Vanity Fair Blog

Name dropping has become the modus operandi of journalists when they talk about squash: Roger Federer, Pervez Musharraf, John Dryden. 

The latest media mentions:

—The Times of London ran an interesting piece during the Wimbledon fortnight about how squash has helped out tennis players. It has gotten so common that the Times figures there is a new shot derived from all this squash playing: the wrist hinge. It is a forehand flick. It appears when playing a serve or cross-court “wide out on the stretch,” as the Times describes it and you slice it back with a lot of wrist and a touch of hope. Federer played squash regularly as a child with his father; Andy Murray grew up playing as well. Time to get the U.S. Open finalists to the real U.S. Open—the squash Open.

Harvard Magazine mentioned in its July-August issue that the university’s oldest alum, Al Gordon, ‘23, was unable to make it to his 85th reunion this June (excuses, excuses….I mean everyone should go to their 85th reunion). Al had his 107th birthday in July. He is also the grandfather of seventy-eighth ranked squash star Chris Gordon. I guess that is like shooting your age in golf: getting your world squash ranking under your grandfather’s age.

—This summer Alex Beam started producing the most interesting, insightful and entirely snark-free squash blog this side of The Direct. Beam, a twice-a-week columnist at the Boston Globe and a high C player, has written more than a half dozen entries at the website for Vanity FairBeam, with a delightfully wry tone, dilates on such items as Mushaffarf’s game, Victor Niederhoffer’s daughter Galt, squash at the White House and summer camp at Wesleyan.

My favorite entry was about squash at the New Yorker in the 1970s and 1980s. Very cleverly he got Dan Menaker to do the dilating for him. Menaker remembered the New Yorker’sladder, posted on a bulletin board on the 19th floor of the old offices; watching Sharif Khan v. Niederhoffer at a tournament; and the general vibe of the early eighties: “Squash was a huge deal for a while back then—everybody played or tried to.”

Menaker did mention Herbert Warren Wind, the one renowned New Yorker writer (and former player) but he did forget one classic: the real “Khan,” E.J. Kahn, Jr. This Kahn never wrote about the game for the magazine like Wind, but he did mention squash a couple of times in his famously dishy memoir About The New Yorker & Me: A Sentimental Journey (G.P. Putnam, 1979). Kahn talked about playing doubles with John McPhee at a court in New Jersey (either Princeton or Sea Bright?). He said that McPhee, the great nonfiction writer, had a solid game, “straightforward and first-rate.”

Kahn also had a great story about Allison Danzig, the old squash and tennis writer. He offered to give Danzig, rushing for a train after the finals, a lift from the national tennis doubles at Longwood back to New York. But his brakes froze up. They had to take a taxi from Worcester to Boston (couldn’t have been cheap) and finally arrived back in New York at one in the morning. Kahn doesn’t say this, but it must have been cool to have Danzig alone for that long, to pick the memory of the guy knew more about racquet sports than anyone else alive.

One Response to “Beam’s Blog—Media Watch VI”

  1. Guy Cipriano Says:
    I suspect that the doubles court in NJ referenced above was the Sea Bright court. Bill Robinson, fomer editor of Yachting Magazine and a very well known man for 5 decades in publishing circles in NYC, was the patron saint of the Sea Bright court . He also was a member of the very well known Sea Bright Lawn Tennis Club which is only 5 minutes away . It was the site of one of the top tournaments in the old eastern grass court circuit which was the focus of amateur tennis in America for decades, including Longwood, Rockaway, Newport, Germantown and Merion, Piping Rock and a few others. The court was recently renovated and is in brilliant shape, although it seldom is used.

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.

Bad Bad Badminton

I am sure that all of you are following the story of badminton at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, with the finals of the various tournaments scheduled to start today. No? 

For more than twenty years, the World Squash Federation and its predecessor the International Squash Rackets Federation have pursued with a relentless focus the goal of getting squash into the Olympics. The push really began in the early 1980s and accelerated after the IOC recognized squash in 1986—the 1992 Barcelona Games were the first real effort. Ever since then, squash bodies nationally and internationally have clutched at the five tantalizingly close golden rings as we wheel around on the carousel of squash administration.

The Olympics is a worthy goal, and the corporate support, USOC cash and public attention will all be welcomed, but it has taken up too much of our collective time.

Just look at badminton. It is a huge sport. Everyone has heard of the shuttlecock, most people have played it in their backyards and no one confuses it with a vegetable. More than two million people play competitive badminton at least once a month—many more than the 250,000 who play squash. Badminton is the same age as squash (it was invented in England in the 1870s). The International Badminton Federation has 164 member countries (45 sent teams to Beijing); the WSF has either 124 or 118, depending on how you count. As far as making it bigtime, in Barcelona in 1992, it became an Olympic sport (it was a demonstration sport in Munich in 1972; it has been in every Commonwealth Games since 1966 in Kingston).

Yet, let’s look closer. After five Olympic Games,  our national badminton association has about 2,700 members, about a fifth of what U.S. Squash has. The worldwide pro tour is worth about $1 million, about a third of our PSA tour. Badminton celebrities? Badminton on television? Badminton in the newspapers and magazines? Badminton in Grand Central?

The analogy is not perfect, but it seems close enough to give credence to the argument that the Olympics is not the golden goose that will instantly transform squash. The Olympics would be a good thing, but it would have a much smaller effect than many people have assumed. So sit back and enjoy watching the shuttlecock fly about at 180 miles per hour across the Beijing University of Technology gym. Oh, you can’t find any coverage on television? Oh, it is on Bravo at three in the morning. Mmmmmm.

Journey of a Thousand Miles

George Haines, one of the most successful if unheralded high school squash coaches in the country, died last month at the age of sixty-four. 

George taught middle school math and coached six sports at Haverford School. George’s true love was golf. A scratch golfer, he had won two New Jersey state amateurs and qualified for the 1968 U.S. Open at Oak Hill (where he shot a respectable 78-76 before missing the cut). He wrote for numerous golf publications and played in amateur tournaments around the world (including twenty Canadian and seven British amateurs). His life list of played golf courses totaled over four hundred, which is about three hundred and seventy more than me. His golf teams at Haverford won five league titles.

He was George E. Haines, Jr. in print, as he was sometime confused with another legendary coach, George F. Haines,  a swim coach in California.

But squash was where George had a lasting impact on a generation of squash champions. George coached the Haverford School varsity from 1978 through 1989. Haverford, which had been a perennial also-ran to Episcopal, instantly captured the Inter-Ac league title that 78-79 season (the toughest league in the country). Haines’ teams subsequently never lost a match to a fellow high school team. Haines issued out dozens of top-flight junior, collegiate and amateur players including Andy Ball, Rusty Ball (national U16 junior champion), Teddy Bruenner (only player ever to win the national juniors in softball, hardball and doubles), Scott Brehman, Beau Buford, Colin Campbell, Ricky Campbell, Bob Clothier, Morris Clothier, Dan Cornwell, Alex Cuthbert, Bernie Halfpenny, Tom Harrity, Bruce Hauptfuhrer, Bobby Hobbs, Bruce Hopper, Dan Hutchinson, George Krall, Steve Loughran, Alex Marx, Austy Murray, Matt Olgesby (national U16 junior champion), John Pruett, Rodolfo Rodriquez (two-time national junior champion), the Spahr boys (Chris, Terry and Wes), Bob White and Wistar Wood. Nine members of the 1982-83 squad captained their college team (some, ahem, Cuthbert, even wore clothes for team photos); six from 1986-87 captained their college team.

And you can toss me in that list, as someone who played #7 senior year, when Haverford beat Amherst and Dartmouth in the national five-man teams—Amherst ended up 12th and Dartmouth 8th in the intercollegiates. It was odd going to Dartmouth the following fall and knowing that my high school team was better than my new college team.

George was a huge help with my squash book, supplying me with hours of conversation and materials relating to the origins of the game and his grandfather Rowlie Haines.

Many of the Haverford players trained at Merion Cricket Club down the street, so George never got the full credit he was due as a mentor. Having had brain surgery as a young man, we were never sure of the source of his quirkiness. On the first day of practice each fall, he would have us hit only drop shots, using a golf analogy that we should work on our putting first before our drives. But he was a leader, and his results are still unmatched for any high school coach for any ten-year period.

I recall the oh-so-true line from Confucius that teenagers are so apt to ignore. George wrote it every year on the sheet that announced the squad for our first varsity match: “A journey of a thousand miles beings with a single step.”

One Response to “A Journey of a Thousand Miles”

  1. Guy Cipriano Says:
    Truly a class act. He’ll be missed. A gentleman of the old school.

Double Match Point

Starting last month, the PSA has revised it terrible tiebreaker scoring system. No longer was it reported 11-10 (5-3) or something (meaning the actual score was 15-13). But they blew it in not reverting to the old American tiebreaking system. 

What is the most exciting thing in sports? When a tied game goes into sudden-death overtime. Extra innings in baseball is boring. Overtime in soccer, football or basketball is tedious. But give me ice hockey, with the chance in a split second, the game can be over. That is a thrill.

Squash in America used to have that. Hundreds of thousands of matches had a game (or two) in which both players had a simultaneous game point, and thousands of matches turned on a point that if either player won it, the match was over—the fifth game tiebreaker that stretched to one final double match point. It was that 14-all, 15-all, 16-all or 17-all nailbiting point that is the ultimate for any squash fan.

Very rarely, double match has deliciously occurred in the finals of our ultimate tournaments, the U.S. national championships:

—In the men’s singles, 1931. Donny Strachan chose no-set at 14-all giving himself another championship point but also giving his opponent, Larry Pool, one. Dumb idea. Pool won it.

—In the men’s singles, 1951. Henri Salaun flipped a desperate lob out of court to lose to Eddie Hahn. Eddie’s classic statement, which he told me a few days before he died, fifty years later, was “I looked up and it didn’t come down.”

—In the women’s singles, 1978. Gretchen Spruance won, on a stroke, over Barbara Maltby. A stroke at double championship point. Ugh.

—In men’s doubles, 1964. Sam Howe & Bill Danforth chose no-set, giving both themselves and Kit Spahr & Claude Beer a championship point. Danforth’s crosscourt drive nicked on the back wall.

—In men’s doubles, 1988. The Mateer brothers fought back from a 13-8 deficit in the fifth game, only to lose the game, the match and the championship when Drew Mateer flubbed a forehand into the tin.

—In women’s doubles, it happened just last year, in the 2007 finals. Meredith Quick & Fiona Geaves climbed back from being down 10-14 in the fifth to force a tiebreaker against Narelle Krizek & Steph Hewmitt. They went down 0-2 in the breaker, before pulling it out. At double championship point, Quick dug out a deep crosscourt by hitting a desperation double boast.

It never happened in the national juniors, apparently, or any age-group nationals, but it did happen four times in the national intercollegiates, three for the men and one for the women:

—Bernie Ridder, Jr. (the founder of what was the Knight Ridder newspaper chain) lost double-match points two years in a row. In 1937, having gone undefeated all year, he tinned a winner with his opponent, Dick Dorson, sprawled on the ground without a racquet in his hand. In 1938 Ridder lost to LeRoy Lewis. Ridder knew about losing: he brought the Minnesota Vikings to Minneapolis. But he did alright: he married FDR’s neice, served on the board of the USGA and when he died in 2002 has nineteen great-grandchildren.

—In 1939 Stan Pearson returned a hard serve into the right corner just above the tin for a winner, to be Kim Canavarro. Stan later told me it was the luckiest shot he had ever hit.

—In 1990 Jenny Holleran beat Berekely Belknap, making it four of the past five years that a Holleran sister had won the intercollegiates.

2 Responses to “Double Match Point”

  1. Bruce Elfenbein Says:
    One double matchpoint that, at least in retrospect, I am glad that I lost was in a PSRA A league match when I lost to Kit Spahr. Unfortunately, he died of cancer shortly later.
  2. Guy Cipriano Says:
    Jimbo- how right you are.
    The geniuses who decided to install the 11 point PAR system in the USA should be excoriated.The former 15 point system was better by a country mile- you got that right. Further, There are going to be some matches finished in 7 minutes in the juniors. At least hardball doubles has kept the traditional scoring system, to which the phrase If It Ain’t broke don’t fix it, applies brilliantly.

    I keep hoping for some POSITIVE changes being made by the USSRA or the PSA- like speeding up the ball a little bit to allow for increased winners. Instead decisions like throwing Railstation ( in which a small fortune was spent on development) under the bus are implimented.
    Why???

Sports Illustrated Covers

Speaking of magazine covers featuring squash, Sports Illustrated has been on my mind recently. It is the fiftieth anniversary of the first (and probably, the way things are going, last) time a squash player was featured on the cover of the world’s most famous sports magazine. 

The cover of the 10 February 1958 Sports Illustrated issue featured Henri Salaun and Diehl Mateer. Henri was in the foreground and Diehl leaned, in a classical pose, against the side wall. Dan Weiner took the shot in an old court at the University Club in New York. Weiner had scheduled a late afternoon photo session. Diehl later told me that he had been rushing from work and arrived just in time to change into his whites and so did not have time to shave. (You can’t notice.) Diehl was wearing shorts. In a few years, once his singles career wound down, he wore only cricket flannel trousers on the squash court, in what became a signature look.

The big storm about the cover was Henri’s pose. He held out his Bancroft racquet, the emblem on the throat almost thrust at the camera. Henri later told me that it was innocent, that his racquet just happened to be there when Weiner was shooting. But for many in the squash world, the joy of having squash players on the cover of SI was instantly tainted by the fact that Henri was hawking a racquet—he worked as a salesman for a sporting goods firm (he started his own company in 1969, Henri Salaun Sports, a firm that he still runs today at age eighty-two.) Interestingly, Diehl played with the same racquet, but his left hand (consciously?) covered the emblem on the throat.

Perhaps Diehl and Henri, as cover boys, might merit a short obituary in SI when they die. Joe Alston, the only badminton player to grace a SI cover (in March 1955) got a mention in the “For the Record” page when he passed away this spring.

As for the other racquet sports, there is a SI shutout. A racquetballer has never appeared on the cover, nor champions of paddle tennis, racquets, court tennis or ping pong. But tennis, yes. Seventy-eight times.

One Response to “Sports Illustrated Covers”

  1. Matthew Says:
    By following the link to the SI archive, you can see the contents of this issue, which features a spread of color photos of Salaun and Mateer going at it. Despite all the differences between 1950s hardball and the game we play today, you can still sense the common thread from these pictures.

New Yorker Covers

I just got back from my framer three precious things. Since I never want to have a squash court at my house—besides the fact that I am sure I’ll never be able to afford it, I too much like the social side of squash, the random locker-room chatter, the serendiptious gossip that is absent when you have your own court and have to invite over players—these pictures are destined to decorate my already crowded office wall. They are the three squash covers of the New Yorker

Two were by Constantin Alajalov. Born in Rostov, Russia in 1900, Alajalov emigrated in the early 1920s, first to Persia and then to the U.S. where he soon got work as an illustrator. Constantin (sometimes with an e at the end of his first name) Alajalov did one hundred and sixty-seven covers for the New Yorker from September 1926 to September 1960. He was notably the only artist who did covers for both the New Yorker and the Saturday Evening Post, the sole exception to the famously iron-clad rule of the country’s two leading magazines. He also did covers for Vanity FairVogue and Fortune, illustrated many books and painted murals for the Sherry-Netherland Hotel and for ocean liners. He was close friends with Odgen Nash, Leonard Bernstein and the Duke of Windsor. Janet Flanner, the famed New Yorker correspondent in Paris, wrote an book with him that collected his cartoons and painting. He died in New York in October 1987, survived by a brother who still lived in Moscow.

Alajalov was the sports cartoonist for the New York Evening Post in the 1930s, a job that brought him into contact with a relatively obscure sport, squash. In the space of ten months, he twice put a squash player on the cover of the New Yorker. On 25 May 1935 he depicted six men playing squash, tennis, polo, golf, ping pong and baseball, all trying to swat the same white ball. It is a brilliant, metaphorically-rich painting.

On 7 March 1936, he drew a squash match. In the foreground is fierce, white-haired man about to smash, with an enormous swing, a backhand into the back wall while his opponent cowers in a corner. It is an awkward scene, with the smasher’s right foot heading toward the front wall and yet his swing shaped for a backhand to the back wall. The only copy I have seen in a squash facility is at the University Club of San Francisco.

On 7 November 1977 Charles Saxon put squash players back on the New Yorker cover for the third and last (so far) time. Saxon, like Alajalov, was another legendary staff cartoonist: in thirty years he did ninety-two covers and seven hundred and twenty-five cartoonists for the magazine (it took three books to collect them all). Born in Brooklyn in 1920, Chuck Saxon grew up the son of English emigrants (his great-uncle Barney had been a court violinist to Queen Victoria).

Saxon was renowned for puncturing the pompous sensibilities of upper-class East Coast America, and his portrait of a woman waiting to get on a squash court filled with two men perfectly captured the wildly-changing 1970s New York City squash scene. It was rumored that Saxon drew the picture at an old squash tennis court at the Yale Club (he went to Columbia, class of 1940 and the Columbia Club of New York is based at the Yale Club).

Saxon, like most squash players, went down swinging. He was sardonic, right up to the day in December 1988 when he had a heart attack in his home in New Canaan. In the process of falling down when his heart seized, he knocked down a lamp. He seemed to be pretty sure he was dying, and when the EMTs were taking him out on a stretcher, he said, “I guess I’d better die—I just broke our best lamp.”

3 Responses to “New Yorker Covers”

  1. Kathy Mintz Says:
    Great post! I have a color xerox of the March 7, 1936 cover hanging in my living room, courtesy of a friend who used to work at the New Yorker and made a copy for me. I think you can order prints of the covers from the link you sent, too. Didn’t realize that there were two other instances of squash players depicted, too.
    Also, just visited my alma mater, Wesleyan, which built a great new set of squash courts just a couple of years ago. They’re named after Robert (Bob) Rosenbaum, my former math professor, who’s still playing squash at 90 with a twinkle in his eye.
    cheers, Kathy
  2. Guy Cipriano Says:
    Jim- great post! I had seen the cover of the people at the Yale Club checking their watches- extremely well done! It was definitely of the old Yale Club courts- they were the only ones that had that kind of door and railing combined. That is absolutely true. Many years ago there actually was a stand-alone Columbia Club on 43rd St. in NYC. It was on the south side of the street, close to 5th Ave. They had two courts I think. I played there before they closed. That must have been in the late 70’s I think. The rumor was that the Reverend Sun Yung Moon’s people bought the bldg. IT’s still there but I”ve never seen anybody going in or out . I wonder if Moonies play squash. Sure hope so! GUY CIPRIANO
  3. Mark Alger Says:
    Hi Jim,
    I enjoy reading your posts. Those are great covers, and they would look great on my wall here too. Regarding having to invite players to play at your own court, I agree it’s a bit tedious, especially when your prospects would have to travel all the way to beautiful Alaska! But worth every penny! (for the court, and opponent’s travel) Hope you can arrange a trip up here. Bring your bat.
    Mark

Media Watch

Now that the season has slowed down to a dull, rat-a-tat-tat roar, here is the vaunted, valuable and sometimes venomous list of The Direct’s Top Ten Media Watch™ citings for American squash this winter. Let’s get snarky and sassy. 

10. Two articles on the urban squash movement: one in the Philadelphia Inquirer on SquashSmarts—13 April 2008. No snark here. This was a nice, feel-good piece on the front page of the Sunday paper’s Local News section about Philadelphia’s urban after-school youth-enrichment program. It has a nice description of Chase Lenfest showing up at one of SquashSmarts’ partner schools “in bombed-out sneaks.”

The other was in the Village Voice on 8 January 2008. It is a long and thoughtful piece on CitySquash and its successes in placing students in boarding schools.

9. A piece on YouTube that is the best squash trick shot I’ve seen in a while—29 March 2008. Mark Vocetti, an Australian teaching pro, performs this on German television, with Paris Hilton commenting live. We’ve got to get both to come to Grand Central….

9a. Another YouTube on some live JP trick shots from days gone by. Not really news, but it was nice to see again.

8. A radio piece on Trinity squash that ran nationally on The World and also locally on Connecticut public radio by Catie Talarski—15 February 2008.

7. Article in the Philadelphia Inquirer on Fairmount Athletic Club—20 January 2008. This was another positive piece from the Inquirer, this time on the front-page of the Image section of the Sunday paper. It focused on Demer “genial, can-do” Holleran, her more than thirty national titles and her new 46,000 square foot (!) health club. There were a couple of brilliant quotations from me about her legendary mental toughness and a shot of Caroline Swain, 15, who must be Joe Swain’s daughter?

6. Article in the Boston Globe on the Players Cup—6 February 2008. The piece, by squash mandarian Alex Beam, was in Beam’s Lifestyle column. Beam, a good, veteran writer, said that Nimick was “euchered.” That was the first time I have seen that game used that way—brillliant. Beam was alternatively feel-good on squash (”backgammon with racquets”) and not: “It’s like a clay-court tennis tournament with endless rallies….the stars are boring automatons.” But he inserts a great quote from John Nimick, the king of witty media soundbites: “[Ashour v. Shabana] is like a cobra and a mongoose. It’s all about offense.” Well, some cobras have good defenses too, right?

5. Article in the New Yorker on the Tournament of Champions—21 January 2008. In the Talk of the Town section, it was a solid piece by Nick Paumgarten. Nick went to the school where the game was first played in the U.S.—St. Paul’s—so he knows a little of the history, but he chose to talk about two relatively obscure players in the ToC qualies. They were two young Egyptians, Mohamed Ali Anwar Reda (former Egyptian national junior champion) and Badr Abdel Aziz. Reda was eighteen at the time and one of the callow Cairene upstarts picked to topple the upstart Ramy Ashour who is picked to topple world champion Amr Shabana. (There are twelve Egyptians in the top fifty, including three named Omar.) Aziz’s parents are both Egyptian, so although he grew up in Sweden and plays for Sweden, the twenty-seven year-old can argue in Arabic, so he can also possibly be classified as a part of the Egyptian juggernaut.

The piece starts out with a classic statement: “A good professional squash match is like a divorce.” Their match at the New York Athletic Club was viewed by about a dozen people, again pointing to the fact that New Yorkers really don’t know their squash, for a free match between two players who will probably crack the top twenty is always a good value. Nick also got the scoop on the player’s billeting in Bronxville (that should be a movie: Billeting in Bronxville). Nick makes it seem like Aziz quit at 5-5 in the fifth game of their seventy-four minute match, stalking off the court but the official score read 11-5 so it appears that he tanked rather than exited.

Notable fact: Reda and Aziz can text seventy words a minute. Can you?

4. Article in Sports Illustrated on Trinity—5 February 2008. Michael Bamberger did a major, explosive piece on Trinity College’s squash team, “the longest winning streak in college sports history” and its “obsessive coach” Paul Assaiante. I spent a couple of hours chatting with Bamberger, so I know he knows the game (he sees it at the Philadelphia Cricket Club) although he had never heard of Trinity before he started working on the piece. He traveled with the team to their match at Penn and came to the Trinity v. Princeton dual match. He did capture the atmosphere of college squash (the kids’ nicknames, etc) but he did have some snarky references to “the cocktail party circuit” that supposedly dominates East Coast squash and “alumni in their grosgrain belts.” After the piece came out, Bamberger called me and I told him that the one bit I was mystified by was the mention of grosgrain belts. What was that? He  told me. Turns out I own one.

3. Articles in Denver newspapers and television about good family fun at the old Rocky Mountain squash mecca—February 2008. Talk about a Mile High Club. Don’t touch my robe.

2. Article in the New York Times on college admissions—9 December 2007. This piece, well reported, was about how squash can help you get into college. It deflated that myth a bit but perhaps not enough. Squash is not a back door into elite colleges, Alex Williams wrote, but it “is so esoteric…it might be a pet door….squash conveys an aristocratic quirkinnes, a bit like a taste for Sanskrit poetry.”

Williams talked about how parents, normally voluable about their kids’ athletic achievements, are guarded when discussing how it might get them into Dartmouth. Williams gets a nice quote from Ramsay Vehslage, Jr., the Pingry coach and Robby Berner, former US Squash intern. But Williams quotes a Greenwich mom who said that her son leveraged his squash skills to get into Princeton, which is probably complete hogwash. Squash does, however, help kids get into prep schools, for what that is worth.

The real undiscovered sports, college admissions-wise, might be bowling, the article concludes. It turns out, that is no joke. 

Drumroll please:
1. Article in the New York Times on Hashim—30 December 2007. A Denver reporter for the Associated Press, Pat J. Graham did a long story on Hashim that ran in the Sunday Timesjust before New Year’s Eve, as well as thirty-five other newspapers in the U.S. and all over Europe and Asia. The Times was a shorter version than what ran elsewhere. A nice piece on the ninety-three year-old, it had quotes from Diehl Mateer to filmmaker Josh Easdon, as well as one from me comparing Hashim to Ali and Jordan. “I was pretty good once,” ends the piece. That’s right.

Rule 13.1.3

The greatest unknown squash publication in North America has just published its final hardcopy issue this week. It was started in 1993. It had great artwork, very insightful articles, a regular and rich debate between two leading squash figures and an unparalleled humor section. Every insider read it. Subscriptions were free and people in seventeen countries got them. It’s nickname was TSO. Still guessing? 

The Squash Official has been a fantastic, if completely below the radar screen publication for fifteen years. It has been the brainchild of Barry Faguy, the veteran Canadian squash referee. With a simple 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 page, stapled, sixteen page pamphlet format, it has always been well-designed, boasting call-outs, sidebars and other design accoutrement. It will still appear three times a year, but now just electronically.

The content of TSO has been extremely useful. There is nothing more unintelligible to the average player or spectator than the implementation and enforcement of the rules of the game. Parsing the esoteric—follow-through contact, self-inflicted injury, the 3/4 front wall convention, foot-faults (my personal pet peeve)—has been the key job of TSO. One fine feature has been the middle-page spread in which Rod Symington and Graham Waters are given the same situations and asked to adjudicate. Although their answers are often similar, their differences are telling and it is wonderful to see when they disagree.

The best thing about TSO, though, was its back-page humor section “Officially Speaking” which repeated comments and conversation between players and referees. Not surprisingly, our own maestro of the mouth, the gadfly with the gift of the complaining gab, the Comox comet Jonathon Power appeared more than any other player. Here is my favorite beaut from the October 2003: “During the Jonathon Power/Viktor Berg match [at the 2003 Canadian nationals], Berg is arguing with the referee Zal Davar. As the discussion goes on, Power says to Berg: “I’m not the one arguing the call, but if you want some help, I’m better at it.”

One Response to “Rule 13.1.3”

  1. Guy Cipriano Says:
    Wow- I thought I’d heard of them all, but that’s a new one to me! Maybe Sconzo, McGoo or Dinny know about it- I”ve never heard of it or seen it in 30 plus years in the game! Funny line by Power, though!

What Is To Be Done About Doubles?

Last weekend one hundred and ninety-eight players swatted the ball at the national doubles in Philadelphia. It was another spectacular event. Only nine pairs entered the women’s open, but they were an extremely strong group. Trevor McGuinness took the men’s open, becoming the youngest player to win it since a twenty-one year-old Tommy Page swashed his way to the title in 1978 (Diehl Mateer was also the same age when he won his first title in 1949); McGuinness also becomes the first guy to win it before he matriculated in college. 

I wrote an article for the tournament program that elicited a lot of e-mails, telephone calls and rabid discussion. So, in an edited version, here is what I wrote:

Does this sound familiar? “I don’t care if the rest of the world is playing that version of the game. Ours is much better. Ours has a great history. Ours is more fun to watch and more fun to play.”

This is what we said about hardball v. softball on the singles court. But look what happened in the past fifteen years. There are a whole panoply of reasons why the U.S. switched—it’s a whole chapter in my book—but the bottom line was the number of countries that played each version. Why do we think squash doubles will be any different in the long run?

In the short run, we have been doing very well. The past eight years have rightly dispelled much doom and gloom about hardball doubles. The rise of the ISDA and now the WDSA is fantastic. Tournaments are packed and the new national ones—Father & Son, Century and now Mother & Daughter—are spectacular successes. It seems every club has a member-guest. The new US Squash’s doubles committee has led to a revamped World Doubles format, North American rankings and corporate sponsorship.

Most of all, the spate of new courts is impressive: resort dubs in Nantucket, Vail, Sea Island and Johns Island; private clubs like the Jonathon, Olympic, Westchester Country, NYAC, Cleveland Racquet, Philly Country, University of San Francisco and Apawamis (they’ve broken ground); public clubs like the Fairmount, Charleston Squash, Long Island City and Southampton; and out-of-the-way quirks like outside Richmond and the Whippanong.

Hardball doubles celebrated its centennial last October and the game has never been as vibrant or strong.

Underneath it is appears a little like rearranging the deck chairs. We have lost courts: the City Athletic Club, Lone Star Boat Club, Dartmouth, Bowdoin (in early May), Gates Rubber Co. in Denver, Glade Springs in West Virginia, Middlebury, Lewis & Clark, and the Jewish Community Center and the University Club in Detroit. (We have about a dozen more courts now than we did in 2002.) Major squash cities like Seattle and Washington still do not have courts.

The ISDA has plateaued in terms of tour stops and prize money, still has not garnered significant corporate sponsorship and somehow Philadelphia, the country’s flagship doubles city, again did not host an event this season. You take away the New York City-area (six of sixteen events this season) and the tour, in this recession, suddenly looks a bit fragile.

Moreover, Canada is not the robust partner that she appears to be. Sure, she has incredible players and Toronto is gagga on dubs, but she has not had the same court boom we have had. Guess how many Canadian clubs outside Ontario have courts? Twelve.

Softball doubles is a real threat. It is being poorly managed (the switch to a 27 1/2 foot wide elite-standard court was a disruptive decision) and yet, there are four hundred courts in thirty-two countries; according to ASB’s Markus Gaebel, ASB has built 315 of these courts themselves (all but ten are with movable walls). Softball doubles is a medal sport in the Commonwealth Games; if we get into the Olympics, we’ll play softball doubles. It has a bi-annual World Doubles Championship—the 2008 event is being held this December in Chennai, India. The Country Club of Johannesburg just built four gorgeous, new permanent softball doubles courts last year. There are old club championships (the RAC in London has had one for half a century) and new tournaments everywhere. Doubles, internationally, simply means softball.

And just like softball singles, softball doubles is creeping into North America. Heather Wallace’s club in Ottawa has a thriving softball doubles program. There are twenty-two softball doubles courts in the U.S., according to US Squash’s latest survey; that is double what we had in 2003. Some are never or rarely used; but both the Concord-Acton Club in Boston and the Missouri Athletic Club in St. Louis have serious softball doubles action—the 2008 Massachusetts state softball tournament had thirteen teams (and no entry fee). In 2005 US Squash even sanctioned our first softball doubles nationals, to select players to go to the 2005 World Softball Doubles.

To avoid repeating what happened with hardball singles, we should:
1. Continue to support accessibility—clubs like Fairmount are a key to growth in the U.S. We have one hundred and three courts in the country but less than a seventh are public.
2. Ask Gordie Anderson to get hardball doubles court specifications up on the World Squash Federation’s website.
3. Continue to maximize every existing court, with more juniors, collegiate and post-collegiate development as the focus.
4. Get the portable glass court up and running, so we can show off pro doubles. Pro doubles is our shop window, but the largest crowd in the history of U.S. doubles was under two hundred people.
5. Most importantly, we need to do what we never did with hardball singles: expand the empire and go beyond Canada and the U.S. The fact that our court is so big should not be a deal-breaker; with movable wall technology, two softball singles courts can easily slide to make one hardball doubles court.

The first step is to surely take advantage of the overseas regulation hardball doubles courts we already have: the two courts, built in 1962, at the Reforma Athletic Club in San Juan Tototepec on the edge of Mexico City (where the Copa Wadsworth is being held next month); the court, built in 2001, in Tijuana, Mexico; the three courts built in the 1970s in Asia: the Royal Bangkok Sports Club in Thailand, the Tanglin in Singapore and the Raintree Club in Kuala Lumpur; and perhaps most importantly the court, built in 1935, at the Edinburgh Sports Club in Scotland. There should be yearly tours to these clubs to drum up interest in playing hardball, to raise standards and to bring them into our North American community. Once we get a foothold in Europe and Asia, then we can perhaps persuade other clubs to build courts.

This is naked imperialism. In the end, this is the only way to ensure that hardball doubles will celebrate its bicentennial.

5 Responses to “What Is To Be Done About Doubles?”

  1. Michael Letourneau Says:
    Great article and well said. An update on Canadian hardball doubles courts for you. Calgary (Alberta, Canada) now has 2 doubles hardball courts ( 1 new one on past 6 months) with 2 other clubs considering adding to that total. While Calgary is a softball town we had at one point 1 softball doubles court that basically bombed due to lack of interest. Our current 2 hardball courts are used often with the hardball doubles player base getting bigger and better.
  2. KERRY MARTIN Says:
    Your article ‘What is to be done about Doubles’ is both interesting and thought-provoking.
    There is, however, one reference which I wonder about. You write that “McGuinness also becomes the first guy to win it before he matriculated in college.” In your book (Pg.106) you wrote that Diehl Mateer passed up a third intercollegiate title to play in the national doubles. Since he won the doubles in both 1949 and 1950 he presumably did so as an undergraduate.
    Am I missing something here ?
    Cheers.
  3. Viktor Berg Says:
    Always enjoy your work Zug…
  4. Guy Cipriano Says:
    I really think that hardball doubles is here to stay and that the softball version, while fun and a good diversion, can’t compare. I”m not too worried about the erosion of the game because unlike hardball singles, hardball doubles is tied to private clubs and their constituency couldn’t care less what the ISRF or the colleges do or don’t do. I just read Niederhoffer’s description of doubles in the final chapter of Barnaby’s book- really great stuff and super advice. Your dad is featured prominently, with great respect from Victor! I”m not sure we’ll be able to make much headway internationally, but I do think that Gordon Anderson is the key to the promoting the game long term in private clubs which is the bastion of the game. Incidentally, rumor has it that a glass wall court is being fabricated for ISDA play next year. IF that’s the case and it’s true, I think we’ll see a real fire lit , esp. if the USOpen is held in an open place where people can watch. Watching Mudge /Berg v Price Gould is indescribably better than watching Ashour v Palmer and they get great crowds at Grand Central. That could be the key to igniting a fire. Hope it’s true. GUY CIPRIANO
    PS The ISDA is the best value for a spectator dollar in the world, hands down. It’s so exciting and the players are all so great that singles pales by comparison. I hope the ISDA can convince Jon Power and guys like Ricketts and Palmer to play. They’d be flat out NASTY and the more, the merrier!
  5. Guy Cipriano Says:
    PS the courts which you described , with the exception of Bowdoin College and City AC never really got that much play . The court at Lone Star Boat Club was dreadful from the day it was built, and some of the other courts just collapsed and had no constituency. The legit clubs who do have courts report tremendous support and high court usage. As for Middlebury I didn’t know they had a court, and the University Club of Detroit has been out of business for at least 15 years, taking a racquets court out of service as well, which is a damned tragedy, but the UCLub Detroit was in a combat zone and there was just no chance for survival. The trend is defintely on the rise, though. PPS David LeTourneau, son of Michael LeTourneau, is an outstanding player and current intercollegiate champion. Peter Cipriano would surely like to get a shot to play with or against him next year – they would do some serious damage!

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