I acted as the moderator of a fascinating evening at the Racquet & Tennis Club earlier this month. It was a discussion with the brothers Bostwick, Pete and Jimmy and about their incredible athletic careers. We expected thirty people. Forty signed up. Seventy showed up.

The Bostwicks were hesitant about doing the event, thinking that they might run out of things to say. Instead, the conversational juices got flowing and I had to cut them off after two hours, and we had just lightly touched upon so many of their stories.

World champions in court tennis. Great ice hockey players (Pete tried out for the Olympic team) despite growing up in South Carolina. Pete played at Forest Hills, and in the 1959 U.S. Open in golf, at Winged Foot (missed the cut, but was one stroke better than Jack Nicklaus) and thus is probably the only guy to play in our national championship in lawn tennis, court tennis and golf.

Jimmy also qualified for the U.S. Open, in Rochester in 1968 (also missed cut) and won the French Amateur in 1964. Both won the Gold Racquets in court tennis and racquets, something no one else had done.

Pete told some stories about playing golf with Ben Hogan and lawn tennis with Nicklaus. Jimmy talked about Pierre Etchebaster. Pierre’s advice, every time, no matter who the opponent was or which court or what the tournament was, it was the same: “One point at a time. No mistakes.” 

Just did a talk at the annual dinner of the Northern New Jersey Squash Racquets Association.

I started off by saying that I think they have the longest name of any squash association in the world, or at least this side of the border—you suspect that the Squash Pekwachnamaykoskwaskwaypinwanik in Canada might beat it, if you could pronounce it.

It was a great night. A ton of people. Awards. Exhibition between Baset Ashfaq and Lee Rosen. It was nice to be at the Short Hills Club, which was the home of Tommy Iannicelli, the squash pro with the largest number of vowels in his name, only equaled by my co-author, Paul Assaiante. Sat with the Cipriano clan which including sipping a tasty Brandy Alexander after the meal.

Just minutes after running into a Dartmouth classmate who was having a late night game of squash, twenty years after we graduated, I was introduced to Mark Funk, who will be a freshman this fall at the college. Ouch 

Barney Lawrence died on Saturday 30 April. He was eighty-five.

Rial George Rutter Lawrence, Q.C., B.A., LL.B  was a legend, the absolute definition of ebullient.

I usually saw him at Lapham Grant weekends. The last time was at Apawamis a year ago. We talked for a long time, as was usual with Barney.  He was a good player, we tended to forget in later years—he told me a story about losing a close match to Diehl Mateer in the semis of a tournament in the1950s. But he was the great raconteur. He said he just recited the Gettysburg Address at his birthday party, he said. He was known for being able to reel off long stretches of memorized poetry.

The emails have been flying ever since the news of his passing came out. Kit Tatum said he was squash royalty. “One of the comments that Barney made at the Lapham Grant final luncheon speech was that he had made an ‘anonymous’ gift to the Lapham Grant event, and he sure as hell wanted everyone to know about it. The crowd broke up, and it was pure Barney.”

Ted Marmor talked about Barney’s warm, husky voice. “His distinctive role for after dinner talks was to speak a form of gibberish. That meant talking very fast, reversing sentences, reversing endings and beginnings of words, all the while smiling as if he were the funniest, wittiest, and most elevating speaker one could find.”

“I am deceptively slow these days” was his classic one-liner that Alladin Mitha recalled.

Guy Cipriano remembered Barney’s brilliant, after-dinner rendition of “Little Red Riding Hood.”

“We have lost a friend,” said Alan Fox. “Squash has lost one of its most colorful (and contributing) characters. Some of the glow goes out of the game for all of us.”

The masters trophy at the Lapham is named in part after Lawrence (the other half is another legendary guy who worked into his eighties, Howard Wilkins) and hopefully the glow will return, along with a Barney laugh and a joke or two. 

While down in Aiken, I met with Bob Harrington.

Bob has been a resident of Aiken since 1947 (he was the head of Aiken Prep from 1971-88), so he was very helpful about the history of the tennis court there. He also let me borrow a fascinating scrapbook of his father’s that had a bombshell in it.

Carroll Harrington was the class of 1924 at Harvard. He was the champion of the freshman class in 1921. This was back when Harvard had twenty-nine courts scattered around its houses and hundreds of men who played every day. Harrington then played on the junior varsity his sophomore year and the varsity his junior and senior year, right behind national champion Palmer Dixon. In fact, he had match points against Dixon in the semis of the 1924 college tournament before losing in five.

Harrington played in the first-ever intercollegiate squash match, Harvard v.  Yale, held at the Racquet & Tennis Club in February 1923. Harvard won 4-1, with only Lucien Williams of Yale scoring for the Eli (Williams was the 1922 intercollegiate tennis champion). The Harvard v. Yale squash rivalry is thus the oldest in the world, as Oxford and Cambridge didn’t start playing each other until 1926.

I learned that Harry Cowles first came over to help Harvard squash in 1921-22 rather than a year later. So it was fifteen seasons in Cambridge, not fourteen. He was called Henry Cowles in the papers, which quoted him on his notions of coaching: “I’d like to add that I teach the game as it was played by Dr. John Cummin of the Harvard Club. I consider his game most skillful and based on the theory of billiard shots.”

Cummin, I learned by poking around the web, was the class of 1892, a doctor and a member of the Harvard Club of Boston’s squash committee. And apparently, he was the source of wisdom for the greatest squash coach in history.

Glorious Aiken. Last weekend I played in the Nordy Knox, the old Aiken Handicap court tennis tournament.

It is the oldest handicap doubles tournament in the U.S. and attracts players from England and Australia. The beauty of it is that you get to spend a long weekend at perhaps the world’s most unique playable court: it has spawned two world champions, is the home of world #3 Cam Riviere, is most isolated court in the world and has perhaps the most newspaper-clipping adorned bathroom wall I’ve seen at a tennis club.

Moreover, the village of Aiken has a few amenities that no one else can offer.

My partner, Mit Carothers, invited me to what his polo team practice, so I spent a lovely afternoon at Powderhouse Field watching a half-dozen chukkers. I played a round at Palmetto, the grand old golf course of the south (started in 1892 by Tommy Hitchcock, partially designed by Alistar MacKenzie and the nineteenth club to join the USGA). I heard many ribald tales from Masters week—Augusta National is twenty-odd minutes to the south and the Aiken Handicap used to be on Masters weekend until the Masters became such a huge deal in the 1970s. I visited the local historical society, which is housed in one of the many nineteenth century mansions that northerners built when they created a winter colony in Aiken over a century ago.

And I played croquet at Green Boundary Club with Wayne Davies. Wayne might just be one of the great athletes of our time: he was world champion in court tennis for seven years; he was a fine racquets player, winning the U.S. professional title; he got to forty in the world in squash while working as a court tennis pro in Bordeaux in the early 1980s; and now he’s consistently coming in the top ten in the U.S. croquet nationals (fifth in 2007, ninth last year). Down in Aiken for a few week’s break from his job at the Westmoor Club on Nantucket, Wayne took some of us out for an hour’s clinic. I was losing badly in a game of singles to Andrew Gould of Melbourne when time was called. 

Got an email a couple of days ago: “Who has won the national doubles in both squash and court tennis?” That was easy: Ralph Howe and Morris Clothier. And now Addison West, who along with Trevor McGuinness took the 2011 BMO Capital Markets U.S. Squash Doubles Championships men’s open division title, can also claim that rare feat of dominating the amateur four-handed games in two sports.

At the national singles, it was Old Home Week. For all the names in the draw, it could have been played a decade or two ago. In the women’s draw, a smattering of teenager came and one, Sabrina Sobhy, age fourteen, knocked off former champion Shabana Khan, age forty-two. Shabana, it must be said, had a world ranking three years before Sabrina was born.

On the men’s side, there were more blasts from the past with forty-somethings Richard Chin, Jamie Crombie and Damian Walker not only entering the tournament but each winning their first round match. Does it say something about the strength of the U.S. game when forty-one year olds like Chin and Walker (the latter turned forty-two the week after the tournament) let alone a forty-five year-old like Crombie can all still make the quarters of the nationals?

Or does it just say that the three of them are gifted and hardworking? For when has the nationals had three quarterfinalists ranked in the top seventy-five in the world? Not until last year.

And Julian Illingworth, statistically the greatest American man ever, won his seventh straight title. Now he stands alone, beyond any other male player, ahead of Stanley Pearson who won six nearly a century ago. Julian is now tied with Alicia McConnell who won seven in a row in the 1980s and only has Demer Holleran, who was national champion nine times, to catch.

It is possible he’ll do it. He would only be thirty when he could surpass Holleran in 2014. That should be easy if you use this year’s nationals as a forecasting tool—if he follows Crombie’s training regimen, he could still be playing in the tournament in 2026.

And Sabrina Sobhy will probably be at that 2026 nationals, as she’ll just be twenty-nine  and in her prime. Will she be Shabana-like and play in the 2039 nationals? 2039—just seems impossibly far away.

Court tennis just joined the Internet Age.

For the first time, the United States Open is live on the web. Last year, the final eliminator at Tuxedo was live, with Tiger Riviere putting together the feed. But now, the firty-ninth annual national championship, hosted by the Racquet Club of Philadelphia, is finally accessible to people all around the world. Jon Crowell has placed two cameras in the left corner of the dedans and a microphone that can pick up the marker’s calls. It is pretty good stuff. The finals of the singles is at 12:30 on Sunday the 3^rd and the finals of the doubles is at 5:30 on Monday the 4^th.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/us-open-2011

An even richer experience is being offered by RealTennis.tv. The brainchild of Frederika Adams and Paul Brown, they launched in October of last year. Their first major tennis event was the European Open early last month. It was a wonderful production, with expert live commentary, post-match interviews, and a multitude of camera angles.

They also just shot the world racquets doubles championship, complete with an overhead camera, so not just court tennis is getting the live streaming treatment.

Freddy, a transplanted American photographer, is excited about the future of RealTennis.TV. “Our plan now is to see if we can get five events in the schedule so that we can help to raise money to fund the streaming through banner ads and donations from loyal viewers,” she told me. “We are also keen to buy our own kit so we don’t have to keep renting it which is a substantial part of the cost.”

http://frederikaadam.blogspot.com/

Two great college squash coaches died recently. They showed that there is more than one way to be an effective leader.

John F. Kenfield, Jr. died in October 2010 at the age of eighty-nine. He coached the Dartmouth men from 1966 to 1983.

Kenfield came from North Carolina. He had grown up in coaching: his father, John, Sr., was the tennis coach at UNC and John, Jr. played for him in college. After graduation, he served as a pilot during the Second World War and then became the men’s tennis coach at NC State. He came to Hanover at the age of forty-five.

Just the fourth coach in Dartmouth’s history (the team was started in 1937), Kenfield didn’t know anything about squash before taking the job. But he worked hard, converted tennis players and maintained a top ten program while coaching three All Americans. His best year was in 1981-82 when the team went 10-5; his overall record was 89-119.

Kenfield was known as Gentleman John. He always wore a coat and tie at matches and calmly road a bike from his home on Rip Road to the gym. He taught his players about the primacy of sportsmanship, as Robert Sullivan’s piece about Kenfield in Sports Illustrated in 1984 explained.

(See: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1122693/1/index.htm)

Bob Hawthorn died in March 2011 at the age of eighty. He coached the Fordham men from 1956 to 2010.

Hawthorn was the opposite of Kenfield in some ways. He cared little for the trappings of his position. He demanded that his players call him Bob rather than Coach. He was famously salty, with a sarcastic, irreverent tone, always competitive and a natural teacher.

Hawthorn was a registered nurse, a full-time math teacher at Fordham Prep, the Fordham men’s tennis coach; all seven of his children attended Fordham, as he had.

He coached a college squash team for fifty-four years. It is a record, easily beating Jack Barnaby’s forty-two seasons, and something that probably will never be broken.

(See: http://www.fordhamsports.com/sports/c-squash/spec-rel/071910aaa.html)

One of the effects of the world juniors coming to the States will be on Harvard squash. Princeton, after hosting in 1998, benefited from the exposure overseas, not only as boys who played in the tournament later came to the Tigers (like Yasser El Halaby) but in name recognition.

Ironically, the issue of recruiting has been playing out in the pages of Harvard Magazine this winter.

In the January-February issue, there was a side-bar on the Crimson’s new coach, Mike Way. After talking about Way’s kiteboarding obsession, classical guitar playing and his four coaching DVDs, this sentence appeared: “For years, college squash’s juggernaut has been Trinity College, where recruiting and admissions policies, and other guidelines, differ drastically from the Ivy League’s.”

In the March-April issue, two letters to the editor appeared because of that sentence. One was from Tom Lips (who went to Dartmouth undergrad and Harvard Law School) and one was from Al Gordon, the father of Chris Gordon and a well-known squash gadfly. Both letters pointed to the harshness of the word “drastically.”

Craig Lambert, who probably wrote the piece on Way (he mentioned my history of squash book when it came out in 2003) then responded to the letters. He said that all the Ivy League rules about athletic scholarships, defined off-seasons, and the famous Academic Index for recruits, “need not impinge on Trinity’s modus operandi.”

Odd phrasing. Of course, it need not, as they are not in the Ivy League. But they are in the NESCAC and the NESCAC has similar rules and regulations that Trinity adheres to. In fact, it is arguable whether NESCAC rules are actually more stringent than the Ivy’s rules. Is Lambert suggesting that the NESCAC’s rules are radically looser than the Ivy’s or that Trinity is a lone wolf that follows no rules at all?

Lambert then pointed to one part of the Bantam’s m.o., as it were, that Trinity has January admittance. They still do, but in the past two years Trinity independently of other NESCAC schools has stopped allowing January admits to play on the squash team. (Lambert suggests that Jan admits must be a huge advantage for Trinity, but actually it was more of a disadvantage because of the disruption to the team’s chemistry and the problems that arose when a January admit was suddenly in a pressure situation and the coach and fellow players barely knew him.)

In addition, because Trinity is a Division III school, it follows a different set of regulations about gap years than the Division I Ivy League schools do, in that it is obligated to hold the player out for a season if he took a gap year after high school. 

The main issue with college squash is that with the mish-mash of conference rules (Rochester and F&M, for instance, are not in a conference), Division I and III rules and NCAA rules (most schools follow NCAA rules even though squash is not a NCAA sport), ahtletic directors and coaches are making a myriad of choices when faced with the same issue, whether large or small. For years, I have been saying the CSA must issue a set of minimum guidelines that all CSA teams follow. That is the only way to clear the confusion. 

Lastly, there have always been recruiting stories in college squash—they were rife when I was at Dartmouth twenty years ago—about who got in and/or rejected where. But Lips and Gordon were right to point out the inappropriateness of the word “drastically” because while it might often be easier to get into Trinity than an Ivy, sometimes it is not. Two current and top Ivy League players were accepted at Yale but were rejected by Trinity.

It isn’t admission policies or athletic guidelines that are making Trinity so successful. Trinity’s “strategy of achieving dominance in squash,” as Lambert describes it, comes primarily from coaching. That is the whole of  Run to the Roar. How else do you explain the unprecedented number of 5-4 wins? If it was recruiting, Trinity would be winning 9-0 and 8-1 every time.

In early February I spent the night at Khaled Sobhy’s house in Sea Cliff, outside New York. For a couple of hours we sat and watched on television the massive demonstrations in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Sobhy’s hometown. We talked how the upheaval might affect the women’s world juniors, which were scheduled for Cairo in July. Sobhy said that he was going to email U.S. Squash and suggest they offer an alternative here in the States. Perhaps Harvard or Yale could host?

It would be good for our development—we’ve only hosted two world championships before, the 1998 men’s juniors and the 1999 women’s open—and good for Sobhy’s daughter, Amanda, the defending world junior champion, who would much rather play in her home country than in Cairo where her chief rivals live (though she trains every summer in Cairo).

Sobhy fired off some emails and discovered that U.S. Squash was already working on it with the World Squash Federation. At that point, it was wait and see. Well, at the end of July Harvard will be hosting the women’s world juniors.

This will be an enormous boon to the U.S. squash community. Unlike in 1998 or 1999, we’ll have an American who is likely to go far in the tournament if not win it, so the marketing campaign is much easier. In 1998 for instance, only four boys—out of seventeen—managed to win a match (Eric Pearson, Peter Kelly, Rich Repetto and Peter Karlen) and none won more than one. A typical result was Dylan Patterson, a very good American player, and yet he lost to future world champion Nick Matthew 1, 0, 0.

At the women’s world open in 1999 in Seattle, only two Americans made it into the main draw, and both, the Khan sisters Shabana and Latasha, lost in the first round.

No American was seeded in 1998 or 1999; Sobhy will likely be seeded number one.

It is also a mammoth event. The 1998 event at Princeton had a budget of $280,000.

[See: http://www.ussquash.com/news/content.aspx?id=5798]