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.