I just got back from my framer three precious things. Since I never want to have a squash court at my house—besides the fact that I am sure I’ll never be able to afford it, I too much like the social side of squash, the random locker-room chatter, the serendiptious gossip that is absent when you have your own court and have to invite over players—these pictures are destined to decorate my already crowded office wall. They are the three squash covers of the New Yorker. 

Two were by Constantin Alajalov. Born in Rostov, Russia in 1900, Alajalov emigrated in the early 1920s, first to Persia and then to the U.S. where he soon got work as an illustrator. Constantin (sometimes with an e at the end of his first name) Alajalov did one hundred and sixty-seven covers for the New Yorker from September 1926 to September 1960. He was notably the only artist who did covers for both the New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post, the sole exception to the famously iron-clad rule of the country’s two leading magazines. He also did covers for Vanity Fair, Vogue and Fortune, illustrated many books and painted murals for the Sherry-Netherland Hotel and for ocean liners. He was close friends with Odgen Nash, Leonard Bernstein and the Duke of Windsor. Janet Flanner, the famed New Yorker correspondent in Paris, wrote an book with him that collected his cartoons and painting. He died in New York in October 1987, survived by a brother who still lived in Moscow.

Alajalov was the sports cartoonist for the New York Evening Post in the 1930s, a job that brought him into contact with a relatively obscure sport, squash. In the space of ten months, he twice put a squash player on the cover of the New Yorker. On 25 May 1935 he depicted six men playing squash, tennis, polo, golf, ping pong and baseball, all trying to swat the same white ball. It is a brilliant, metaphorically-rich painting.

On 7 March 1936, he drew a squash match. In the foreground is fierce, white-haired man about to smash, with an enormous swing, a backhand into the back wall while his opponent cowers in a corner. It is an awkward scene, with the smasher’s right foot heading toward the front wall and yet his swing shaped for a backhand to the back wall. The only copy I have seen in a squash facility is at the University Club of San Francisco.

On 7 November 1977 Charles Saxon put squash players back on the New Yorker cover for the third and last (so far) time. Saxon, like Alajalov, was another legendary staff cartoonist: in thirty years he did ninety-two covers and seven hundred and twenty-five cartoonists for the magazine (it took three books to collect them all). Born in Brooklyn in 1920, Chuck Saxon grew up the son of English emigrants (his great-uncle Barney had been a court violinist to Queen Victoria).

Saxon was renowned for puncturing the pompous sensibilities of upper-class East Coast America, and his portrait of a woman waiting to get on a squash court filled with two men perfectly captured the wildly-changing 1970s New York City squash scene. It was rumored that Saxon drew the picture at an old squash tennis court at the Yale Club (he went to Columbia, class of 1940 and the Columbia Club of New York is based at the Yale Club).

Saxon, like most squash players, went down swinging. He was sardonic, right up to the day in December 1988 when he had a heart attack in his home in New Canaan. In the process of falling down when his heart seized, he knocked down a lamp. He seemed to be pretty sure he was dying, and when the EMTs were taking him out on a stretcher, he said, “I guess I’d better die—I just broke our best lamp.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 10:15 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.

Now that the season has slowed down to a dull, rat-a-tat-tat roar, here is the vaunted, valuable and sometimes venomous list of The Direct’s Top Ten Media Watch™ citings for American squash this winter. Let’s get snarky and sassy. 

10. Two articles on the urban squash movement: one in the Philadelphia Inquirer on SquashSmarts—13 April 2008. No snark here. This was a nice, feel-good piece on the front page of the Sunday paper’s Local News section about Philadelphia’s urban after-school youth-enrichment program. It has a nice description of Chase Lenfest showing up at one of SquashSmarts’ partner schools “in bombed-out sneaks.”

The other was in the Village Voice on 8 January 2008. It is a long and thoughtful piece on CitySquash and its successes in placing students in boarding schools.

9. A piece on YouTube that is the best squash trick shot I’ve seen in a while—29 March 2008. Mark Vocetti, an Australian teaching pro, performs this on German television, with Paris Hilton commenting live. We’ve got to get both to come to Grand Central….

9a. Another YouTube on some live JP trick shots from days gone by. Not really news, but it was nice to see again.

8. A radio piece on Trinity squash that ran nationally on The World and also locally on Connecticut public radio by Catie Talarski—15 February 2008.

7. Article in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Fairmount Athletic Club—20 January 2008. This was another positive piece from the Inquirer, this time on the front-page of the Image section of the Sunday paper. It focused on Demer “genial, can-do” Holleran, her more than thirty national titles and her new 46,000 square foot (!) health club. There were a couple of brilliant quotations from me about her legendary mental toughness and a shot of Caroline Swain, 15, who must be Joe Swain’s daughter?

6. Article in the Boston Globe on the Players Cup—6 February 2008. The piece, by squash mandarian Alex Beam, was in Beam’s Lifestyle column. Beam, a good, veteran writer, said that Nimick was “euchered.” That was the first time I have seen that game used that way—brillliant. Beam was alternatively feel-good on squash (”backgammon with racquets”) and not: “It’s like a clay-court tennis tournament with endless rallies….the stars are boring automatons.” But he inserts a great quote from John Nimick, the king of witty media soundbites: “[Ashour v. Shabana] is like a cobra and a mongoose. It’s all about offense.” Well, some cobras have good defenses too, right?

5. Article in the New Yorker on the Tournament of Champions—21 January 2008. In the Talk of the Town section, it was a solid piece by Nick Paumgarten. Nick went to the school where the game was first played in the U.S.—St. Paul’s—so he knows a little of the history, but he chose to talk about two relatively obscure players in the ToC qualies. They were two young Egyptians, Mohamed Ali Anwar Reda (former Egyptian national junior champion) and Badr Abdel Aziz. Reda was eighteen at the time and one of the callow Cairene upstarts picked to topple the upstart Ramy Ashour who is picked to topple world champion Amr Shabana. (There are twelve Egyptians in the top fifty, including three named Omar.) Aziz’s parents are both Egyptian, so although he grew up in Sweden and plays for Sweden, the twenty-seven year-old can argue in Arabic, so he can also possibly be classified as a part of the Egyptian juggernaut.

The piece starts out with a classic statement: “A good professional squash match is like a divorce.” Their match at the New York Athletic Club was viewed by about a dozen people, again pointing to the fact that New Yorkers really don’t know their squash, for a free match between two players who will probably crack the top twenty is always a good value. Nick also got the scoop on the player’s billeting in Bronxville (that should be a movie: Billeting in Bronxville). Nick makes it seem like Aziz quit at 5-5 in the fifth game of their seventy-four minute match, stalking off the court but the official score read 11-5 so it appears that he tanked rather than exited.

Notable fact: Reda and Aziz can text seventy words a minute. Can you?

4. Article in Sports Illustrated on Trinity—5 February 2008. Michael Bamberger did a major, explosive piece on Trinity College’s squash team, “the longest winning streak in college sports history” and its “obsessive coach” Paul Assaiante. I spent a couple of hours chatting with Bamberger, so I know he knows the game (he sees it at the Philadelphia Cricket Club) although he had never heard of Trinity before he started working on the piece. He traveled with the team to their match at Penn and came to the Trinity v. Princeton dual match. He did capture the atmosphere of college squash (the kids’ nicknames, etc) but he did have some snarky references to “the cocktail party circuit” that supposedly dominates East Coast squash and “alumni in their grosgrain belts.” After the piece came out, Bamberger called me and I told him that the one bit I was mystified by was the mention of grosgrain belts. What was that? He  told me. Turns out I own one.

3. Articles in Denver newspapers and television about good family fun at the old Rocky Mountain squash mecca—February 2008. Talk about a Mile High Club. Don’t touch my robe.

2. Article in the New York Times on college admissions—9 December 2007. This piece, well reported, was about how squash can help you get into college. It deflated that myth a bit but perhaps not enough. Squash is not a back door into elite colleges, Alex Williams wrote, but it “is so esoteric…it might be a pet door….squash conveys an aristocratic quirkinnes, a bit like a taste for Sanskrit poetry.”

Williams talked about how parents, normally voluable about their kids’ athletic achievements, are guarded when discussing how it might get them into Dartmouth. Williams gets a nice quote from Ramsay Vehslage, Jr., the Pingry coach and Robby Berner, former US Squash intern. But Williams quotes a Greenwich mom who said that her son leveraged his squash skills to get into Princeton, which is probably complete hogwash. Squash does, however, help kids get into prep schools, for what that is worth.

The real undiscovered sports, college admissions-wise, might be bowling, the article concludes. It turns out, that is no joke. 

Drumroll please:
1. Article in the New York Times on Hashim—30 December 2007. A Denver reporter for the Associated Press, Pat J. Graham did a long story on Hashim that ran in the Sunday Timesjust before New Year’s Eve, as well as thirty-five other newspapers in the U.S. and all over Europe and Asia. The Times was a shorter version than what ran elsewhere. A nice piece on the ninety-three year-old, it had quotes from Diehl Mateer to filmmaker Josh Easdon, as well as one from me comparing Hashim to Ali and Jordan. “I was pretty good once,” ends the piece. That’s right.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 11:49 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.

The greatest unknown squash publication in North America has just published its final hardcopy issue this week. It was started in 1993. It had great artwork, very insightful articles, a regular and rich debate between two leading squash figures and an unparalleled humor section. Every insider read it. Subscriptions were free and people in seventeen countries got them. It’s nickname was TSO. Still guessing? 

The Squash Official has been a fantastic, if completely below the radar screen publication for fifteen years. It has been the brainchild of Barry Faguy, the veteran Canadian squash referee. With a simple 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 page, stapled, sixteen page pamphlet format, it has always been well-designed, boasting call-outs, sidebars and other design accoutrement. It will still appear three times a year, but now just electronically.

The content of TSO has been extremely useful. There is nothing more unintelligible to the average player or spectator than the implementation and enforcement of the rules of the game. Parsing the esoteric—follow-through contact, self-inflicted injury, the 3/4 front wall convention, foot-faults (my personal pet peeve)—has been the key job of TSO. One fine feature has been the middle-page spread in which Rod Symington and Graham Waters are given the same situations and asked to adjudicate. Although their answers are often similar, their differences are telling and it is wonderful to see when they disagree.

The best thing about TSO, though, was its back-page humor section “Officially Speaking” which repeated comments and conversation between players and referees. Not surprisingly, our own maestro of the mouth, the gadfly with the gift of the complaining gab, the Comox comet Jonathon Power appeared more than any other player. Here is my favorite beaut from the October 2003: “During the Jonathon Power/Viktor Berg match [at the 2003 Canadian nationals], Berg is arguing with the referee Zal Davar. As the discussion goes on, Power says to Berg: “I’m not the one arguing the call, but if you want some help, I’m better at it.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 1:32 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.

Last weekend one hundred and ninety-eight players swatted the ball at the national doubles in Philadelphia. It was another spectacular event. Only nine pairs entered the women’s open, but they were an extremely strong group. Trevor McGuinness took the men’s open, becoming the youngest player to win it since a twenty-one year-old Tommy Page swashed his way to the title in 1978 (Diehl Mateer was also the same age when he won his first title in 1949); McGuinness also becomes the first guy to win it before he matriculated in college. 

I wrote an article for the tournament program that elicited a lot of e-mails, telephone calls and rabid discussion. So, in an edited version, here is what I wrote:

Does this sound familiar? “I don’t care if the rest of the world is playing that version of the game. Ours is much better. Ours has a great history. Ours is more fun to watch and more fun to play.”

This is what we said about hardball v. softball on the singles court. But look what happened in the past fifteen years. There are a whole panoply of reasons why the U.S. switched—it’s a whole chapter in my book—but the bottom line was the number of countries that played each version. Why do we think squash doubles will be any different in the long run?

In the short run, we have been doing very well. The past eight years have rightly dispelled much doom and gloom about hardball doubles. The rise of the ISDA and now the WDSA is fantastic. Tournaments are packed and the new national ones—Father & Son, Century and now Mother & Daughter—are spectacular successes. It seems every club has a member-guest. The new US Squash’s doubles committee has led to a revamped World Doubles format, North American rankings and corporate sponsorship.

Most of all, the spate of new courts is impressive: resort dubs in Nantucket, Vail, Sea Island and Johns Island; private clubs like the Jonathon, Olympic, Westchester Country, NYAC, Cleveland Racquet, Philly Country, University of San Francisco and Apawamis (they’ve broken ground); public clubs like the Fairmount, Charleston Squash, Long Island City and Southampton; and out-of-the-way quirks like outside Richmond and the Whippanong.

Hardball doubles celebrated its centennial last October and the game has never been as vibrant or strong.

Underneath it is appears a little like rearranging the deck chairs. We have lost courts: the City Athletic Club, Lone Star Boat Club, Dartmouth, Bowdoin (in early May), Gates Rubber Co. in Denver, Glade Springs in West Virginia, Middlebury, Lewis & Clark, and the Jewish Community Center and the University Club in Detroit. (We have about a dozen more courts now than we did in 2002.) Major squash cities like Seattle and Washington still do not have courts.

The ISDA has plateaued in terms of tour stops and prize money, still has not garnered significant corporate sponsorship and somehow Philadelphia, the country’s flagship doubles city, again did not host an event this season. You take away the New York City-area (six of sixteen events this season) and the tour, in this recession, suddenly looks a bit fragile.

Moreover, Canada is not the robust partner that she appears to be. Sure, she has incredible players and Toronto is gagga on dubs, but she has not had the same court boom we have had. Guess how many Canadian clubs outside Ontario have courts? Twelve.

Softball doubles is a real threat. It is being poorly managed (the switch to a 27 1/2 foot wide elite-standard court was a disruptive decision) and yet, there are four hundred courts in thirty-two countries; according to ASB’s Markus Gaebel, ASB has built 315 of these courts themselves (all but ten are with movable walls). Softball doubles is a medal sport in the Commonwealth Games; if we get into the Olympics, we’ll play softball doubles. It has a bi-annual World Doubles Championship—the 2008 event is being held this December in Chennai, India. The Country Club of Johannesburg just built four gorgeous, new permanent softball doubles courts last year. There are old club championships (the RAC in London has had one for half a century) and new tournaments everywhere. Doubles, internationally, simply means softball.

And just like softball singles, softball doubles is creeping into North America. Heather Wallace’s club in Ottawa has a thriving softball doubles program. There are twenty-two softball doubles courts in the U.S., according to US Squash’s latest survey; that is double what we had in 2003. Some are never or rarely used; but both the Concord-Acton Club in Boston and the Missouri Athletic Club in St. Louis have serious softball doubles action—the 2008 Massachusetts state softball tournament had thirteen teams (and no entry fee). In 2005 US Squash even sanctioned our first softball doubles nationals, to select players to go to the 2005 World Softball Doubles.

To avoid repeating what happened with hardball singles, we should:
1. Continue to support accessibility—clubs like Fairmount are a key to growth in the U.S. We have one hundred and three courts in the country but less than a seventh are public.
2. Ask Gordie Anderson to get hardball doubles court specifications up on the World Squash Federation’s website.
3. Continue to maximize every existing court, with more juniors, collegiate and post-collegiate development as the focus.
4. Get the portable glass court up and running, so we can show off pro doubles. Pro doubles is our shop window, but the largest crowd in the history of U.S. doubles was under two hundred people.
5. Most importantly, we need to do what we never did with hardball singles: expand the empire and go beyond Canada and the U.S. The fact that our court is so big should not be a deal-breaker; with movable wall technology, two softball singles courts can easily slide to make one hardball doubles court.

The first step is to surely take advantage of the overseas regulation hardball doubles courts we already have: the two courts, built in 1962, at the Reforma Athletic Club in San Juan Tototepec on the edge of Mexico City (where the Copa Wadsworth is being held next month); the court, built in 2001, in Tijuana, Mexico; the three courts built in the 1970s in Asia: the Royal Bangkok Sports Club in Thailand, the Tanglin in Singapore and the Raintree Club in Kuala Lumpur; and perhaps most importantly the court, built in 1935, at the Edinburgh Sports Club in Scotland. There should be yearly tours to these clubs to drum up interest in playing hardball, to raise standards and to bring them into our North American community. Once we get a foothold in Europe and Asia, then we can perhaps persuade other clubs to build courts.

This is naked imperialism. In the end, this is the only way to ensure that hardball doubles will celebrate its bicentennial.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 5:25 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.

This very minute is the start of the greatest forty hours of the year. It is the first day of spring and March Madness begins at noon today. Almost all of the thirty-two first-round games that are played today and tomorrow are not in primetime, but rather in the middle of the day. The start of the Big Dance is the last major televised sporting event to still occur midday midweek. It is the World Series in 1951. It is calling in sick. It is going to the pub at three in the afternoon. It is great.

The NCAAs also remind us, year after year, that not all institutions of higher learning have bland, common nicknames. One guy counted up college nicknames and found seventy-four schools that field Eagles, forty-six Tigers and thirty-nine Bulldogs. But the NCAAs bring out those inventive, iconoclastic names. This year’s choice is probably Kent State: the Golden Flashes.

But intercollegiate squash, although for some quirk of administration not an official NCAA sport, does match up very well with any college sport in its wealth of nicknames. So in honor of March Madness, I have devised a crude, twenty-four team bracket of the best of college squash nicknames (the NCAAs were a twenty-four team draw until 1974….):

First Round—
Bowdoin Polar Bears v. Colby Mules
For this in-state derby, you gotta go with Da Bears.

Conn College Camels v. Drexel Dragons
As our son likes to say, a one-hump camel poops a one-hump poop. And dragons are scary.

F&M Diplomats v. Haverford Black Squirrels
Black squirrels are the nice kind, right?

Amherst Lord Jeffs v. Kenyon Lords
Hoi polloi.

Harvard Crimson v. Stanford Cardinal v. Denison Big Red v. Cornell Big Red
Red is not red.

Vassar Brewers v. Wesleyan Cardinals
No more partying in Pougkeepsie.

Tufts Jumbos v. Tulane Green Wave
Fat Tuesday.

UVM Catamounts v. Georgetown Hoyas
No one really knows what a Hoya is.

Columbia Lions v. Mount Holyoke Lyons
Roar.

NYU Violets v. Trinity Bantams
Shrinking.

Wellesley Blue v. Dartmouth Big Green
Size does matter.

William Smith Herons v. Hobart Statesmen
Can’t they all just get together and love one another right now up at the College of the Senecas?

Second Round—
Polar Bears v. Camels
Global warming is a killer.

Black Squirrels v. Lord Jeffs
Haverford has the country’s only varsity cricket team—take that M’ Lord.

Cardinal v. Cardinals
Really.

Green Wave v. Catamounts
Tsunami.

Lions v. Bantams
Why did the chicken cross the road?

Big Green v. Herons
Hate to dis my alma mater, but the big, gawky bird gets it.

Quarterfinals—
Camels v. Black Squirrels
A camel gets you across the desert; a squirrel eats your bulbs.

Cardinal v. Green Wave
Is that then a yellow tide?

Bantams v. Herons
Trinity has won too much lately, right?

Semis—
Camels v. Green Wave
Tulane’s former nickname was the Greenbacks.

Herons get a bye since I did the draw. They have a hit with the Bard Raptors.

Finals—
Camels v. Herons.
We are talking some serious squash history being made. Best college squash team nickname of 2008. Well, with a coach called Fishback, it seems they are taking their nickname seriously up in Geneva. Let’s take the William Smith Herons.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 12:01 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.

Twenty-five Grover Clevelands. That is what safecracker Jimmy Willy walked away with on a rain-swept evening in Allston, Mass last weekend in the biggest legal heist in U.S. squash history. 

It was the finals of the Players Cup Championships, or as the marvelous mandarins of squash dubbed it, Tha Play-ah. The four-wall permanent glass court at Harvard’s Murr Center was intimately jammed, which was nice after attending some not-quite-sold-out finals in some other tournaments. James Willstrop v. David Palmer was a good, riveting match, though a bit too stroppy and churlish—but that was to be expected considering that $25,000 was on the line. (By the way, the $1,000 bill, which was last printed in 1945, did bear the beaming face of Buffalo’s great son Grover Cleveland. He was the last man to get married while in the White House, at the age forty-nine, she was twenty-one—that would have been a nice media feeding frenzy today.)

The 2008 McWil Courtwall Players Cup Championship might have been the last men’s pro singles event in the Hub for a while. It looks like the bean counters have perhaps run out of beans in Beantown. The city has hosted twenty-six of the now-defunct Boston Open, four Tournament of Champions, the U.S. Open from 1998 to 2006 and now this. Besides New York, no either city comes close to Boston’s support of men’s pro singles (Philadelphia comes in third, and it has hosted just a dozen pro events and only one portable court tournament. Just one portable court event in Philly v. seventeen in Boston. It is simply shocking.) Boston might be understandably a little tapped out.

The big gossip at the tournament was about Gawain Briars’ sudden dismissal after eight and a half years at the chief executive of the PSA. Retirement. Resignation. Retrenching. Whatever.

Gawain was not beloved, but he did have some startling yardstick numbers behind his PSA work: annual prize money from $1.5 million to $3.2 and the number of annual events from 100 to 371. I spent two hours talking with him one afternoon in Bermuda last December and found out that behind his lawyerly bluster—”I’m not paid to achieve harmony in the game”—there was a fascinating CV.

Gawain lived in Lagos from 1958 to 1968, when his father was the head of an international school there; he tried to organize a Nigerian Open tournament a few years ago. He was married four years ago to Susan, a medical doctor; they honeymooned in Rome. He was ranked as high as four in the world in the mid-1980s. Was it hard playing Jahangir? “Well, I’d rather play him today, that is for sure.”

And perhaps, most importantly, he shares the same birthday as I do. In fact he is just the second person I have ever met with my birthday. Different years, of course. We share the great day with such folks as Dorothea Dix, Maya Angelou, Heath Ledger and Robert Downey, Jr. Now that would be a harmonious party.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 3:50 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.

Two thousand three hundred and twenty-nine. That was how many people were clicked in as they filed into Halsey Field House at the United States Naval Academy to watch a squash match at the national intercollegiate individuals last weekend. It was a record crowd for a U.S. squash match. 

Nobody paid to get into the match. This was not the case at the half dozen Al-Ahram’s, the epic men’s pro tournament plopped in front of the Great Pyramids of Giza. The Al-Ahram boasted five thousand seats. And about two thousand of the people at the Navy match were not there on their own accord. Midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy, they were politely ordered to go in their uniforms and cheer for Tucker George, a Navy senior, who was facing Trinity’s sophomore Supreet Singh in the opening round of the 2008 intercollegiates. There were bagpipes and the singing of the Marine Corps anthem, “Semper Fidelis,” and a whole lot of cheering. When George won the opening game from an overawed Singh, a third of the crowd surged out of their seats—clearly thinking that the match was over (one game; wouldn’t that be nice?).

Willing or unwilling, knowledgable or just enthusiastic, the crowd was more than historic. It reminded everyone of the importance of the military academies in the American squash world—programs lost in the shuffle from hardball to softball. West Point squash disappeared after the 1988 season, and Navy squash sorely missed Army’s absence. Nothing inspires institutional support more than a rivalry and very little compares to Army v. Navy. But with a 2007 addition, Navy now has twelve courts, including two three-wall glass ones.

This was not the first time the men’s intercollegiates came to Annapolis; it had hosted the men in 1955 (Roger Campbell), 1966 (Howard Coonley), 1973 (Peter Briggs), 1977 (Mike Desaulniers), 1984 (Kenton Jernigan) and 1993 (Adrian Ezra). In fact, current Navy coach Craig Dawson easily recalled the 1973 edition, because as a senior playing #2 on the Navy squad, he managed to reach the semis before losing to Briggs. (West Point also hosted the men’s intercollegiates seven times.)

But it was the first time it has hosted both the men and the women and what a brilliant idea to try to break the U.S. squash crowd record. It had been around one thousand two hundred, but it was hardly official and with military precision, every person who entered the fieldhouse was counted. When you add in many of the CSA players and coaches who were already in the building, the total number was easily over twenty-four hundred.

The crowd renewed my appreciation for the Academies’ contribution to U.S. squash. Besides all the great players to come out of the Academies (everyone from Russ Ball, Sr. to Walter Oehrlein to Scott Ryan to Sunil Desai), great coaches (both Paul Assaiante and Satinder Bajwa coached at Army and Art Potter was the giant at Navy) and great teams (Navy won three national team titles, the only school besides Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Trinity to do so), they also have provided two necessary things:

For one, they threw a gritty, hardworking ball into the mainly-preppy squash court—Dawson told me that Potter held challenge matches every day, that practice always meant a challenge match. And they could access federal largese and support. Maybe if the Academies were stronger (whither Air Force?), we might get governmental money the way that the other major squash federations do? Or at least a court at the White House? Semper Fi.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 3rd, 2008 at 9:02 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.

Four years ago, there was just one thing that came to mind when you heard the phrase Richmond squash: the Price-Bullington Invitational. The PBI is a classic amateur tournament that features top college kids who are flown in from their campuses to the Country Club of Virginia for the weekend. (Started in 1970, it was originally the Holt Bullington, named in honor of the eponymous Richmond junior who died the year before.) Otherwise the Virginia SRA was molasses-slow world, with not a single twenty-one-foot court in Richmond and barely any league or junior play. Richmond’s main claim to fame was that it was the home of the good reverend, Bob Hetherington, who was a top amateur forty years ago. And then everything changed. 

Ted Price, the Old Dominion squash kingpin who now shares the honors of the PBI name, brought in journeyman teaching pro Gus Cook (France; Lakeshore Athletic in Chicago; Birmingham Athletic in Detroit; Meadow Mill in Baltimore), and Richmond squash blossomed. Cook started five days before Christmas in 2003 and a month later he had organized a pro squash tournament, the Virginia Open. Each winter Cook added a PSA star to the prize money level and increased the budget (from $19,000 in 2004 to $175,000 in 2008). After two years at the Country Club of Virginia, Cook moved the tournament down the road to the home of the Spiders, the University of Richmond. For the next two years, the tournament had a glass court plopped down in the Tyler Haynes Commons, UR’s student union which famously had fifty-foot high windows looking out on the a tree-banked pond.

While this was going on, Richmond squash exploded. The CCV put in three softball court and other clubs began the process of converting or adding courts. One intriguing new club is the Wood n Racket, which is a half hour outside Richmond on the way to Charlottesville. Besides some grass tennis courts, it has one squash doubles court and plans for a second one.

This week the Davenport Open, as the pro tournament is now called, is up the hill from the pond, at UR’s old Millhiser gym. It has a 400-seat capacity, cozy and slightly quaint with the worn brick and wooden rafters. With the huge draw (twelve of the top twenty in the world), it feels like just another big international tournament: The McWil truck (”Glass Court on World Tour”) is sitting outside; Martin Bronstein is interviewing the players as they leave the court after their match; local shutter babe Patricia Lyons is snapping shots; and Jean Delierre is tremendously busy fixing cameras and snaking cable lines for his television filming. Fans from as close as Norfolk and Chapel Hill and as far away as Baltimore and New York are coming into town.

Only at times it is a sleepy scene, like when there was a fifteen-minute gap between matches on the first afternoon, and Ramy and Hesham Ashour got on court to hit. Ramy was about as casual as possible: in his socks, borrowing one of his brother’s racquets and his long sweats dragging underfoot. Yet he still looked, with his flicks and flips, like a magician.

The biggest excitement so far has been the opening round match of Patrick Chifunda v. Cam Pillay. Chifunda is now based at CCV and running junior clinics all over town and got enormous home-crowd ovations—at introductions, after the warmup, after some of his airborne swan dives and after his match.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 12:10 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.

February is the quiet month in American sports. Except for the squash community, when it is nuts, with two or three marquee events each weekend. Living in Washington, one tournament I like to catch is Baltimore’s famous—or rather infamous—BIDS. 

Baltimore has a rich squash history and none more interesting than its fierce, sometimes absurd involvement with hardball doubles. There was the brothers tandem of Joe and Jim Lacy who won numerous state and club championships despite both being left-handed. The city’s first court appeared in 1937 at the now-defunct University Club, but the court was built not at the U Club’s clubhouse on Charles Street but in a hotel around the corner on West Madison Street (it disappeared in 1964). In 1939 the first Baltimore Invitational Doubles was held and it has occurred sporadically ever since; the 2008 edition was called the 65th, but in reality it was more like the 40th (war years; squabbling amongst Baltimore’s clubs; and they like to count the ten times the city has hosted the national doubles).

The highlight of this year’s BIDS was the action at Meadow Mill. Players got to watch an exhibition between Wade Johnstone and John White on Saturday afternoon, followed by dual match between Navy and Franklin & Marshall. This was one of the first (or the first?) on-purpose neutral-site college squash matches. The varsity were followed by Navy’s junior varsity playing against Meadow Mill; half of the JV were women—Navy is planning to add a women’s team in the fall.

The BIDS has a notorious reputation for fun. Players come from around the country. At the Saturday party, I talked to friends from Texas, California, a half dozen East Coast states and even a couple of guys from DC (we have no doubles court here). The BIDS program, compiled by John Voneiff, was packed with gossip, lists and history. Voneiff lovingly recounted a number of classic Southey Miles stories.

Miles, a BIDS bon vivant, was the head referee at the 1960 BIDS and the stress of the match and some of his bad calls led him to head to the bar after the fourth game to fortify himself with one of his trademark cold gin martinis; he never returned and, Voneiff says, no one saw him for five days. Two years later at the BIDS he received, Voneiff colorfully wrote, “a nasty spider bite while mistaking a giant flower arrangement in the foyer for a urinal.” Miles died in 1973 of a cerebral hemorrhage while on vacation in Austria at the age of fifty-two. His eponymous award, interestingly enough, has not been given out at the BIDS for nineteen years. Where have the spiders gone?

The 2008 BIDS added two more members to the Maryland State SRA’s squash hall of fame: Joe Fitzpatrick and Geoff Kennedy. They joined fourteen other Maryland greats (as well as four honorary members). Fitz was in rare form, parading around the party with a seven-week-old, perfectly composed, bow-tie clad grandson in his arms. Good to get them locked in early.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 12:31 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.