Amherst and Dartmouth in the national five-man teams—Amherst ended up 12th and Dartmouth 8th in the intercollegiates. It was odd going to Dartmouth the following fall and knowing that my high school team was better than my new college team.

George was a huge help with my squash book, supplying me with hours of conversation and materials relating to the origins of the game and his grandfather Rowlie Haines.

Many of the Haverford players trained at Merion Cricket Club down the street, so George never got the full credit he was due as a mentor. Having had brain surgery as a young man, we were never sure of the source of his quirkiness. On the first day of practice each fall, he would have us hit only drop shots, using a golf analogy that we should work on our putting first before our drives. But he was a leader, and his results are still unmatched for any high school coach for any ten-year period.

I recall the oh-so-true line from Confucius that teenagers are so apt to ignore. George wrote it every year on the sheet that announced the squad for our first varsity match: “A journey of a thousand miles beings with a single step.”

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 3:54 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Starting last month, the PSA has revised it terrible tiebreaker scoring system. No longer was it reported 11-10 (5-3) or something (meaning the actual score was 15-13). But they blew it in not reverting to the old American tiebreaking system. 

What is the most exciting thing in sports? When a tied game goes into sudden-death overtime. Extra innings in baseball is boring. Overtime in soccer, football or basketball is tedious. But give me ice hockey, with the chance in a split second, the game can be over. That is a thrill.

Squash in America used to have that. Hundreds of thousands of matches had a game (or two) in which both players had a simultaneous game point, and thousands of matches turned on a point that if either player won it, the match was over—the fifth game tiebreaker that stretched to one final double match point. It was that 14-all, 15-all, 16-all or 17-all nailbiting point that is the ultimate for any squash fan.

Very rarely, double match has deliciously occurred in the finals of our ultimate tournaments, the U.S. national championships:

—In the men’s singles, 1931. Donny Strachan chose no-set at 14-all giving himself another championship point but also giving his opponent, Larry Pool, one. Dumb idea. Pool won it.

—In the men’s singles, 1951. Henri Salaun flipped a desperate lob out of court to lose to Eddie Hahn. Eddie’s classic statement, which he told me a few days before he died, fifty years later, was “I looked up and it didn’t come down.”

—In the women’s singles, 1978. Gretchen Spruance won, on a stroke, over Barbara Maltby. A stroke at double championship point. Ugh.

—In men’s doubles, 1964. Sam Howe & Bill Danforth chose no-set, giving both themselves and Kit Spahr & Claude Beer a championship point. Danforth’s crosscourt drive nicked on the back wall.

—In men’s doubles, 1988. The Mateer brothers fought back from a 13-8 deficit in the fifth game, only to lose the game, the match and the championship when Drew Mateer flubbed a forehand into the tin.

—In women’s doubles, it happened just last year, in the 2007 finals. Meredith Quick & Fiona Geaves climbed back from being down 10-14 in the fifth to force a tiebreaker against Narelle Krizek & Steph Hewmitt. They went down 0-2 in the breaker, before pulling it out. At double championship point, Quick dug out a deep crosscourt by hitting a desperation double boast.

It never happened in the national juniors, apparently, or any age-group nationals, but it did happen four times in the national intercollegiates, three for the men and one for the women:

—Bernie Ridder, Jr. (the founder of what was the Knight Ridder newspaper chain) lost double-match points two years in a row. In 1937, having gone undefeated all year, he tinned a winner with his opponent, Dick Dorson, sprawled on the ground without a racquet in his hand. In 1938 Ridder lost to LeRoy Lewis. Ridder knew about losing: he brought the Minnesota Vikings to Minneapolis. But he did alright: he married FDR’s neice, served on the board of the USGA and when he died in 2002 has nineteen great-grandchildren.

—In 1939 Stan Pearson returned a hard serve into the right corner just above the tin for a winner, to be Kim Canavarro. Stan later told me it was the luckiest shot he had ever hit.

—In 1990 Jenny Holleran beat Berekely Belknap, making it four of the past five years that a Holleran sister had won the intercollegiates.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 11:07 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Speaking of magazine covers featuring squash, Sports Illustrated has been on my mind recently. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the first (and probably, the way things are going, last) time a squash player was featured on the cover of the world’s most famous sports magazine. 

The cover of the 10 February 1958 Sports Illustrated issue featured Henri Salaun and Diehl Mateer. Henri was in the foreground and Diehl leaned, in a classical pose, against the side wall. Dan Weiner took the shot in an old court at the University Club in New York. Weiner had scheduled a late afternoon photo session. Diehl later told me that he had been rushing from work and arrived just in time to change into his whites and so did not have time to shave. (You can’t notice.) Diehl was wearing shorts. In a few years, once his singles career wound down, he wore only cricket flannel trousers on the squash court, in what became a signature look.

The big storm about the cover was Henri’s pose. He held out his Bancroft racquet, the emblem on the throat almost thrust at the camera. Henri later told me that it was innocent, that his racquet just happened to be there when Weiner was shooting. But for many in the squash world, the joy of having squash players on the cover of SI was instantly tainted by the fact that Henri was hawking a racquet—he worked as a salesman for a sporting goods firm (he started his own company in 1969, Henri Salaun Sports, a firm that he still runs today at age eighty-two.) Interestingly, Diehl played with the same racquet, but his left hand (consciously?) covered the emblem on the throat.

Perhaps Diehl and Henri, as cover boys, might merit a short obituary in SI when they die. Joe Alston, the only badminton player to grace a SI cover (in March 1955) got a mention in the “For the Record” page when he passed away this spring.

As for the other racquet sports, there is a SI shutout. A racquetballer has never appeared on the cover, nor champions of paddle tennis, racquets, court tennis or ping pong. But tennis, yes. Seventy-eight times.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 8:05 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.