Yale Club To Lose Its Exhibition Hardball Court
by Rob Dinerman
May 30, 2002-
The main exhibition court at the Yale Club of New York, the site of
numerous professional, amateur and age-group tournaments and some
extraordinary matches during the more than two decades since its
construction in 1981, will be eliminated as part of a substantial
summer-long renovation of the club's athletic facilities and locker
room areas on the fifth and sixth floors.
For the past four years, this court has been the club's last remaining
hardball court, and its 125-seat gallery was filled to capacity many
times during hardball's glory days of the 1980's and early 1990's. The
athletic facilities were shut down during the Memorial Day weekend and
the Executive Council vote that sealed the famous court's fate occurred
at a meeting on the evening of May 28th.
A STORY OF LOST COURTS
With the departure of this court, which hosted tournament play as
recently as the 2002 USSRA Nationals this past February, another step
was taken in a process that seems destined to leave New York, formerly
the mecca of hardball squash, bereft of any hardball courts before too
much longer. Of the 1l clubs (Racquet & Tennis, University,
Lincoln, Uptown, Heights Casino, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, the New York
Athletic Club, the City Athletic Club and Fifth Avenue) that entered
teams in the MSRA A League in the early 1990's, only the Harvard Club
will still have any hardball courts by the time the Yale Club
renovation is over.
Further afield, the two fabled courts at the Resorts International
Hotel, the site of the annual Atlantic Coast championships for 59
consecutive years, were lost when the hotel was purchased last year by
new owners who decided to replace the squash area with additional
luxury suites; a bittersweet "Match Point" farewell party was given
last June to allow the event's passionately loyal following to say
good-by to this unique facility. This change forced the 2002 edition of
this storied invitational to relocate to a nearby club and, more
importantly, to be played on softball courts, though still as a
hardball event, which may be hardball's future, though no one who has
to deal with the 80 additional square feet, higher tin or sloping side
wall boundary lines would doubt that the hardball game is decidedly
ill-suited to softball dimensions.
Other venues of longstanding hardball events have lost hardball courts
in recent years as well, from the University Club of Washington D. C.,
site for more than a half-century of the Woodruff-Nee Invitational,
which has had its original four-court allotment cut in half, to the
Rockaway Hunting Club in Long Island, where the prestigious Gold
Racquets Invitational was held as a hardball event for more than 70
years before the hardball courts were converted to softball in 1999, to
the famed Merion Cricket Club in suburban Philadelphia, for decades the
breeding ground for national champions and the host club for the
William White invitational and often for the USSRA Nationals, which
lost two of its five hardball courts a few years ago.
Though Merion still puts on a somewhat diminished version of the White
and has committed to host the2003 Nationals, no one can deny either
that the creation of these "facts on the ground" has severely imperiled
the survival of the hardball game or that the elimination of the Yale
Club's court is another damaging step in that process. This is so
because of the major role that court, known for its solid walls, true
bounces and intimate character, played in the vitality of the hardball
game.
TOURNEY HISTORY
The Yale Club Invitational, which actually began a few years before the
exhibition court was constructed, grew during its 20-year run into one
of the highlight events on the USSRA schedule and its late-October time
slot made it into the first important tourney, the one that often set
the tone for the entire season. The World Professional Squash
Association (WPSA), the pro hardball association, made the Yale Club an
important stop in its schedule as well; both the World Series of Squash
and several editions of the U. S. Open were contested there and the
WPSA's top two players, Sharif Khan and Michael Desaulniers, played a
stirring exhibition match in October 1981 as part of the grand opening
festivities of the exhibition court after its construction the previous
summer.
There were a number of years when a Yale Club Pro Invitational, usually
an eight-man draw composed on New York-based performers, produced such
stars as Desaulniers, Ned Edwards and Tom Page among its champions. For
the past 32 years, the Eastern States Veterans Invitational, with
flights for every age-group beginning with the 40-and-over, has been
hosted at the Yale Club in late January, and its results have had an
important determinative influence on the seeding for the Nationals
several weeks later. In the several years since four of the club's five
hardball courts were converted into three softball courts in 1998, the
Yale Club has made use of the Harvard Club's courts for this event, but
the Yale Club has still been the headquarters for the tournament, and
most of its finals have still taken place on the exhibition court,
whose glass back wall and excellent sight lines have made for
outstanding viewing, as has the manner in which the bleachers run down
to a front row that is within two feet of the back wall, creating the
Fenway Park-type effect of putting the spectators right on top of the
action.
The New York State Open, Metropolitan Open and Junior squash events
have also been housed at the Yale Club, which perennially entered teams
in MSRA leagues at every level and whose A Team won the league
championship seven times in the 11-year period from 1983-93. And the
final of the annual Club Championship always took place on the
exhibition court as the kick-off event of the annual end-of-season
Squash Dinner in the spring.
LEGACY OF FINE MATCH PLAY
It would almost be inevitable that a court that hosted so much
high-level competition would become the battleground for some of the
most compelling hardball matches ever played, and that is exactly what
happened. The World Series of Squash in 1982, the final event of that
WPSA season, became a forum for Desaulniers to accentuate his No. 1
end-of-season ranking, which he had clinched one month earlier by
terminating Sharif's six-year run of North American Open championships.
Desaulniers seemed so unstoppable in his final-round straight-set
demolition of Gordy Anderson (Sharif's upset conqueror one round prior)
that it was difficult to for any of the 150 spectators who jammed the
gallery that day to believe that his time at the top would be so
ephemeral and that first-round loser Mark Talbott would wind up winning
every remaining WPSA event hosted at the Yale Club.
In contrast to the dominant fashion in which Desaulniers ripped through
that inaugural pro event, the amateur invitational and club
championship competitions often had final rounds that were
characterized by incredibly close finishes. The very first invitational
in March of '78 was comprised of only 16 players (a modest beginning to
a tourney which would later feature more than 80 players and require a
second competitive flight) the last two of which, Glenn Greenberg and
Edwards, fought to a fifth-game tiebreaker, which went to Greenberg
when Edwards sustained an immobilizing leg cramp during the tiebreaker
and had to default.
In the final of the '92 event, Rob Dinerman won 15-13 in the fifth from
0-7 and 11-12 against his long-time rival Cyrus Mehta, whom Dinerman
would also edge five months later in fourth- and fifth-set tiebreakers
in the final of the '93 Yale Club club championship final, which he
thereby won for the 14th of his record 16 times.
National champions Tom Page and Kenton Jernigan both were winners of
the invitational, as were intercollegiate champions Vic Wagner and
Adrian Ezra, while such superstars as John Nimick, Jeff Stanley, John
Foster, Greg Zaff and Edwards, WPSA top-tenners all, each fell in their
final-round appearances in this event.
Foster reached three consecutive finals from 1989-91, but lost to Page
twice and Ezra, while Stanley led Darius Pandole 14-11 in the fourth
game in '85 before getting tied and tinning a risky serve-return
following his no-set call. And both Gil Mateer (who dropped the first
two games of his round-of-16 match with Hollis Russell in '78) and John
Winchester (who trailed Chi Chi Ubina, 12-10 in the fifth in their
quarter-final in '93) rallied from the brink of early-round defeats to
eventually win the entire tournament.
STRANGE CLOSING STORY
Neither the exhibition court's impressive historical legacy (both in
squash and in squash tennis, whose national championships were often
held there), nor the enormous efforts of the many club members
committed to saving it, nor the host of petitions, motions, threats of
legal action and meetings that took place at a frantic pace in recent
months were ultimately enough to undo the votes by the Athletics
Committee and the House Committee (in both of which the club's
squash-playing members are currently badly under-represented) that took
place early this spring.
One of these meetings was abruptly canceled by the club president just
hours before it was to begin, the Athletics Committee chairman claimed
that he couldn't discuss the matter due to a "gag" order imposed on him
by the Council after another closed-door meeting and the club manager,
reflecting the defensive "herd mentality" that developed among the
plan's increasingly beleaguered proponents, actually avoided returning
the phone calls of members whom he knew to be opposed to elimination of
the hardball court.
This defensive posture was exacerbated when fully two-thirds of the
respondents to a poll mailed early this month voted in favor of
retaining the hardball court.
This court cannot be converted into a softball court, either presently
or probably ever, due to the location of vital water pipes and
electrical connections in the immediate area, which would necessitate
closing the entire building down for several weeks at a huge cost to
the club over and above the expenditure of more than $900,000. As a
result, the area currently occupied by the hardball court and gallery
will go to expanding the exercise area. The three newly constructed
softball courts offer no viewing galleries and all of which at the
moment have room for fewer than a dozen people to watch from the narrow
walkway that runs behind their back wall.