A History Of The U. S. National Men’s Doubles Squash Championship In Baltimore By Rob Dinerman
February 10, 2010-
This weekend will mark the 75th edition of the U. S. National
Men’s Doubles Squash Championship, which debuted in 1933 and has
been held every year since except for a three-year World War II-caused
hiatus from 1943-45. The city of Baltimore has previously hosted this
tournament 11 times (in 1940, ’42, ’46, ’48,
’53, ’58, ’65, ’73, ’81, ’87 and
’96) and those championships have featured some of the
game’s all-time leading stars adding to their legend and
important chapters in several enduring rivalries, as well as a series
of out-of-the-blue one-hit wonders, noteworthy upsets, instances of
sibling rivalry as well as partnership, and some of the most riveting
final-round finishes in the history of doubles squash.
THE 1940’s: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION?
A real question has emerged in researching this chronicle
as to whether the 1940 National Doubles event was actually held in
Baltimore, and 70 years after the fact, no one could be found who had
played in or attended that tournament and hence would be in a position
to resolve this unanticipated and highly intriguing though decidedly
unwelcome issue. All the USSRA Yearbooks from the early 1950’s
onward list Baltimore as having been the host site in 1940, but the
1940-41 Yearbooks (chronicling the 1939-40 season) of both the national
and New York associations clearly state that the tournament that year
was held at the Philadelphia Country Club. Furthermore, the highly
unusual trajectory of the final, in which five-time champions (from
1933-37) Roy Coffin and Neil Sullivan faced off against two-time
defending champs Hunter Lott Jr. and William Slack, would argue for the
latter locale as well ---- on the third point of the second game, after
Coffin/Sullivan had taken the opener 15-9, Slack was injured so badly
by his partner’s racquet follow-through that he was unable to
continue.
Slack and Lott therefore graciously offered a default win
to their opponents, who however just as graciously refused, leading to
a resumption and conclusion of the match (which Lott and Slack wound up
winning in four games) three weeks later. Since all four players were
Philly Country members, it seems that such an arrangement would have
been far more likely if that club had been hosting the entire event,
and in any case, as noted, both the USSRA and MSRA (i.e., Met-NY)
Yearbooks explicitly specify Philly Country as the venue for that
entire tournament.
No draw sheets could be located either in the U. S. SQUASH
office in New York, the Hall Of Fame in New Haven, the Maryland State
Squash Association (MSSRA) archives in Baltimore or the libraries of
various racquet-sports-oriented clubs, to detail the course of the
National Doubles in 1942 (when the Lott/Slack duo earned this title for
the fifth-straight and final time), 1946 or 1948 (when Charles Brinton
won both years, first with Donald Strachan and then with Stanley
Pearson Jr.), but full documentation was available from the early
1950’s onward.
1953: A RETURN TO THE STATUS QUO
The 1953 championship was especially noteworthy for the
opportunity it represented for the Philadelphia player group to restore
order after the dramatic fashion in which the American doubles
landscape had been at least temporarily transformed by what had
happened one year earlier in Greenwich, where to everyone’s
surprise and for the first time in the history of the tournament (then
in its 17th holding), not a single Philadelphian made it into the
winner’s circle. Indeed, only two non-Philadelphians had made it
that far as PARTNERS of denizens of the City Of Brotherly Love to that
point, namely the New Yorkers Strachan in ’46 with Brinton and
Calvin MacCracken in ’51 as Diehl Mateer’s partner. This
means that 30 of the 32 listed champions through 1951 had been
Philadelphians, though, in a sign of the dominance and longevity that
this group of champions attained, those 30 spots had been manned by a
total of only eight different people, namely Lott (who by then had won
seven of his eight career titles), Slack, Sullivan and Coffin (each
five-time winners), Brinton and Pearson (twice each), David McMullin
and Mateer, who in ’51 had won the third of his eventual and
all-time-high total of 11 National Doubles crowns.
Given this extremely homogeneous backdrop, the 1952
edition, in which no Philadelphian even made it to the finals,
constituted a major deviation from all that preceded it, with eventual
champs Germain Glidden III and Dick Remsen summarily ousting Mateer and
Lott in the semis to advance to (and through) the final against fellow
New York metropolitan-area players Carl Badger and Jim Ethridge of the
host Field Club of Greenwich. The 1953 National Doubles in Baltimore,
which was held at the University Club near the Park Plaza Hotel, was
therefore viewed as a chance to see whether what had happened one year
earlier was merely an aberrational blip on the screen or the first
signs of a more lasting change in the power structure of top-level
amateur doubles in this country.
On the first weekend of March (the tournament wouldn’t be
pushed back to its current placement near the end of the month until
the following decade), it emphatically proved to be the former, as even
the MSRA Yearbook ruefully acknowledged when it admitted that
“after one heady year” (referring of course to 1952),
Philadelphia, “long the squash doubles stronghold of the country,
bounced back with both final-round teams in 1953, dousing the last New
York hopes in the semi-finals.” Those semifinal
“dousings” were brusquely administered, in each case in the
minimum number of games, by Mateer and Lott over Ethridge/Badger and by
Howard Davis and James Whitmoyer at the expense of defending-champs
Remsen and Glidden. Mateer and Lott would then dominate the last two
games (15-9 and 6) of the ensuing four-game final in what proved to be
Lott’s career swan song, as he would announce his retirement from
national competition to the Baltimore newspapers later that afternoon.
Lott, whose eight U. S. National Doubles titles were a record
for a right-waller until Morris Clothier recorded his ninth in 2005
(just months before Lott died a few weeks short of his 91st birthday),
also won the U. S. National singles crown in 1949 before winning the
National Doubles with Mateer a few weeks later, a parlay that made him
literally a first-ballot U. S. Hall Of Famer in 2000 when he became one
of the first class of inductees (Mateer and Brinton were also members
of that august group) into that celebratory society. He and Mateer,
National Doubles co-champions in ’49, ’50 and ’53,
opposed each other a decade later in a memorable early-1960’s
Merion Cricket Club club-championship final in which Lott, by then in
his late 40’s (in what became his last hurrah, given the ruptured
Achilles tendon a few weeks later that ended his squash-playing
career), teamed with Whitmoyer in a five-game win over Mateer and John
Hentz, who less than a month earlier had garnered the third of the four
National Doubles titles they won during the five-year period from
1958-1962!
1958: DIEHL MATEER TO THE RESCUE
The first of those titles occurred, as referenced, at
Baltimore’s University Club, where Mateer and Hentz were unseeded
and from which Badger and Ethridge, the top seeds and two-time
defending champions after their exploits in New York in ’56 and
Minneapolis in ’57, were ousted in the quarterfinal round by Ray
Widelski and ’52 National Singles champ Harry Conlon. Mateer and
Hentz encountered plenty of resistance themselves in a four-game
round-of-16 match with the Hahn brothers, Joe and Ed (winners of the
tournament three years earlier), and were pushed all the way to
simultaneous-match-point in a tortuous semi against Whitmoyer and
Davis, who rallied from two-love down and then, hair-raisingly, from a
14-6 fifth-game deficit by saving eight straight match-balls against
them and forcing a best-of-five tiebreaker, which seesawed to 2-all,
set-three. At this crisis juncture, and on his team’s 10th
match-point of the game, Mateer ended a long all-court rally by
steaming a backhand rail that barely eluded his left-wall opponent
Whitmoyer’s wild but futile diving attempt to get his racquet on
the ball.
The final later that same day against Paul Steele
and Bill Danforth (straight-set winners in both their quarterfinal with
Baltimore torch-bearers William Lamble and George Doetsch and their
semi against Widelski and Conlon) also went the five-game limit, with
the three first-time National Doubles finalists all betraying
understandable nervousness and only Mateer (who already had won this
event five times with three different partners, his trio with Lott in
’49, ’50 and ’53 being augmented by title runs with
MacCracken in ’51 and Richard Squires in ’54) playing up to
form. Four evenly-divided games after the match had started, no one
knew what to expect entering the fifth, but at that stage Hentz settled
down and he and Mateer ran off and hid with a 15-3 tally, though it
should be noted that a half-decade after this disappointing denouement
(i.e., in Wilmington in 1963), Danforth would team up with Sam Howe to
annex this championship for the first of the three times that this
pairing would emerge triumphant during the five-year period from
1963-67.
1965: FAMILY SHOWDOWN
Indeed, Howe and Danforth were top seeds and two-time
defending champions the next time that the National Doubles came to
Baltimore on a sultry and unseasonably warm third weekend in March 1965
in which both the weather conditions and the scheduling of the matches
played a role in the ultimate outcome. Mateer and first-time Nationals
partner Ralph Howe (Sam’s younger brother), winners of the
Baltimore Invitation Doubles (forerunner of the BIDS) just a few weeks
earlier on the same University Club court, advanced to the final
without dropping a game, including a fairly concise semifinal Sunday
morning against a pair of opponents, Kit Spahr and Claude Beer, who
were pardonably pooped from their lengthy 3-2 quarterfinal the previous
afternoon against Victor Elmaleh and Maurice Heckscher.
By contrast, Sam Howe and Danforth, whose semifinal with
the Vehslage brothers, Steve (the newly-crowned National Singles
champion) and Ramsay, had been played after the bottom-half semi (a
breach of the normal protocol of allowing the No. 1 seeds to play first
that drew some protest from the normally affable Sam Howe, whose
prescience would be borne out later that day), had barely survived a
murderous marathon in which Howe/Danforth, after failing to reach
double figures in either of the first two games, surged back to force a
fifth game that inched evenly along all the way to 14-all, no-set,
before ending on a Danforth three-wall that nicked on the left wall and
rolled insolently out at Steve Vehslage’s feet.
When the ensuing final began a mere (and insufficient) 65
minutes after that simultaneous-match-point semi had ended, Danforth
and Sam Howe found themselves facing an even more daunting task when
they dropped both of the first two games in tiebreakers, the first when
at 17-all Howe’s attempted overhead volley drop-shot caught the
top of the tin, and the second when their opponents swept through a
best-of-five overtime session to win 16-13. The defending champs
pridefully forged their way into a fifth game, their 10th of the day,
and one more than they could handle, with cumulative fatigue playing a
visible and defining role as the anticlimactic game moved along to its
clear-cut 15-6 conclusion.
These two top-tier tandems would meet again in both the
’66 and ’67 finals, with Mateer and Ralph Howe successfully
defending their title in a straight-set final in Philadelphia but
relinquishing it the following year in Buffalo, when at 12-all in the
first game Mateer ruptured his left Achilles tendon while trying to
accelerate in pursuit of a drop shot. By 1969, the brothers Howe (who
had opposed each other in the North American Open singles final, which
Ralph won 15-13 in the fifth) had become partners, and they won the
National Doubles throughout the three-year period from 1969-71.
Fittingly, they would both be inducted into the U. S. Squash Hall Of
Fame simultaneously, during the weekend of the 2002 National Doubles in
New York.
The whole tournament experience had a profound impact on the
younger Howe, who was participating in his first-ever National Doubles
after graduating from Yale less than two years earlier, and who would
accrue benefits from playing with the wiser and vastly more experienced
Mateer that would play a crucial role in the six National Doubles
crowns (the two with Mateer and three with his brother Sam, plus the
’76 event as Peter Briggs’s partner) that Ralph Howe would
collect during his career. Even four decades removed from that 1965
tournament, he vividly remembered how well organized and focused Mateer
had been, how meticulously he scouted upcoming opponents, how he would
arrange formal pre-match meetings to discuss strategy for the match
ahead, how he would always hold his racquet on the same side for his
forehand. Prior to the Baltimore Invitational final, Mateer and Howe
had sat in the gallery watching Ian McAvity and Dave Pemberton-Smith
win their semi, and whenever McAvity would rocket one of his scorching
forehands down the middle and nick it out at the back wall, Mateer
would lean over to his much younger partner and whisper into his ear
that, “Those balls are YOURS when he hits them against us!”
1973: SWEATING IT OUT
Another in-tournament adjustment by a highly decorated veteran
would ultimately have a decisive impact on the National Doubles the
next time it came to Baltimore eight years later (i.e. in 1973), when
it would be co-hosted by the Baltimore Country Club and the Maryland
Club. Jim Zug came into that event as the reigning champion after
winning the ’72 tourney in Minneapolis with Larry Terrell, who,
however, had moved out west shortly thereafter and had temporarily
stopped playing. As late as the mid-February National Singles, Zug had
still not chosen a partner for the by then fast-approaching ’73
tournament, but while playing in the Five-Man Team event during that
weekend at Princeton University, where Zug himself had spent his
college years a decade earlier, he and Victor Niederhoffer (who was in
the process of earning the second of his four-straight National Singles
titles from 1972-75) decided to partner up for Baltimore.
Niederhoffer was a professor at Berkeley during that 1972-73
year and his doubles game was very rusty, as became palpably clear
during his shaky Saturday-afternoon quarterfinal performance, a
too-close-for-comfort four-gamer against New Yorkers Mel Sokolow and
Frank Satterthwaite during which Niederhoffer committed a number of
unforced errors and positioned himself too deep in the court to be
effective. Zug was understandably concerned by his partner’s
Saturday struggles, but when he showed up at the club early Sunday
morning and arrived in the doubles-court gallery, he immediately saw
Niederhoffer perspiring profusely in his grey sweatpants, strenuously
practicing both his stroking and his court movements, a clear sign of
the latter’s realization that his play needed to substantially
improve, as well as his determination to make that happen.
Niederhoffer moved well up in the court and demonstrated
the accuracy, placement, mobility and shot-making skills that had been
absent the day before, and he and Zug moved confidently to straight-set
victories both in the morning semifinal against young Canadians Gordy
Anderson (who 13 years later would partner Todd Binns to the World
Doubles crown) and Peter Martin and in the afternoon final, where they
prevailed 15-7, 7 and 11 over the top-seeded Pierce brothers, Michael
and Peter, whose path to the finals included a quarterfinal win over
just-ensconced Maryland State champions Joe Lacy and Sandy Martin and a
semifinal advance at the expense of Heckscher and Tom Poor.
Not too long after that tournament, Zug would decamp for
Germany, where he would spend the rest of the decade of the
1970’s. His business-related move gave Niederhoffer the
opportunity to show his versatility by moving to the right wall to play
with Colin Adair in the ’74 National Doubles at the Merion
Cricket Club in suburban Philadelphia, where they would out-last
another mixed-national team, namely Poor and his Canadian partner Peter
Hall, fresh off winning the Canadian National Doubles one week earlier,
in a two-hour final, 16-13 in the fourth. This outcome caused
Niederhoffer to become the first player ever to win the National
Doubles playing each wall, while also making Adair, a two-time National
Singles champion (in ’68 and ’71), the first Canadian to be
part of a U. S. National Doubles championship team.
Although Mike Pierce and Heckscher would both fall short
on that Sunday, March 25, at the Baltimore Country Club in 1973, they
would team up to win this tournament two years later in Buffalo at the
final-round expense of Mateer and his precocious son Gilbert, a
University of Pennsylvania sophomore at the time, who would win the
National Doubles for three consecutive years from 1978-80, teaming up
with Tom Page in ’78 and ’79 and with John Bottger in
’80. Similar final-round redemption would await Hall, a
first-round loser (with Craig Benson) in Baltimore in ’73 who
however would team up with his Canadian compatriot Victor Harding to
become the first all-Canadian team to win this title when they defeated
Page and Gil Mateer in St. Louis in ’77, the backdrop for a
triumphant return to “Charm City” the next time it hosted
the National Doubles, which was in 1981.
1981: “WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR”
By that time the tournament had greatly expanded, aided by the
praiseworthy efforts of Tournament Chairman Bob Hicks and his Committee
and the reputation that the city had by that time universally acquired
for hospitality and the exceptional Saturday-evening dinner-dances it
offered as the main social event of a National Doubles weekend. A
record 61 teams entered the three men’s events (Men’s,
Veterans for players age 40-and-over, and Seniors for players age
50-and-over), 22 of them in the Men’s division, and not only the
Baltimore Country Club and Maryland Club but also the Racquet Club and
the two doubles courts at the athletic complex of nearby Towson State
University were utilized as well to accommodate the large turnout.
After disappointing National Doubles final-round losses in
both ’79 and ’80, top seeds Larry Heath and John Reese,
childhood friends in suburban New York and excellent singles players as
well (Heath won the National Juniors in ’64 while Reese had been
a U. S. Nationals finalist in both ’71 and ’76), entered
the ’81 tourney convinced that this would finally be “their
year” after the manner in which they had swept through the
amateur tournament schedule during the preceding fall and winter. But
as had been the case 16 years earlier in 1965, the differing courses of
the two Sunday-morning semis would exert a tangible impact that
afternoon in the final --- ’77 champs Hall and Harding, fresh off
winning the Canadian Nationals a week prior to Baltimore, had defeated
surprise semifinalists Scott Ryan and Jay Umans (who had saved a
third-game match-point-against en route to a Saturday-morning win over
Diehl Mateer and his son Drew) in a competitive but solid four games,
whereas Heath and Reese trailed Poor and the hometown hero Martin two
games to one before barely eking out an 18-15 fifth game that left them
too drained, both physically and emotionally, to overcome the 17-15
loss of the first game of the same-day final, which Harding and Hall
would wind up winning in three.
The outcome was especially fulfilling for Hall, who by
that time was in his late 30’s and had decided even before
the event began that it would be his last appearance in the Open
division of the U. S. National Doubles. Conversely, rarely if ever has
disappointment and dismay been as graphically presented on the faces of
losing finalists as it was in the trophy-presentation photo that day on
the countenances of Heath and Reese, who would, it should be noted,
finally attain their coveted title a year later, when they out-dueled
Diehl and Gil Mateer in a four-game final in Buffalo.
The dynamics of the ’81 championship in Baltimore
were also influenced by both the fact of and reason for the absence
from the competition of Gil Mateer, who as mentioned had won the title
throughout the prior three years from 1978-80 but who earlier that
winter of ’81 had been assessed a six-month suspension by the
USSRA for an unfortunate episode that had occurred on-court in
mid-January in the final round of a doubles tournament in Cleveland. In
fairness it must be said that Mateer would uncomplainingly serve out
his suspension and fully redeem whatever temporary damage had been done
by being a model of deportment, on and off the court, from that point
onwards: one momentary lapse of judgment can not nullify the decades of
praiseworthy play, good sportsmanship and solid citizenship that this
four-time National Doubles champ has evinced ever since.
1987: DOWN TO THE WIRE
Indeed, he entered the tournament the next time it was
held in Baltimore, in ’87, as the reigning champion, having
combined with brother Drew to prevail in Detroit in ’86, when he
switched to the left wall and thereby joined Niederhoffer as the only
players to win this championship playing each wall. Again the
tournament was chaired by Bob Hicks, again it drew a record number of
entries, but this time the top seeds (the defending champion Mateer
siblings) fell not in the final, as had been the case in ’81, but
in the round of 16, at the hands of the local duo of Mike Hahn and Doug
Rice, who rode an 18-17 match-evening second game to a pair of
close-out single-figure games and an unexpected slot in the
quarterfinals. There they were stopped by the Cinderella team of Len
Bernheimer and Sandy Tierney, two of the four players manning the eight
semifinal positions who would have been eligible to have entered the
Veterans flight (which was won by Martin and George Maguire) had they
chosen to do so.
Both semis went the full five games, with
Tierney/Bernheimer barely out-lasting Umans and Paul Assaiante and
Philadelphians Ryan and Rich Sheppard doing the same to Poor and Jamie
Barrett in a tension-filled Sunday morning in which five of those 10
games were decided by two points or less. In the final, Bernheimer and
Tierney, bidding to become the first-ever all-Boston winners of this
championship, stayed alive by eking out an 18-16 fourth game and
appeared poised to make that reversal stick when they rallied, largely
on the strength of Tierney’s forehand reverse-corner (which had
been on fire throughout the weekend), from 6-9 to 11-9 in the fifth. On
the ensuing exchange, Bernheimer had a loose ball and an open
front-court to work with, but his drop shot barely caught the tin,
jump-starting his reprieved opponents to a 6-0 match-ending run.
Sheppard and Ryan would successfully defend their title a year later at
the Pittsburgh Golf Club in even more down-to-the-wire fashion, 18-17
in the fifth over the Mateer brothers when Drew tinned would-be winning
drop shots on each of the last two points to deprive his team of a win
that would have been especially meaningful to Gil, who was living in
Pittsburgh at the time.
1996: NICK OF TIME
Only once in the 23 years since that route-going ’87
final has Baltimore provided the venue for the U. S. National Doubles,
and many of the themes that had animated previous Baltimore-hosted
versions of this prestigious championship --- from the premature exit
of top-seeded defending champions, to the avenging of recent previous
defeats, to five-game finals hinging in substantial measure on
specific-point fifth-game turnarounds and memorably defining
shots, to unexpected faces in the winner’s circle --- made
compelling reappearances in the ’96 edition as well. Clothier and
Jonathan Foster, national champions in each of the three prior years
(i.e. 1993-95) lost a thrilling quarterfinal to Pete DeRose and his
power-hitting right-wall Canadian partner Peter Maule when DeRose was
able to conjure up a nick-finding backhand cross-court drop on
simultaneous-match-point that Clothier was unable to retrieve,
following which the DeRose/Maule duo rallied from two games to one down
to overtake Geoff Kennedy and Joe Fabiani (winners of the
highly-regarded William White Invitational at Merion a few months
earlier) in five games.
Meanwhile, the bottom half also had some completely
unexpected twists and turns, chief among them the advance of unseeded
Philadelphians Dave Proctor (who had won this tournament in ’89
with Heckscher and in ’90 with Geordie Lemmon) and Jamie
Heldring. The latter, who had successfully recruited Proctor only a day
or two before play began when Heldring’s scheduled partner Lemmon
pulled a hamstring muscle in a Wednesday-evening practice session,
vividly remembers looking around at the star-studded competition during
the Friday-night welcoming cocktail party and being chastened by
“the number of big guns in this room.” He had already
experienced the firepower from several of those “guns”
first-hand, including the Garrett Frank/Bob White and
Sheppard/Keen Butcher duos, both of whom had defeated Lemmon and
Heldring at, respectively, the William White in January and the
Philadelphia A final, in the latter case in a 3-0 rout just one week
prior to the National Doubles, a pair of results that made the
pre-final wins that Heldring and Proctor were able to engineer over
each of those teams (in the 2nd and semifinal rounds respectively, with
a quarterfinal triumph over Eric Vlcek and Rick Wahlstedt sandwiched in
between) all the more remarkable.
As had been true 38 years earlier back in 1958, the March 17th
final featured three first-time National Doubles finalists, all of them
battling a severe case of nerves, and one player (Proctor) who, like
Diehl Mateer all those years before him, had experienced final-round
success on multiple occasions. It is therefore unsurprising that it was
Proctor who came up with the match-ending winner, a backhand three-wall
(the only time he attempted this shot the entire match) at 14-13 in the
fifth that rolled out at Maule’s feet. The eventual runners-up
had actually led that game 7-2 and Maule had an open-court opportunity
to make it 8-2, but he tinned his forehand drive, thereby opening the
door for the Proctor/Heldring pair to tie the game at 9-all, after
which the issue seesawed evenly along until it was finally settled on
Proctor’s successful salvo. As Mike Pierce (who teamed with Drew
Mateer to win the Veterans event that weekend) noted afterwards,
Heldring, who had never before won an invitational doubles tournament,
thus had the National Doubles represent his first-ever career
tournament win, possibly a unique experience in the history of this
championship!
Three other aspects of that ‘96 tournament (the
fourth in the last six Baltimore-held National Doubles to end with a
five-game final) that stand out are (1) the resilience showed by DeRose
and Maule, who one year later would take that final step that had
barely eluded them in Baltimore when they soared to victory in Buffalo,
where Heldring and Proctor lost in the opening round; (2) the medically
amazing feat recorded by Bernheimer, who had undergone emergency
open-heart surgery on October 17, 1995, and whose advance with his
Boston co-denizen Poor to the 50-and-over crown (over the redoubtable
Heckscher and Ralph Howe in the final) therefore came an incredibly
compressed five months to the day after that significant and frequently
life-altering operation; and (3) the honoring throughout the weekend of
Seymour Knox, a long-time patron of the game and, like his father
before him, a former USSRA President, who was known to be dying of
cancer (to which he did indeed succumb a few weeks later) at the time
the tournament took place, who nevertheless attended every tournament
function and most of the Sunday finals and who in a letter he
subsequently wrote to the Committee conveyed his immense gratitude at
having been invited to be part of the weekend, stating that it
had been his most enjoyable tournament experience ever.
SUMMATION
Doubles squash in the United States has changed a great deal
during the 14 years since Proctor’s three-wall from the depths of
the back-left corner was collected by the same front-right nick where
DeRose’s cross-drop had landed the previous afternoon ---
for one thing, during that entire time frame only one Philadelphian,
Trevor McGuinness, has managed to add his name to the Champions List,
and he was partnering a New Yorker, Whitten Morris, when they captured
the ’08 and ’09 titles in Philadelphia and Denver
respectively. For another, enough time has passed since ’96 for a
whole new generation of standout players and teams to have emerged
during the interim, fully precluding the possibility of a repeat
Baltimore-hosted National Doubles champion, as happened with Brinton in
’46 and ’48 and with Diehl Mateer in the three consecutive
Baltimore hostings that took place in ’53, ’58 and
’65, each time with a different partner in the case of both men.
However, the Baltimore-held National Doubles championships
have generated so many memorable themes --- from the Hall Of Fame
players Lott, Diehl Mateer and the Howe brothers substantially adding
to their career legacies by what they achieved at the University Club
or the Baltimore Country Club or the Maryland Club, to the
eleventh-hour and sometimes capricious partner pick-ups that led a few
weeks or days later to a trophy-hoisting, to the myriad of rallies and
match-turning moments that this essay has chronicled --- that whatever
happens this weekend is bound to enhance the enduring impact of what
has happened in Baltimore in the past.
From Morris Clothier, a National Doubles runner-up each of
the past two years, who will be seeking his 10th career title; to
Whitten Morris, winner of the National Doubles A division from 2005-07
who therefore has won his competitive bracket of this championship each
of the past five years; to Peter Hall, who has such fond memories of
his run with Harding to the ’81 title that as soon as he heard
that Baltimore would be hosting the 2010 event he immediately made
plans to compete in this championship (in the 60-and-over division,
with Baltimore’s Charlie Fenwick) for the first time in many
years; to Len Bernheimer, who will be returning to the scene of his
medical miracle; to the Wyant brothers, Tim and Jack, who will be
attempting to join Ed and Joe Hahn, Sam and Ralph Howe and Gil and Drew
Mateer as the only siblings to collaborate in a title run --- all
of these decorated protagonists, as well as many others, will be coming
to Baltimore this weekend in enthusiastic acknowledgement of how
important this venue has been for doubles squash over the years, and
out of a respect-suffused recognition of the fact that the history of
the U. S. National Men’s Doubles in Baltimore is ultimately, in a
very real sense, the history of the U. S. National Men’s Doubles
as a whole.