Last month I was involved in two nationals squash tournaments that showed how sustaining the game is.

The first was the high school nationals. It had one hundred and forty-one teams (about a thousand players on site) at four sites in central Connecticut. I churned through a tank of gas shuttling from Wesleyan to Choate to Trinity to Yale to Trinity—and that was just in the first thirty hours of the weekend.

I was helping with the St. Andrews School’s boys and girls. I had been an assistant coach at SAS for the winter, coming down once or twice a week to work with the fifty kids that make up Delaware’s only high school squash program. (One day while stretching in the gym, surrounded by state championship banners, I joked that they get the school to put some up for squash—a state title is a state title.) It was wonderful working with such great kids, drilling, hitting and playing knock-knock. However, I am still waiting to go on a Frosty run to the Friendly’s in Middletown (the school’s motto right now seems to be Carpe Frosty, a play on the film that was shot at the school, Dead Poet’s Society).

When I got to the nationals, I discovered that I was not alone. Dozens of people like me who have full-time jobs (or the equivalent in my case) spent their winters helping high school squash teams. I ran into Duncan Pearson (Springside), Carole Grunberg (Potomac), John Musto (Chapin), Rich Sheppard (Springside). St. Andrews faced off against Chapin (an eighth grader for Chapin clawed back from a 0-2 deficit to win her match in five and clinch a 4-3 win over us), and there was Musto and I, coaching against each other, after having worked at a squash camp together twenty years earlier. (To be fair, John has now taken on a full-time job running the squash program at CityView in New York.)

More than one person asked me if I ran into any contemporaries who were there not because they were coaches but because they were parents, and yes, just one (David Ganek) but one was enough to make me feel old.

The other tournament was the century doubles in New York. I played with my father in the 70+ division. Overall, the century had eighty-six teams in five divisions. A plane-load came down from Toronto (both our matches were against Toronto teams), a dozen from Louisville, including a couple who were not playing but just came for the party. (see p. 156 of my history of U.S. squash book for the Louisville’s motto) and even one came from Sweden. It was even more obvious to me that squash is a lifetime sport, as the century necessarily had a lot of older guys, including many in their eighties.

Four guys not there were the four that played in the 80+ division at the hardball nationals in Boston in February: Charlie Baker, Charlie Butt, Henri Salaun and Bill Wilson. (Butt was coming down to the century but got the flu.) That is a murderers row of great players and much fanfare should go to Goose Wilson, the defending champion, who survived a five-gamer against Butt to win the title again.

Trinity won its thirteenth national title and two hundred and forty-fourth dual match in a row last weekend in dramatic fashion. It was the seventh time since the streak started in February 1998 that they’ve escaped with a 5-4 victory (2004 v. Harvard at the nationals; 2006 v. Princeton in the regular season [Atlas Lives] and the nationals; 2007 v. Harvard in the regular season; 2009 v. Princeton in the regular season and the nationals [Run to the Roar])

For a brief report on the previous nailbiters, see Vanity Fair: (http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2009/02/trinity-squash-wins-its-eleventh-straight-title.html) and for a full report, read the book: http://runtoroar.com/

Anyway, this time they won behind Chris Binnie. It is not because he is a total frickin’ rock star from Mars. No, the senior from Jamaica had just improved. When he came to Trinity, he was not the mentally toughest competitor out there, but Paul Assaiante mentored and lead him to discover a vast reservoir of emotional calm and confidence.

Unlike most 4-4 dual matches, at Harvard last weekend Binnie and Ricky Dodd went on court to warm-up knowing that their match would be the decisive one. Talk about pressure—winner take all. But in his last team match, Binnie toughed it out. The last time they faced each other, Binnie had beaten Dodd at the 2010 nationals, but it was a brutal five-gamer 12-14, 11-9, 11-8, 11-13, 11-9. Who had improved more in the past three hundred and sixty days?

Binnie won in four.

Then he had the courtesy to allow Dodd to exit before the traditional storming of the court.

This match, this sportsmanship, this leadership is coaching at it finest 

Watch the conclusion at: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fyyQMDN-bg)

People are still talking about last month’s dinner at the J.P. Morgan Tournament of Champions. The word you kept hearing was “glittering.”

The sixth annual 2010 World Squash Awards finally came across the pond. Peter Nicol and Tim Garner, through their sports marketing firm, Eventis, started the WSA in 2005 with a black-tie dinner at the Royal Automobile Club. After three more years at the RAC, they switched to Manchester for the 2009 World Open and this year came to the Tournament of Champions.

It was a star-studded evening. One hundred and sixty people (just six under the maximum capacity allowed by the Grand Central security staff) sat down at the courtside affair and tucked into butternut squash polenta, porcini mushrooms chicken with a roasted shallot sauce and Tuscan panzanella salad. Most WISPA and PSA stars were in attendance—Eventis flies in potential winners. Nour El Tayeb dropped in from Cairo just for the weekend. “I didn’t even bring my squash kit,” the seventeen year old told me as she spoke between media interviews.

Presented by Lexington Partners and Brent Nicklas, it was a nicely inclusive ceremony, with North America getting into the act for the first time: the ISDA was a part of the ceremonies and two special recognitions went to Frank Stella and Mark Talbott. The crowd included Hazel & Tom Jones from North Carolina and Doug Talbott from Atlanta and David Carr from Washington and a slew of other well-wishers.

The elder Talbott sported a blazer with a nifty RAC emblem sewn onto the pocket. Was this a reference to the World Squash Awards dinners at the RAC? Oh, no. I saw the skunk below the RAC—it was the Runnymeade Athletic Club, the court that the Talbotts had down in the Florida Keys. Now gone, it was always dubbed “the southernmost squash court in the U.S.”

People stayed after the dinner until almost the stroke of midnight—so many old and new friends talking—that it looked more like a college reunion than the night before the start of the 78th annual ToC.

Two articles in last Sunday’s New York Times recently caught my eye.

One was the big spread in the Magazine about Paul Assaiante and the Trinity squash streak. Paul Wachter, the writer, spent some time with the 2010-11 team, traveling to a couple of matches. I met him when Yale came to Trinity.

Two Times photographers flew in from LA to spend a full twenty-four hours on the team. One was originally from Sweden. Where? I asked when they got to the squash courts. Malmo, he said, it is a city in…. I know, I said and grabbed Johan Detter, a Malmo native who was twenty feet away and said, this guy’s from Malmo and in a second they were chatting about neighborhoods and bridges and women legally swimming topless in city pools.

The other photographer told me he was from Paris. Sorry, I said, I can’t hook you up—twenty nations from around the world and yet Trinity never had a Frenchman on the squash team.

The piece isn’t perfect: it quotes passages from Run to the Roar without attribution and has a couple of tiny errors (it was 1998 not 1999 when Trinity first beat Harvard in a dual match, and Harvard had won five national titles in a row, not eight, when Trinity ended their streak in 1999). But it is a good story and well told and has a cool Scandanavian/Gaullic photograph at the front. As the saying goes, any publicity is good publicity.

The other piece was another Christopher Gray gem in the real estate section, about the fact that a squash tennis court (no need for a hyphen, Grey Lady) was built on what was the fifteenth floor of an apartment house at 160 East 72^nd Street. It was built by Kingdon Gould, Jay Gould’s brother. Jay Gould, who was known to play a lot of squash tennis in the 1920s after his court tennis career began to wane, surely played on the court. There are a number of these old squash tennis courts still haunting buildings around Manhattan. A piece I did in the Atlantic a decade ago lead off with another one of these ghostly remnants. But in an apartment, that is a rarity.

(See: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/magazine/20Squash-t.html?scp=1&sq=assaiante&st=cse

and http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/realestate/20streetscapes.html?scp=1&sq=kingdon&st=cse

At the forefront of the coverage of events in Egypt last week was this fact: the departure of Hosni Mubarak meant the loss of our most famous squash-playing head of state.

A keen squash player, he got on court almost every day at the Air Force base, across the street from his presidential palace. (He wouldn’t just stroll out and wait at the light to cross, though—there was a tunnel connecting the two complexes.) He was a pretty good player. Last Friday, as we watched the news from Tahrir Square, Khaled Sobhy told me some Mubarak stories. A a top-ranked Egyptian in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sobhy was one of the many national team members called in to spar with the president.

Mubarak sometimes came to the pro tournaments at the pyramids, driving across the desert to Giza in a motorcade that left a trailing cloud of dust.

A joke that went around Cairo the last year or two went like this: Mubarak calls up the sheikh of Al-Azhar, the highest Sunni Muslim cleric in Egypt, to ask if there are squash courts in heaven. The sheikh asks for a couple of days to consult the Almighty. Two days later, he calls Mubarak back. “There’s good news and bad news,” he says.

“Give me the good news,”  Mubarak barks.

“Well,” says the sheikh, “there are lots of squash courts in heaven.”

“And the bad news?” asks the president.

“You’ve a match scheduled there in two weeks.”

This morning Mubarak’s squash game came up on Philadelphia radio. Arlen Specter called into 610WIP to talk with Angelo Cataldi about the Phillies (if as Henry James wrote, the two most beautiful words in the Engligh language were “summer afternoon,” the most precious words annually might be “pitchers and catchers report”—which they did today).

After the usual chit-chat about the Phil’s rotation, Cataldi asked the former senator about Mubarak, and Specter said a couple of amazing things. He mentioned that they first met in 1982 in Washington and that Specter said, “I hear you play squash, let’s have a game “and Mubarak told him, “yes, and if I beat you, you give me an extra $100 million.”

Turns out they didn’t get around to playing that time. In fact Specter said that he actually never got to play squash with Mubarak, that he’d call him when he was in Egypt but it never happened. We know Dick Rumsfeld played squash with Mubarak (and boasted, incorrectly, about beating him) but never Specter. The reason why Mubarak avoided the match, Specter speculated this morning, was that he was Jewish.

(For the squash joke, see:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/egyptians-prepare-for-lif…“> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/egyptians-prepare-for-lif…)

(For the Rumsfeld story, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/washington/24rumsfeld.html)  

Three recent deaths just after Christmas, all within hours of each other, have highlighted the backbone of squash: ordinary guys who just love the game, who play with passion and humor, who help at the local level. Two might have not been the most well-known guys in the nation, but they had a huge impact in their clubs and cities. And the third was at the heart of the game internationally in the 1970s and 1980s.

Drew Hurley died on 26 December 2010 of a heart attack. He was forty-nine. He played at the University Club of Boston. He was an avid left-wall doubles player. He steamed before he played, ran sprints to warm up, pointed to spots on the front wall like Babe Ruth calling a home run and to start every game, as his friend Brian McGrory said at his funeral, “he’d hold the ball high in the air between his thumb and index finger and declare, ‘Ball’s in’ as if he was letting the thousands of people know who were following us on TV.”

He had a nickname for everyone. He played all the time. He was a board member for the Massachusetts Squash Association. He won the 1992 and 1998 U Club’s C/D singles; with Doug Lifford, he won the club’s 2002, 2003 and 2009 A/B doubles.

“The wind has been taken out of Boston’s squash sails,” said Ed Serues in an email to me after Hurley’s passing.

(See:http://www.boston.com/yourtown/newton/articles/2011/01/06/drew_hurley_was_popular_personable_salesman_at_49/)

In Philadelphia, people were likewise shocked by the death of Dick Welsh. Just one day after Hurley, Welsh died of colon cancer at the age of sixty-nine. Like Hurley, Welsh was a legendary figure at the Racquet Club of Philadelphia.

He was full of what came to be called “Welshism,” classic lines he’s utter at any and all times. When departing company, he would, like a true Marine, say, “post and orders remain the same.” After a tough match, he’d head to get a beer with the line, “How about a little sugar for your horse.”

(see: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/philly/obituary.aspx?n=richard-t-welsh&pid=147487837&fhid=4609

We also lost a third person at the same time. On 26 December, just eight days after his eighty-sixth birthday, Ian Stewart died in Toronto. He was a former president of Squash Canada and of the Badminton & Racquet Club in Toronto. He also was a vice-chair of the World Squash Federation and thus far and away the most influential Canadian in the history of international squash administration. An early proponent of softball, he helped bring the U.S. and Canada into the international fold.

http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/Deaths.20110108.93253119/BDAStory…

Last night we had a very special evening on the Main Line: a book & film mega-event at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute, which was a cool old (1926) theater when I was a kid and now is a super hip and trendy non-profit cinema. It attracted 275 people. (see: http://www.brynmawrfilm.org/).>

Then we went into the theater and watched a screening of Keep Eye on Ball, the must-see documentary about Hashim Khan. Afterwards, Beth Rasin, the film’s producer, regaled us with stories about traveling with the great old man in Pakistan back in 2005. (see: http://squashfilms.com/)

Drexel is very much in the squash news these days. 

The Dragons, who along with the UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs have the coolest nickname in collegiate sports, have hosted SquashSmarts, the urban youth enrichment program, since it was founded ten years ago. They even sacrificed one of their old hardball courts to make SquashSmarts’ original office. (See: http://www.squashsmarts.org/)

Both of the Drexel teams are club rather than varsity, but not for long. They have two new softball courts to go along with their four old hardball ones. Drexel’s president, John Fry, is an avid squash player who was very supportive of the program when he was president of F&M. The teams, like many club teams, make a huge effort to train and get better, even without the help of a full-time coach. Two weeks ago the men flew to Atlanta to play in a six-team round robin. (See: http://collegesquashassociation.com/2011/02/01/fourth-annual-jesters-southeas…

And last week, we hosted the men and women teams at the Racquet Club of Philadelphia, for a squash match and a chance to get out on the court tennis court. (See: http://collegesquashassociation.com/2011/01/28/jim-zug-hosts-the-drexel-squas…

But the biggest news was the United States Open is coming to Drexel in October. This will be just the second time in history that Philadelphia has held a glass-court squash tournament. The first was in 1986 when Penn plopped a small pro tournament on its hockey rink (the court was near the blue line). Now a quarter century later, Penn’s neighbor is hosting a $175,000 tournament, with both the men and women pros competing. It will surely be a huge boost for squash in Philadelphia and for Drexel. (See: http://www.ussquash.com/news/content.aspx?id=5678).

Live on national television. Well, sort of.

The Tournament of Champions has always been at the forefront of media exposure. It was not the first squash tournament to be on TV (that was the 1959 U.S. Open in Pittsburgh) but it was at the ToC in 1991 when squash went national for the first time, when the Prime Network broadcast a ninety-minute edited show on the finals. (The ToC, at the Winter Garden in lower Manhattan, was also a $75,000 event that year, sponsored by Mutual Benefit.)

Five years ago the ToC was the first pro tournament in the world to be streamed live on the Internet.

This year, the ToC was not only streamed live, by the ever-better PSA SquashTV folks, but also at the same time by ESPN3—both last night’s semis and tonight’s finals. 

Streaming live on the Internet is no longer something new, but getting in lockstep with the world’s leading sports broadcaster is fantastic for squash. ESPN3 used to be ESPN360, the live broadband network they launched on the web in 2005. Many of us watched the World Cup last summer via ESPN3. More than a billion people now have access to ESPN3—in North America, South America, Europe and the Middle East and even a few flood-stricken Aussies down in Oz. And it is free, as opposed to the $6 a day or $80 a year for the PSA service.

It is a step in the right direction. How cool was it last night to toggle at ESPN3 between the Bryan bros. in the Australian Open and St. John’s v. Georgetown in basketball and Nick and Amr going at it in a spectacular overtime in the fifth tussle?  

For tonight’s match: http://espn.go.com/espn3/#

Went to the Yale v. Trinity match last week in Hartford. The Eli women crushed the Bantam women, 6-3 and very quickly. I was sitting with Yale coach Dave Talbott in the gallery, chatting away casually, and a match finished and Dave quietly said, well, that’s five. And this was just over an hour into the match.

In under two hours it was finished. An undefeated Yale, with its combo of players from the Main Line (two, including #1 and captain Logan Greer), Greenwich (four) and the U.K. (two), is looking very strong. Trinity has only one player from Yale’s three hotspots, but instead has players from Zimbabwe, El Salvador, Germany, Scotland, Mexico, Colombia, Malaysia and Canada.

That international flavor is more what you’d expect from the Trinity men and surprisingly, they actually seem riven with Americans at the moment. In the highly anticipated rematch of the controversial 2010 national championship bout with Yale, they won 7-2. Trinity started two Americans in their top nine. Both were Brunswick boys, Travis Judson, a senior, at #8 and Matt Mackin, a freshman at #9. It was the first time in over a decade that in a match against a top opponent Paul Assaiante fielded a team with more than one American.

Both Travis and Matt lost, but there is more to the story. Travis won the first game easily and then it got a lot harder against Johnny Roberts of Ireland. But in the fourth, Travis was down 8-9 and then at match point at 9-10 and went on to win the game 12-10 when Roberts tinned on two straight points. Travis lost in five but it was a good effort. 

Matt lost in four. It was, psychologically, almost a foregone conclusion. A freshman, this was his first big college match. Trinity was still on winter break, so the galleries were pretty packed (with Salisbury, New Haven Lawn Club and other juniors, as well as some Trinity winter sports teams and the usual gaggle of middle-aged men who avidly follow the Bantams) but it was not stuffed with supporters like most matches. More critically, he was playing Rob Berner. When Matt was a high school freshman and unable to make the varsity at Brunswick, Berner was a senior and a big stud on campus. Matt even paid Berner $30 a pop to give him lessons. So it was going to be pretty hard for the student to beat his teacher in his first attempt.

Trinity went on to win two more dual matches this past weekend, so the streak is now at 232. The only sour note came the morning after the Yale match, when the front page of the Hartford Courant’s sports page had a three-column photo of a fist-pumping Parth Sharma and a prone Kenny Chan. After what Kenny endured last time out, with Baset Ashfaq’s notorious explosion, it was unfortunate to see him portrayed that way.

By the way, Kenny was treated well by the Trinity fans, with no comments or hostility. That might have been in part because the CSA launched a roving referee system at this match, with two unaffiliated refs (coaches from nearby high schools) roaming the galleries and assisting the refereeing. They do this in college tennis, and it is a good sign of a maturing CSA that it is finally attacking the issues of crowd behavior, player sportsmanship and match marking that has been bedeviling college matches in the past few years.