Crazy-Quilt Stargown

I just spent much of last month talking with and about Mark Talbott, for a cover article in the current issue of Squash Magazine; the eight-page profile is dotted with a dozen vintage photos of Mark from a quarter century ago. I learned a lot more about someone everyone in the American squash scene knows something about, including a couple of great trivia bits. 

Mark wears a size eight and a half shoe. Despite his six foot frame, he has tiny feet. Is this the smallest pair of feet ever to win a major adult men’s squash tournament? His feet are almost a third the size of perhaps the most famous clodhoppers in pro sports, Bob Lanier’s size twenty-two gunboats, which are so big that the NBA made a bronze cast of them.

The other fact-checking item was about the Grateful Dead. Everybody knows that in the 1980s Mark crossreferenced the touring schedules of the WPSA and the Dead. He told me that, contrary to the estimated seventy shows that I wrote in my 1997 profile of Mark for Squash News, he had actually attended more or less around a hundred shows. (Mark has a better sense of how many pro singles tournament wins he garnered—which is officially around one hundred and sixteen and perhaps even more; how many other people have both their pro tournament career win list and Dead show list in triple digits?)

His first show was at Robert F. Kennedy stadium in Washington in June 1973. Two of his older brothers took their just-turned thirteen kid brother down from Baltimore to see the Dead and the Allman Brothers. He said that of the hundred shows, that first one at RFK was still the best of them all. He wasn’t sure which night he went to, the 9th  or the 10th, but you can look at both set lists and the comments and know that they were good shows.

No doubt. My first show was at JFK in Philadelphia in July 1987. It was still the best show I saw—like a crazy-quilt stargown through a dream night wind.

One Response to “Crazy-Quilt Stargown”

  1. Guy Cipriano Says:
    My first show was also the Dead and the Allmans held at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City, also in 73. It must have been on the same tour. Great stuff. Duane and Butch were still alive and rocking the place.They tore down Roosevelt Stadium, a depression age hulk built for the Triple A Jersey City Giants and built a shopping mall in 2000. I also saw AS Lazio with Giorgio Chinaglia play Santos FC with Pele there in 1974. They sold 40,000 tix for a stadium that held 25,000. Great game, great memories.

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