{"id":176632233,"date":"2008-05-15T18:09:19","date_gmt":"2008-05-15T18:09:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/squashword.wpengine.com\/?p=176632233"},"modified":"2015-05-15T18:11:59","modified_gmt":"2015-05-15T18:11:59","slug":"media-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/?p=176632233","title":{"rendered":"Media Watch"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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\u2019s Top Ten Media Watch\u2122 citings for American squash this winter. Let\u2019s get snarky and sassy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

10. Two articles on the urban squash movement: one in the\u00a0Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>on SquashSmarts\u201413 April 2008. No snark here. This was a nice, feel-good piece on the front page of the Sunday paper\u2019s Local News section about Philadelphia\u2019s urban after-school youth-enrichment program. It has a nice description of Chase Lenfest showing up at one of SquashSmarts\u2019 partner schools \u201cin bombed-out sneaks.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other was in the\u00a0Village Voice<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>on 8 January 2008. It is a long and thoughtful piece on CitySquash and its successes in placing students in boarding schools.<\/p>\n

9. A piece on\u00a0YouTube\u00a0<\/a>that is the best squash trick shot I\u2019ve seen in a while\u201429 March 2008. Mark Vocetti, an Australian teaching pro, performs this on German television, with Paris Hilton commenting live. We\u2019ve got to get both to come to Grand Central\u2026.<\/p>\n

9a. Another\u00a0YouTube\u00a0<\/a>on some live JP trick shots from days gone by. Not really news, but it was nice to see again.<\/p>\n

8. A radio piece on Trinity squash that ran nationally on The World and also locally on\u00a0Connecticut public radio\u00a0<\/a>by Catie Talarski\u201415 February 2008.<\/p>\n

7. Article in the\u00a0Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>on Fairmount Athletic Club\u201420 January 2008. This was another positive piece from the\u00a0Inquirer<\/em>, this time on the front-page of the Image section of the Sunday paper. It focused on Demer \u201cgenial, can-do\u201d 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\u2019s daughter?<\/p>\n

6. Article in the\u00a0Boston Globe<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>on the Players Cup\u20146 February 2008. The piece, by squash mandarian Alex Beam, was in Beam\u2019s Lifestyle column. Beam, a good, veteran writer, said that Nimick was \u201ceuchered.\u201d That was the first time I have seen that\u00a0game\u00a0<\/a>used that way\u2014brillliant. Beam was alternatively feel-good on squash (\u201dbackgammon with racquets\u201d) and not: \u201cIt\u2019s like a clay-court tennis tournament with endless rallies\u2026.the stars are boring automatons.\u201d But he inserts a great quote from John Nimick, the king of witty media soundbites: \u201c[Ashour v. Shabana] is like a cobra and a mongoose. It\u2019s all about offense.\u201d Well, some cobras have good defenses too, right?<\/p>\n

5. Article in the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>on the Tournament of Champions\u201421 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.\u2014St. Paul\u2019s\u2014so 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The piece starts out with a classic statement: \u201cA good professional squash match is like a divorce.\u201d 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\u2019t 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\u2019s billeting in Bronxville (that should be a movie:\u00a0Billeting in Bronxville<\/strong>). 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.<\/p>\n

Notable fact: Reda and Aziz can text seventy words a minute. Can you?<\/p>\n

4. Article in\u00a0Sports Illustrated<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>on Trinity\u20145 February 2008. Michael Bamberger did a major, explosive piece on Trinity College\u2019s squash team, \u201cthe longest winning streak in college sports history\u201d and its \u201cobsessive coach\u201d 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\u2019 nicknames, etc) but he did have some snarky references to \u201cthe cocktail party circuit\u201d that supposedly dominates East Coast squash and \u201calumni in their grosgrain belts.\u201d 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\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>told me. Turns out I own one.<\/p>\n

3. Articles in\u00a0Denver\u00a0<\/a>newspapers and television about good family fun at the old Rocky Mountain squash mecca\u2014February 2008. Talk about a Mile High Club. Don\u2019t touch my robe.<\/p>\n

2. Article in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>on college admissions\u20149 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 \u201cis so esoteric\u2026it might be a pet door\u2026.squash conveys an aristocratic quirkinnes, a bit like a taste for Sanskrit poetry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Williams talked about how parents, normally voluable about their kids\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

The real undiscovered sports, college admissions-wise, might be bowling, the article concludes. It turns out, that is no\u00a0joke.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Drumroll please:
\n1. Article in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>on Hashim\u201430 December 2007. A Denver reporter for the Associated Press, Pat J. Graham did a long story on Hashim that ran in the\u00a0Sunday Times<\/em>just before New Year\u2019s Eve, as well as thirty-five other newspapers in the U.S. and all over Europe and Asia. The\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/em>was a shorter version than what ran\u00a0elsewhere.\u00a0<\/a>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. \u201cI was pretty good once,\u201d ends the piece. That\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 11:49 am and is filed under\u00a0General<\/a>. You can follow any responses to this entry through the\u00a0RSS 2.0<\/a>\u00a0feed. You can\u00a0leave a response<\/a>, or\u00a0trackback<\/a>\u00a0from your own site.<\/small><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s Top Ten Media Watch\u2122 citings for American squash this winter. Let\u2019s get snarky and sassy.\u00a0 10. Two articles on the urban squash movement: one in the\u00a0Philadelphia Inquirer\u00a0on SquashSmarts\u201413 April 2008. No … Continue reading Media Watch<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176632233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176632233","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=176632233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176632233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=176632233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=176632233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=176632233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}