{"id":93306580,"date":"2012-01-10T19:36:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-10T19:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/squashword.com\/whitey"},"modified":"2012-01-10T19:36:00","modified_gmt":"2012-01-10T19:36:00","slug":"whitey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.squashword.com\/?p=93306580","title":{"rendered":"Whitey"},"content":{"rendered":"

The golden anniversary of the William White was last weekend. Fifty amazing years and, because of the one-year hiatus due to Merion Cricket Club’s 1995 conversion from hardball to softball, fifty amazing events. <\/p>\n

I did the tournament program this year. Because of a wealth of information and insightful interviews, it ballooned into an eighty-page booklet. I got to talk with doubles giants like John Hentz, Bill Danforth and Joyce Davenport. I got to talk with my first serious coach, Joe Coyle, for the first time in a quarter century. I got to talk with four of the five guys who played in the inaugural White’s singles draw in 1962, Ben Heckscher, Sam Howe, Diehl Mateer and Charlie Ufford.<\/p>\n

Because of Whitney Thain and Tracy Greer, we were able to dig out and use a wealth of archival photographs for the booklet. Some were just classic shots, including one of Maurice Heckscher & Michael Pierce with the luggage that they received as winners of the doubles in 1977 (when I saw Pierce in the locker room at Cynwyd showering after his quarterfinal loss in at Merion this Saturday, he said he couldn’t remember where the suitcase is now).<\/p>\n

The other great photograph was of a snowy porte cochere at Merion. The Whitey (as it has always been called in my family, since Bill White was always called Whitey) is known for its weather-related catastrophes: for example, the 1996 blizzard that dumped thirty inches on the club started during the Saturday dinner dance.<\/p>\n

Well, this year it was sixty-three degrees on Saturday afternoon and not a cloud in the sky.