{"id":176632252,"date":"2008-09-15T17:13:57","date_gmt":"2008-09-15T17:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/squashword.wpengine.com\/?p=176632252"},"modified":"2015-05-18T17:15:58","modified_gmt":"2015-05-18T17:15:58","slug":"vanity-fair-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/?p=176632252","title":{"rendered":"Vanity Fair Blog"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Name dropping has become the modus operandi of journalists when they talk about squash: Roger Federer, Pervez Musharraf, John Dryden.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The latest media mentions:<\/p>\n

\u2014The\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/em>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\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0figures 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 \u201cwide out on the stretch,\u201d as the\u00a0Times<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>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\u2014the squash Open.<\/p>\n

\u2014Harvard Magazine<\/em>\u00a0mentioned in its July-August issue that the university\u2019s oldest alum, Al Gordon, \u201823, was unable to make it to his 85th reunion this June (excuses, excuses\u2026.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\u2019s age.<\/p>\n

\u2014This 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\u00a0Boston Globe<\/em>\u00a0and a high C player, has written more than a half dozen entries at the website for\u00a0Vanity Fair<\/em>.\u00a0<\/a>Beam, with a delightfully wry tone, dilates on such items as Mushaffarf\u2019s game, Victor Niederhoffer\u2019s daughter Galt, squash at the White House and summer camp at Wesleyan.<\/p>\n

My favorite entry was about squash at the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0in the 1970s and 1980s. Very cleverly he got Dan Menaker to do the dilating for him. Menaker remembered the\u00a0New Yorker\u2019s<\/em>ladder, 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: \u201cSquash was a huge deal for a while back then\u2014everybody played or tried to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Menaker did mention Herbert Warren Wind, the one renowned\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0writer (and former player) but he did forget one classic: the real \u201cKhan,\u201d 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\u00a0About The New Yorker & Me: A Sentimental Journey<\/em>\u00a0(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, \u201cstraightforward and first-rate.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t have been cheap) and finally arrived back in New York at one in the morning. Kahn doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 1:42 pm 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

One Response to \u201cBeam\u2019s Blog\u2014Media Watch VI\u201d<\/h3>\n
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  1. Guy Cipriano<\/cite>\u00a0Says:
    \n    September 16th, 2008 at 4:22 pm<\/a><\/small>I suspect that the doubles court in NJ referenced above was the Sea Bright court. Bill Robinson, fomer editor of Yachting Magazine and a very well known man for 5 decades in publishing circles in NYC, was the patron saint of the Sea Bright court . He also was a member of the very well known Sea Bright Lawn Tennis Club which is only 5 minutes away . It was the site of one of the top tournaments in the old eastern grass court circuit which was the focus of amateur tennis in America for decades, including Longwood, Rockaway, Newport, Germantown and Merion, Piping Rock and a few others. The court was recently renovated and is in brilliant shape, although it seldom is used.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Name dropping has become the modus operandi of journalists when they talk about squash: Roger Federer, Pervez Musharraf, John Dryden.\u00a0 The latest media mentions: \u2014The\u00a0Times\u00a0of London ran an interesting piece during the Wimbledon fortnight about how squash has helped out tennis players. It has gotten so common that the\u00a0Times\u00a0figures there is a new shot derived … Continue reading Vanity Fair Blog<\/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-176632252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176632252","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=176632252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176632252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=176632252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=176632252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=176632252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}