The Office

Squash finally came last week to my favorite television show, The Office

At the end of the episode “Doomsday,” Jim gets on court with Robert California for a nice little game. Jim, having never played before, shows up in all-whites—the whole premise is that squash is a preppy game, so I must wear white; California is in colors—the whole premise being that squash’s preppy image is not reality. Well, that is one way to read into it. Jim’s pretty awful at squash (so is California) but they are wearing protective eyewear, which was a nice touch. 

Now, The Office is set in Scranton and there are no courts in Scranton. The nearest might be Allentown, a lone and possibly neglected hardball court at Muhlenberg College; or more likely Easton, where there are six softball courts at Lafayette College. The show is filmed in Los Angeles, so we’ll wait to hear which club.

 

http://www.nbc.com/the-office/episode-guide/season-8/401526/doomsday/episode-…

Eton

Eton College’s racquets team came to Philadelphia last week on a tour of the East Coast. I had the pleasure to getting beaten up by not one but two Etonians on the racquets court. This was followed by a long dinner in town with them, which included hearing about an upcoming game amongst alums in New York City of the Eton Field Game. 

I know: racquets is pretty obscure, but surely the Field Game is even more unknown, played solely at one British prep school. Makes racquets positively a mass game. 

 

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=897

Drama at the ‘Rama

The New York Times recently did a story on the cyclorama in Atlanta. There are a bunch of cylcoramas still left around the world, but the Atlanta one is huge (the largest oil painting in the world).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/us/moving-of-atlanta-cyclorama-is-raised.ht…

http://www.atlantacyclorama.org/

 

This brought back one of the great events in U.S. racquet sports history, the finals of the 1984 Boston Open, Jahangir Khan v. Mark Talbott, 18-16 in the fifth. It was played in the cyclorama in the South End that is now a part of the Boston Center for the Arts. Hard to believe but it has been almost exactly twenty-seven years since the U.S. started putting on portable glass court squash tournaments. 

http://www.bcaonline.org/venues/cyclorama.html

Late Night

Just played in the Haddon Tomes, the member-guest court tennis tournament at Tuxedo. The theme was Prohibition. (Last couple of years have been Eighties, Seventies and masquerade.) There were a lot of fedoras and spats and flapper dresses and secret passwords.

The event, just a decade old, has really grown and now is so well-subscribed (twenty teams, each with three matches guaranteed) that the last scheduled match on Friday—scheduled—was for 12:45am. It went on court around then and finished at 1:30am. (There was even a spectator, a loyal plus-one as the English pro said.) The 12:00am match in fact involved a team that also was scheduled to play at 8:30am the following morning; they were a bit lucky in that, as the first match of the morning was at 7:00am.

It all reminded me of the old Atlantic Coast Championships, the squash singles tournament, where they also scheduled matches into the night. In fact matches were scheduled all night on Friday, with full galleries and a lot of late-night hilarity.

The ACC event is still being played—in fact, the 2011 event is this weekend, at the Greate Bay Racquet & Fitness Club. From the schedule, though, it appears that Friday’s matches at the ACC end at 7:00pm.

Atlas Lives (the shot)

Dick Druckman has captured hundreds of classic sports moments with his camera: Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit; Michael Phelps capturing his first gold medal, Lance Armstrong winning his seventh Tour de France. So what does Druckman pose right off his shoulder when he is being interviewed by ABC World News? 

The photo of Gustav Detter after winning the Atlas Lives match from five and a half years ago. 

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/business-exec-sports-photographer-14628949

U.S. Open

Finally, Philly gets a portable-court tournament. The U.S. Open at Drexel.

It has been getting people talking: the dragon sculpture outside the facility, the one hundred-plus volunteers smoothing the way, the eighty-four players, the upsets (watched Nicol David go down in the quarters last night) and everyone, and I mean everyone, giving it a whack on the radar gun. Johnny White got it up to 160-mph on his backhand. Wow. 

Pretty nice description of the tournament by Tracy Gates:

http://squeakyfeet.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/squashed-in-philly-the-u-s-open-o…

 

It even got noticed on the left coast:

http://www.latimes.com/health/boostershots/la-heb-squash-tournament-20110929,…

Real TV

RealTennis.tv is on the move. 

They are fundraising in the modern, crowd-sourcing way, in order to broadcast more court tennis and racquets this winter. Very worthy cause.

 www.pleasefund.us/projects/realtennis-tv 

This weekend they are streaming live from the French Open in Paris. Right now I am watching another installment of the Riviere v. Virgona rivalry:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/french-open-2011-paris

And then next weekend they will be broadcasting some of the matches on the most unusual and until recently obscure courts in the tennis world, three pelota courts in southwestern France:

http://www.tennisandrackets.com/Editable/UploadedContent/20010-11%20Season/Te…


Power Outtage

A month ago I got a nice tip from Josh Easdon, the filmmaker and squash coach, about a story on Toronto television relating to Jonathon Power and a Pakistani woman pro, Maria Toor Pakay, ranked 179 in the world.

http://www.thestar.com/sports/article/1039040–squash-prodigy-flees-taliban-to-toronto

 

Brett Erasmus has well-dissected this story:

http://www.brettssquashblog.com/2011/08/power-of-one.html

 

Interestingly, it is her coach not herself (Maria hasn’t played a WISPA tournament since May) who has been making news lately. Power played last night in the Showdown at Symphony in Boston and also found himself in a bit of hot water after getting outed for testing positive for drug use while playing squash in Italy. 

http://www.insidethegames.biz/latest/13942-exclusive-squash-stick-by-new-amba…

http://www.insidethegames.biz/latest/13996-squash-drops-drug-tainted-former-w…

 

 

Diana Nyad Squash Swim

Last week Diana Nyad was at it again. The open-water swimmer got enormous attention for attempting to swim from Cuba to Florida. She failed about halfway, after swimming for twenty-nine hours. Nyad will be sixty-two on Monday. Staying awake for twenty-nine hours would be a challenge at that age, let alone swimming thse so-called shark-infested waters.

She had some famous swims in the seventies (she swam around Manhattan in under eight hours in 1975 and set a record for non-stop swimming without a wetsuit, one hundred and two miles from Florida to the Bahamas in 1979, that lasted for twenty years). 

Nyad played on the women’s pro hardball tour in the seventies as well. In 1976 she famously opened the Manhattan Squash Club in the Grace Building with an exhibition match against George Plimpton. She was a fierce player (broke a rib once) and I ended a chapter in my squash book with a lovely quotation from her in 1978: “It is a game of aggression and intimidation. And women need to learn that they can go out and push somebody out of their way and hit the fuckin’ ball.”

See: http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/08/09/nyad.103.mile.swim/index.html

The Inside Word on the Game of Squash