Leg Surgery This Month For Decorated Philadelphia Veterans
Harrity And Mateer
by Rob Dinerman for DailySquashReport.com
Tom Harrity
Gil Mateer (left)Dateline September 27th --- Two of Philadelphia’s true longtime warriors, Tom Harrity and Gil Mateer, who between them have won five U. S. National hardball titles, five U. S. National Doubles titles and numerous invitational championships in both singles and doubles, are undergoing surgery this month and will be out of action at least until well into this winter. Harrity, 49, who won the National Doubles in 1992 with Joe Fabiani as well as the U. S. Hardball crown in 2000 and from 2003-06, had an operation to repair his badly frayed (five-centimeter tear) right Achilles tendon on September 15th, nearly exactly five years after a procedure to reattach his ruptured left Achilles tendon on September 27, 2006, while Mateer, winner of the Yale Club Invitational (1978 and 1981), the Harry Cowles (1978 and 1984) the Gold Racquets (1980) and the Canadian Nationals (1983) in singles and the National Doubles in 1978 and 1979 with the late Tom Page, in 1980 with John Bottger and in 1986 with his older brother Drew, is scheduled for a resurfacing procedure on his badly inflamed left hip this coming Wednesday, September 28th.
Harrity, currently confined to a Cam walker “boot” and unable to put weight on his right leg for a minimum of six weeks, first experienced pain in his tendon in December 2010, yet maintained nearly his full tournament schedule during the winter/spring of 2011 even as the pain worsened and the damage steadily mounted. He and longtime doubles partner Eric Vlcek (who himself had ruptured his left Achilles tendon back in 2007) successfully defended their William White 40’s title this past January (albeit barely, by a 17-16 fifth-game tally over Rob Whitehouse and Geoff Kennedy) but had their National Doubles 40’s title defense thwarted two months later in Chicago, where they lost in the final to Michael Puertas and Jeff Mulligan.
By that time, a visibly mobility-constrained Harrity had aggravated his injury badly enough in the mid-February Century Mixed Doubles (where he and Sara Luther reached the final) to have had to withdraw from the next-week U. S. Hardball Nationals, though he and his talented nephew Todd Harrity, the current Intercollegiate Individual champion, did win their third straight Merion Cricket Club Doubles tournament in March, several weeks prior to Chicago. Todd is no stranger to winning Merion Club racquet-sports championships while partnering his uncle at a time when he is dealing with a major Achilles tendon issue --- Todd and Tom Harrity were partners in the mid-September 2006 Merion club tennis event when the latter ruptured his left Achilles at 5-4, 40-30 (match point) in the third and decisive set of their final against Steve Graham and Ed Garno. Improbably, the senior Harrity insisted on continuing the match (hopping around on one foot and having Todd covering pretty much the entire court) throughout the TWENTY additional points it took for them to come away with that last set, 7-5.
Though Tom Harrity spent this past summer rehabbing and mostly resting, he did manage (with his right Achilles heavily taped) to win Merion’s open tennis doubles tournaments in June and September before going in 10 or so days ago for his much-delayed operation. He hopes to return in time for the early-January William White event, though both he and Vlcek know that such a scenario may or may not be in the cards.
In contrast to Harrity, who had essentially been attempting to play through his injury for the past nine months, Mateer, who with longtime partner Dave Page had almost won the 2010 National Doubles 50’s crown (falling short by one point in the fourth game of the final to Jamie Heldring and Eben Hardie) had been relatively injury-free until July, when, with a swiftness that he described as “like falling off a cliff,” his hip pain began and speedily increased, to the point where by late summer he was experiencing severe discomfort even when sitting at the desk in his office. In addition to his quartet of National Doubles wins and a near-sweep of all of the most important invitational hardball tournaments during his prime years from the mid-1970’s through the mid-1980’s, Mateer (whose father Diehl holds the all-time record in U. S. National Doubles titles won with eleven) has won most of the Open doubles amateur invitationals, most recently the 1993 William White with Ned Edwards, his former late-1970’s teammate at Penn, and for the past decade he has teamed with Dave Page in a highly successful partnership in age-group competition. Mateer, 56, is hoping that this resurfacing procedure will spare him the need for a full hip replacement and is tentatively planning a late-winter or early-spring return to the doubles court, though this relatively recently-perfected operation has a recovery time-frame that varies anywhere between five and eleven months.
Squash is a grueling game, as anyone who has pursued it intensively can attest, and this pair of right-wall protagonists, who have logged countless miles over the past few decades in bursts to the front wall, are by no means the only northeastern-based players for whom surgery has been necessary in recent months. WDSA women’s doubles star Dana Betts (labrum tear in her shoulder), recent Bowdoin standout Peter Cipriano (wrist), current Fairmount Club head pro and Scottish national team coach Paul Frank (elbow) and longtime New York fixture Niko Elmaleh (meniscus tear in his knee) have all been forced to endure operations, with all hoping to return to action this autumn or early winter.
Gil Mateer, The Great Coach Al Molloy and Ned Edwards
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