Club Squash

For the third year in a row, I peeked in at the National Collegiate Club Team Championships. They were again in Philadelphia, but after two years at the Arlen Specter US Squash Center, this year they moved down 33rd Street to Penn.

But there was the same grassroots excitement. You had 6.0-rated players and other former high-level juniors who could easily play for any top program, and you had some players who had only picked up the sport a few weeks earlier. You had coaches in snazzy branded gear, and you had teams without coaches or without courts on campus or without any financial support whatsoever from their university. I talked with one player who served as his team’s captain, coach and administrator, all in one.

The variety among the twelve women’s teams, twenty-four men’s teams and twelve co-ed teams was palpable. There were teams that have serious varsity women’s programs (Stanford, Georgetown) but because of Title IX have just a well-run club men’s team. There were men’s club teams from colleges that also have a bonafide varsity men team running parallel (all the Ivies but Columbia; other teams like Tufts, Navy, Drexel). Of course Cal Berkeley, which has had a robust club squad for half a century, was there. So was former varsity, recently demoted to club programs like Brown (who fielded both a men’s and a women’s team) and George Washington. I counted eighteen states (including the District of Columbia) represented among the forty-eight squads.

This is a wonderful growth opportunity for the game in the U.S. There are many more colleges with squash courts or easy access to squash courts than what we saw in Philadelphia. And more eager players: Peter Heffernan, who was helping run the championships, told me that he calculated that more than 1,900 kids play high school team squash in one form or another, but there are only 1,100 kids playing organized college squash. Creating lifelong players, filling quiet courts and expanding access to team squash—one of the best parts of the squash community in America—is a major goal for the second century of collegiate squash.

ToC 2024

What an incredible event, per usual.

Some of the gossip: Nour El Sherbini’s parents were with her at the tournament in part to help her shop for a dress for her wedding this summer. Selection is good in New York, her father Atef told me, but the prices in Dubai are much better.

While one great player stepped down this month (Olivia Blatchford Clyne) another might be coming back. Camille Serme might rejoin the tour. The thirty-four year-old former world No.3 is training again full-time. Perhaps her first event will be the Paris Squash Open 2024 in September, poised to be at a new site.

Another legend in Grand Central was eyeing a comeback, but more towards full health. Anders Wahlstedt, the Swedish international, former world No.18 and U.S. national champion, was there watching the matches. (Wahlstedt is the answer to one of squash’s great trivia questions—”who beat Geoff Hunt in Hunt’s final appearance in the British Open?”)

In October while biking along the Hudson River, Anders was sideswiped by an electric bike messenger who was looking at his phone. It was a traumatic accident—he spent a fortnight in the hospital—and a long recovery still in process.

Rock & Fire

Earlier this month I attended a concert in the Princeton University Chapel. It was the first time I had been in that famously soaring, awe-inspiring space since February 2015 when we gathered there for Bob Callahan’s funeral.

Thinking about Bob, still sorely missed nearly nine years after he left us, made me think about his counterpart, Dave Talbott, very much sorely missed three months after he suddenly had a heart attack following the death of his wife Ann. I’ve had so many conversations this fall with people who played for or against Dave, other coaches, friends. It has been a constant theme.

Recently, I was forwarded a vast email chain of correspondence amongst former Yale players. There were dozens in the chain, some of whom just graduated and others, like Sam Chauncey ’57, who knew Dave from when he was a youngster. Scrolling through the many comments, I saw in writing what people were saying in person. They remembered the long stories he’d tell in the van and the many hours spinning tales in his office, which was crammed with totemic items like a ball in a Ziploc from a special match. They remembered a young Dave being able to out-run everyone on the team on early-season training runs. They remembered his penchant for nicknames, the jargon and slang he used. They remembered how he stacked the ladder for matches (one extra-large player said that once Dave moved him up just so he could face another team’s very small player).

They remembered the van and bus rides—in the spirit of an earlier era, Dave sometimes allowed alcohol on board for return trips. Once a policeman tried to arrest Dave, and and a player took the cop aside and said, “look, we’re squash players from Yale and this guy is a crazy alum who loves the team and is harmless.” One alum mentioned that he and another teammate, a few years after graduation, hopped on the team bus after attending a match:

Someone from the athletic department who was onboard was questioning us if we were allowed to be on the bus. Coach just shushed him and sent us to the back of the bus because of course it was perfectly normal for two alums to just hop on the team bus completely unplanned and ride from Princeton to New Haven.  

One alum wrote:

He was so effective at making an impression on everyone he met because he led from a place of love—love of the game, love of the team, love of the individual—and that was infectious. He accepted who you were and that gave you the license to become what you’d be. And being around him, you trusted everything would be alright because he always had an absurd story of someone being in a tight spot and everything ending up just fine. 

One alum wrote about practice on the afternoon of 11 September 2001:

Dave didn’t cancel practice.  He had us circle up and hold hands on court one and I’m pretty sure we just talked for two hours. As always, it was a very diverse team, but looking back it was a simple gesture to have everyone listen to everyone’s reaction to it. 

One player, one of the greatest to go through Yale under Dave, ended the chain by writing:

Amazing to think how many players passed through with Dave who had such powerful formative relationships with him, and that he fostered such intense love and affection across so many years and with such a diverse group of people. As a coach now myself, I can see how much of himself he gave to each of us who passed through there, and how difficult it is to make that type of connection with each and every player. He was a master at that, and I think that was his super power as a coach. 

He concluded the way all the players signed off after they wrote their message: Rock & Fire.

Olympic Dreams

Let’s look back for a brief second, upon the news last month that squash is finally joining the Olympic Games. It had been the end of a long road: the first mention in the historical record was in June 1947 in Stockholm where squash pushed to join the 1952 Games award to Helsinki (five of the losing six cities bidding to host the Games were in the U.S.).

But the real effort started In 1986 when the IOC recognized squash as a sport, and national governing bodies around the world started joining their national Olympic committees. It will have been nine Games (Barcelona in 1992 to Paris in 2024) that squash failed to join before we see a squash ball in the air in Los Angeles in July 2028.

I thought of all the people who worked behind the scenes on those nine Games. Colleagues like Hazel and Tom Jones who led the push for a Pan American federation and inclusion in the Pan American Games, key steps along the way. (We saw the effects of that effort this week with the U.S. sweeping the women’s individual tournament at the 2023 Pan Am Games in Santiago.) And Mike Lee, the sports communications guru who squash hired in 2011 to get us into Tokyo 2020. Mike, ebullient and opinionated, sadly died in September 2018 at the age of sixty-one, and I am sure he would have been so pleased to see us finally triumph.

So what does the next five years look like? Here are some possibilities:

—The over-under on players switching nationalities is 9.5. With only two male and two female players allowed in the thirty-two player draws per country, players lower down the rankings perhaps will switch nations in order to qualify. Nation-switching has happened over the decades (see: Peter Nicol in 2001 from Scotland to England; Natalie Grinham in 2008 from Australia to the Netherlands; Mohamed ElShorbagy last year from Egypt to England), usually for reasons of money and support and sometimes because of a feud with a national federation. Now the switch will occur because a player wants to make LA28.

—Some might be from Egypt. Everyone is talking about how hard this will be for them, with twenty-one men and twenty-nine women ranked in the top hundred right now—if the Olympics were to occur today, only four of those fifty players would be there. But pity also those players from Great Britain. Although Team GB has been the norm since the modern Olympics began in 1896, in squash players typically compete for Wales or Scotland or England or Northern Ireland. Thus, Team GB has fifteen women and nineteen men ranked right now in the top hundred and they will have to scrabble over just four spots rather than sixteen.

—A lot of players now in their thirties spoke at the 2023 U.S. Open about hanging around for five more years in order to play in the Olympics. So expect a rash of retirements after the Games. The average retirement age for pro squash players has been in the mid-thirties. The Olympics will definitely push that back.

—At the same time, expect more players turning pro and joining the tour from less traditionally strong nations. Right now China and Russia have no one ranked in the top hundred—I’d be surprised if that is still the case in five years. Nations that have at least one player ranked in the top hundred are twenty-five for the men (including Team GB); and twenty-three for the women. About half of those countries have just one player ranked in the top hundred, and so LA28 might catalyze more funding to help those nations, especially formerly hegemonic powerhouses like Australia and Pakistan. More courts, more access, more tournaments, more coaches, more attention, more, more, more—all good for the game.

—There will be a fascinating scramble in the year leading up to the spring of 2028. Players will be trying to garner as many ranking points as possible, to either become one of the two highest-ranked players on the PSA tour from their country and/or to be ranked in the top one hundred (the cut-off for automatic qualification). Thus, both platinum and bronze-level tournaments will suddenly have an extra level of drama.

—It appears there might be qualifying tournaments for each continent in 2028 to help fill out the draws of thirty-two. It will be open to players ranked below one hundred. Those events will also be incredibly exciting.

U.S. Open 2023

A fabulous fiftieth United States Open just wrapped up. Here are some sudden thoughts and second thoughts:

—Brink of eliminations. Holy tension. In the quarters Nour El Sherbini was down 6-2 in the fourth, just five points away from a loss, before going on to win and eventually snag the only major trophy missing from her cabinet. Also in the quarters, Amanda Sobhy was down 6-1 in the fourth, also just five points away from a loss, before going to win. And Ali Farah saved a match point in the third game against Tarek Momen before taking the match in five.

—Best match? Probably Coll v. Farag in the men’s final: going into overtime in the fifth game of a Grand Slam? That is exciting.

—Team USA did well. Two American women (Amanda Sobhy and Olivia Fietcher) reached the semis for the first time ever and an American man (Timmy Brownell) made in the quarters for the first time since Houston in 1986 when both Ned Edwards and Mark Talbott reached the quarters. Brownell’s run propelled him to world No.40 in the rankings and for the first time heading the list of American men on the pro tour.

—Good crowds. It was the twelfth time at Drexel, third at the Specter Center. A lot of people there for early round day matches and a vibrant atmosphere every night. Nearly four hundred people came for the annual celebration of SquashSmarts; hometown, tee-shirt wearing support for Fietcher; and a boisterous group came to honor Berwyn which is officially marking its fiftieth anniversary this weekend—as the first and now lone mega-club left in the country, it is a remarkable milestone.

—The Open is a crossroads and one person courtside for the first time in a long time was Paul Price. It had been a decade since we had last seen Price. The former world No.4 in singles and dominant hardball doubles player had departed from Toronto to return to his native Australia. He’s now working with a number of players on the mental side of the game.

—Oh, and the thing that came at the beginning or end of almost every single conversation at the U.S. Open? Squash getting into the Olympics. More on that next time.

Seixas at One Hundred

A follow-up about Vic Seixas. A few days after Vic’s 100th birthday, I got a wonderful message from Walter Oehrlein.

Walter, like Vic, is a great athlete in both tennis and squash. While at West Point, he won the 1965 National Intercollegiates in squash; in tennis, Walter won his first round match at Forest Hills in the 1966 U.S. Championships for tennis and in 1967 he lost in a first-round five-setter. For years Walter coached squash and tennis at the Birmingham Athletic Club in Detroit.

He first met Vic in the 1960s at a squash tournament. In June 1973 Walter invited Vic to put on a tennis exhibition at Birmingham. Serving first in the match, Walter pulled out a squash ball and hit that rather than a tennis ball.

They stayed in touch. Vic arranged for Walter to look at becoming a head pro at Greenbrier, the West Virginia resort where Vic had long been the resident tennis director (Walter decided to stay in Detroit). A few years later, Walter and Vic did a squash exhibition at Regency, the fitness club outside of Washington, DC.

They resumed their friendship in February 2021. The death of Tony Trabert, one of Vic’s Davis Cup teammates and a fellow Grand Slam champion, triggered a condolence phone call that Walter placed to Vic. At the end of the call, Vic said, “Let’s talk more.” So a few weeks later Walter called again and soon they were talking regularly, reminiscing about squash and tennis days of yore.

This year Vic’s daughter Victoria invited Walter to come out to San Francisco to celebrate Vic’s 100th birthday at the end of August: two old stalwarts after sixty years of friendship on and off the court.

Newt & Vic

These past few days have been a rich celebration of two of squash’s legends, the centenarians Newt Meade and Vic Seixas.

The September episode of Outside The Glass, out on the first day of the month per usual, features Newt. We spoke two days after he turned a hundred; yesterday Vic turned a hundred. Quite a pair. I should say that I wasn’t channeling Carter Fergusson when I said on the pod Vic’s full name—Carter had an inimitable way of rolling it out: Elias Victor Seixas, Jr. 

Paddleball

Earlier this month, Freddy Ramirez, an old racquet sports colleague, took me to Juniper Valley Park to play paddleball.

The game, a one-wall racquet sport, is deeply New York. It was invented in the city by Irish immigrants and for a century has been a mainstay in parks in all five boroughs. There is a sixteen-foot-high wall, a small paddle and a ball similar to a racquetball ball and you have to hit it on the front wall above the ground. Simple and complicated.

Juniper is in the Middle Village neighborhood in Queens. It was mid-afternoon on a summer Monday and the park was crowded: a band was testing the sound on a bandstand and some older people were playing shuffleboard. The long handball wall was busy: a young girl was practicing her tennis on one side and on the other was four paddleball courts, three of which were busy with play.

Freddy and I played a couple of matches against some park regulars; we lost 21-9 and 21-14—mostly because I kept hitting the ball wide or letting it go past me thinking it would bounce out. The trash-talking was rich and variegated , the sun hot and the scene was as much about the community as it was about paddleball. It was a fantastic peek into another racquet-sport culture.

And one that is slightly threatened, like so many others, by the arrival of pickleball. In one corner of Juniper, away from the paddleball, two pickleball courts were up and in use. Three days after my visit, the New York Times ran an interesting article about the conflict between paddleball and pickleball playing out in New York City parks:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/nyregion/pickleball-war-central-park.html#:~:text=Now%20he%20is%20Paul%20Owens,a%20narrative%2C%20like%20a%20movie.

Alex Robertson

Today was the memorial service for Alex Robertson. A victim like Bob Callahan of glioblastoma, he died two weeks ago at the age of fifty-four.

Alex and I were two of the eight members of the largest class of letter winners in the history of Dartmouth’s men’s squash program: Nick Billings, James Bragg, Doug Henry, Raman Narayanan, Jose Suarez and Ben Willwerth.

Alex was the best of the lot. He was ranked eleven in the nation as a senior in high school, in the BU18s. He moved incredibly well for being a big guy—I am not sure when he became “Big Al” but that was probably soon after arriving on campus—and was always gliding around the court seemingly undisturbed by any shot you hit. He had an open stance, a liquid smooth swing and subtle power. As John McPhee wrote, he seemed less tense than a length of string.

He had an eye-crinkling smile. We loved the long van rides, stuffed in the way back as underclassmen, hemmed in by squash bags, going along on winter roads in the dark talking about matters large and small, everyone telling stories. Alex was a leader in those conversations and always tossing in a dose of humor to take the edge off when someone got too serious.

Alex played four and five on the ladder freshman year (going 8-6) and sophomore year (4-4). We were sad when he left to devote himself to Dartmouth’s lacrosse team. In the years since, I was lucky to spend time with Alex, as a roommate in England and at two summer communities.

Now that he’s been taken from us, I miss him terribly.

John Greco

Recently I was lucky to join an eighty-fifth birthday party in New York for Johnny Greco. His wife, Kathleen Sharkey, hosted a celebratory lunch at Il Corso, a great Italian restaurant in Midtown Manhattan. Held the day after he turned eighty-five, this was a vintage gathering of the New York squash tribe, as you can see from the group photograph taken by Andreas Hofweber.

Johnny has a unique teaching professional resume of just Manhattan squash clubs: City Athletic Club, 1959-1962;University Club of New York, 1962-1978; Broad Street Squash Club, 1978-1982; Harvard Club of New York, 1982-1985; Park Place Squash Club, 1985-1988; Le Parker Meridien Hotel, 1985-1988; Colony Club, 2001-2008; and River Club, 2004-2008. (He also worked for years teaching tennis in Connecticut.) In 2017 he was honored with the Carter Fergusson Grand Master Award.

An inspiring poster child for resilience. Johnny was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2008, but he has continued to play squash, entering the National Singles eight times since the diagnosis, playing in dozens of local hardball and softball events and avidly attending pro tournaments (and giving advice to the players).

An inveterate storyteller, Johnny told great stories at the party about playing minor league baseball in Delaware, about exploits during the O’Reilly pro-am at the University Club and about how the Bigelow Cup, an iconic New York club trophy, mysteriously ended up residing for some time above the bar at Elaine’s.

(l-r) front row: Amy Bigerna, Grace Bigerna, Kathleen Sharkey, John Greco, Mary Todd, Nancy Brenner; second row: Stanley Stairs, Kit Tatum, Cindy Cosmi; third row: Courtney Fuller, Jay Nelson, Charles Maytays, John Cosmi; back row: Lior Grinberg, Scott Fuller, John Beaman, Ned Monaghan, Lance Mald, Jerry Todd, Richard Chin, Valerie Monaghan, Jim Rucinski, Paula Foley, Andrew Foley, Jim Zug.

The Inside Word on the Game of Squash