The Direct

Four years ago, there was just one thing that came to mind when you heard the phrase Richmond squash: the Price-Bullington Invitational. The PBI is a classic amateur tournament that features top college kids who are flown in from their campuses to the Country Club of Virginia for the weekend. (Started in 1970, it was originally the Holt Bullington, named in honor of the eponymous Richmond junior who died the year before.) Otherwise the Virginia Squash Racquets Association was molasses-slow world, with not a single twenty-one-foot court in Richmond and barely any league or junior play. Richmond’s main claim to fame was that it was the home of the good reverend, Bob Hetherington, who was a top amateur forty years ago. And then everything changed. Read the rest of this entry »

February is the quiet month in American sports. Except for the squash community, when it is nuts, with two or three marquee events each weekend. Living in Washington, one tournament I like to catch is Baltimore’s famous—or rather infamous—BIDS. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I spent eight hours in Ferris Athletic Center. Not much in the squash world is going to keep me in one place for that long, but this was no ordinary event. It was Princeton v. Trinity, which in the past couple of seasons has become the marquee squash day in the country. Read the rest of this entry »

This was my tenth Bear Stearns Tournament of Champions. Every year when I head to my first match I think that this is the year when I will be blasé about it, when I will ho-hum and snigger and, with an apathetic wave of my hand, write it off as a been-there, done-that affair long past its sell-by date. Read the rest of this entry »

Nothing like a little sunshine with which to start the new year. A few weeks ago I sailed to Bermuda for the 2007 World Open. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month the Racquet Club of Philadelphia celebrated the one hundredth anniversary of their lovely clubhouse on South Sixteenth Street. A couple of years ago we spent a lot of time on conference calls trying to come up with a way to properly acknowledge this fact, as it was also necessarily the centennial of the invention of squash doubles. Read the rest of this entry »

The United States Open rocked New York. Again. Literally. Twenty years ago, Tom and Hazel Jones hosted the Open at the Palladium, a night club on 14th Street. Now the Open was back in Gotham, kicking it live at the Roseland Ballroom. Read the rest of this entry »

Sojourning in the nation’s capital has made me slightly more attuned to the political, despite the quirky fact that because I live in the District of Columbia I do not have the right to vote. (This taxation without representation system is still happening at home two hundred and twenty-four years after the Boston Tea Party.) One thing I have seen closeup is that West Wing was a very strong television show, at least because it covered squash.
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This summer has been a one of transition for American squash. The USSRA moved its headquarters from Bala Cynwyd to New York. The association was founded in 1904 and yet until 1974 its official headquarters rotated every two years, to the home or office of the new president. HQ was in Buffalo in 1967-1969 when Seymour Knox was president; then it was in New York when Stew Brauns ran it in 1969-71; and then it was in Indianapolis when Lloyd Jacobs took over in 1971—three cities in three years. Read the rest of this entry »

Ho-hum. Another Pan American Games. More medals for American squash players. From all the desultory coverage in the mainstream American media, you probably missed it. I was in Manchester for the 2002 Commonwealth Games and Great Britain was agog—front-page, above-the-fold, top-of-the-hour, breaking-news coverage. People were lusting after my press pass. The Queen came for a squash match. Here: nothing. Forty-two nations, five thousand athletes and nothing until C-7. Read the rest of this entry »