The Palmer Page Era: Should It Have Ended This Way?
By Rob Dinerman
November 18, 2004 - Last
Friday’s USSRA press release announcing the resignation of Palmer
T. H. Page, the first-ever USSRA CEO, “to pursue personal
and professional goals,” after just 14 months, was accurately
assessed by Squashtalk editor/publisher Ron Beck in an ensuing
newsflash in which he characterized the eight-paragraph document as
“singularly uninformative as to possible reasons” for
Page’s premature and brusque departure.
So to this point have been the non-responses of the top
USSRA officers, several of whom promised to speak candidly on the
matter during the week prior to the issuance of the release but all of
whom in the interim evidently underwent a change of heart, even in some
cases becoming testy when pressed to discuss the matter:
“Don’t push me, Rob!” one prominent officer
menacingly warned when posed a follow-up query. After decompressing
somewhat, he simply acknowledged that everything surrounding the fact,
questionable timing (with a new season just underway) and abruptness of
the 54-tear-old Page’s forced resignation had become “a
touchy situation,” and he therefore preferred to let the press
release speak for itself.
The reticence is understandable, given the
undisputed and multi-front advances the USSRA has made during the
period since Page assumed the new position in September 2003. An
Association whose membership numbers had been going flat for years and
which was facing a budgetary deficit as well has undergone significant
and quantifiable improvements on both of those important fronts,
especially the latter category, in which more than three-quarter
million dollars have been either given or committed in a fundraising
effort whose most shining moment occurred on October 2nd at the USSRA
Centennial Ball and Hall Of Fame Banquet, a hugely successful event
that drew more than 600 participants (overwhelming even the spacious
seventh-floor banquet room of the host University Club Of New York) and
netted the Association approximately $ 400,000 in what was arguably the
most successful squash extravaganza in the history of this country.
Similarly, the advances the USSRA has made on the
technological and Internet fronts (with the establishment of
Railstation, a new online USSRA tournament reporting system), the
implementation of a tiered membership system (keyed by the
Founder’s Club for members willing to commit $ 50,000 or more to
the Association over the next few years), the expansion and support
given to squash-oriented youth organizations like SquashSmarts,
Citysquash, Squashbusters and StreetSquash and an increased outreach
effort to all regional associations across the country, including the
ones with a lower profile, all represent positive changes in which Page
has played a major hands-on role. Beginning with an ambitious 10-day,
seven-city west coast swing last autumn within weeks of his hiring, the
former top IBM executive has traveled extensively and tirelessly all
over the country, and indeed the continent, introducing himself to
members, soliciting their views on various matters and raising the
profile of the USSRA, and he made a practice of attending virtually
every national championship as a sign of support for the event and to
be on hand to present the trophies to the tournament winners.
One of his most significant trips, and certainly the one
that covered the greatest distance, came just on the heels of the
Centennial Dinner, when Page traveled to Mauritius to attend the 34th
World Squash Federation Annual General Meeting and Conference to
represent the United States before that prestigious world body. It had
been hoped that USSRA current president Kenneth Stillman would be
elected a first vice-president during the conference, but at the last
moment he had to cancel his flight, and Page’s lobbying on Mr.
Stillman’s behalf fell just one vote short of the needed total,
which would have given U. S. squash far more influence and a noticeably
higher profile had it come about. Shortly after the conference, WSF
president Jahangir Khan (whose cousin Sharif was one of the 2004 Hall
Of Fame inductees, with Page as his presenter at the ceremony) wrote
Page an extremely laudatory thank-you letter commending him on the
substantial contributions Page had made during his presentation.
So why the brevity of Page’s tenure? As best can be
gleaned from the few hints and veiled references that have emerged, it
appears that the same forthright and forceful style that impelled both
in his outstanding 30-year career at IBM and as a competitive player
(and 2002 and 2003 age-group hardball champion) himself, and that
permeated his 14 months as CEO as well, may have also imperiled it by
ruffling too many people and giving them too great a sense that Page
was only interested in pursuing his goals his way. There was a sense at
some conference calls and committee meetings that Page may or may not
have been truly listening to views that ran counter to his, and that in
any event he had pretty much reached his decision beforehand and was
unlikely to be dissuaded by any input he subsequently received.
As well, in his zeal to further the financial growth of
the Association, Page put a lot of pressure on tournament chairmen and
committees to turn a substantial profit, resulting in higher entry fees
for national tournaments that were resented both by the chairmen and by
potential entrants, resulting in smaller-than-usual draws and hence
subdued participation: the women’s national doubles actually
consisted of only two teams, both of which were therefore
“byed” straight into the final, and anger at the $250 per
person entry fee for the biennial World Doubles in Philadelphia
expressed itself in extremely limited turn-outs across the board.
But should some interpersonal differences have been
allowed to disrupt so many positive changes in so many areas? As it
happens, Page was hired with the mandate of bringing a dynamic degree
of leadership to an Association that realized it needed it; whether or
not he went overboard in this pursuit is subject to speculation and
debate, though clearly the enough members of the Executive Committee
felt that he had to out-number his supporters among that group. One of
his most loyal defenders noted that “you can’t make an
omelette without breaking a few eggs,” and it will never be known
whether the relationship Page and the USSRA Executive Committee were
forming might have settled in if given a little more time, as
frequently happens in businesses when a new CEO enters the scene. It
must be said that under Page’s stewardship, and especially in the
wake of the Centennial event, the USSRA was exuding an exhilarating
degree of momentum and development that it will be hard put to maintain
in the wake of such a peremptory truncation of his tenure.
The Executive Committee itself is undergoing plenty of
transition of its own, especially in the wake of the recent
resignations of vice president Charlie Johnson (who wouldn’t have
been allowed to remain anyway after June, when the new regulation
prohibiting people with a business interest in squash to remain on the
Committee goes into effect) and two-time S. L. Green champion Damian
Walker. Other members are slated to depart fairly shortly as well, and
the day-to-day operations on the Association will be assumed by current
Director Of Operations Mike Barnett while a search for a new CEO is
conducted.
At least three of the original applicants who vied with
Page for that position during the summer of 2003 have already indicated
their interest in it during the past week, and the search will
initially focus on this abundantly qualified trio. Meanwhile, Page has
already flown to Hawaii for a vacation that will later take him to
Beaver Creek to ski before he returns early next month in time to
participate in the Morris Invitational, a member-guest doubles
invitational at the Apawamis Club in Rye, where he remains one of the
club’s most popular and admired members.