Fight To Save Yale Club Hardball Court
by Rob Dinerman
June 9, 2002 -Galvanized
by the smug, gloating tone permeating the open letter that outgoing
Yale Club President Peter Wells recently wrote the membership
triumphantly reporting that the Executive Council's project to "enhance
the athletic facilities" in a summer-long renovation that would
eliminate the club's famed exhibition hardball court was swiftly
"proceeding as planned," even in the face of a membership-wide poll in
which 371 of the 565 respondents (66%) voted against the renovation, an
Ad Hoc Committee wrote a two-page eight-point letter to the Council
dated June 3rd detailing the many flaws in the way the Council has
proceeded and requesting a reconsideration of the entire project that
would give the members an opportunity to have their voices heard.
The Ad Hoc Committee is composed of a half-dozen members who have been
at the Yale Club for more than 25 years and is led by Bill Rubin, who
co-founded the prestigious Eastern State Veterans Invitational with the
late Bill Riesenfeld in 1971, and who along with Riesenfeld received a
major award from the USSRA in 1995 marking quarter-century milestone of
the event's existence. Mr. Rubin and his dedicated band of Committee
members are currently considering their options, as well as the
ramifications of allowing the cherished court to disappear and the cost
of whatever attempts they choose to prevent this from happening.
The planned elimination of venerable but still serviceable hardball
court would of course mean the end of the now 32-year-old event, and
Mr. Rubin and his group are fortified not only by the unexpectedly
compelling two-thirds vote that just occurred but also by the
supportive urging they have received from dozens of longtime members of
the American squash community who over the years have played in the
Eastern States tourney, as well as other Yale Club-hosted events like
the Yale Club Invitational and a host of metropolitan regional
championships (like the New York States and the Metropolitan Open) that
were played on the exhibition court and made it one of the icons of the
American game.
POLITICAL STONEWALLING
Almost from the time the renovation project was announced late this
past winter, and certainly from the moment significant opposition to it
almost immediately surfaced, the renovation's main proponents have
engaged in an unseemly level of stonewalling and other defensive
tactics. President Wells highlighted his introductory remarks at the
first meeting with the Ad Hoc Committee that quickly formed to express
their opposition by peremptorily and preemptively asserting that the
Council's project was a "fait accompli." Wells subsequently canceled a
planned meeting with the Ad Hoc Committee on the very day it was
scheduled to occur and attacked one of many members desiring the
continued presence of the exhibition court as "selfish and petty" for
stating his views.
His loss of composure has been replicated by several other Club
officers as well. The Athletics Committee chairman, whose current
Committee contains a lower percentage of squash players that at any
time in that body's history, declined to respond when asked what had
been decided in an important early-spring Council meeting, saying that
he had been asked not to discuss or even disclose the results of that
session. And Club General Manager Alan Dutton has taken the "evasion"
tactic one step further by refusing to return repeated messages left
with his secretary and on his voicemail by members whom he knows are
not in favor of the project.
NEVER STEPPED ON COURT
Incoming President Fred Leone, who served a previous term as President
in the mid-1990's, took over the subsequent exchanges after the first
meeting chaired by Mr. Wells. Like a large majority of the Council
members, Mr. Leone himself has never played squash and doesn't even use
the sixth-floor athletic facilities, acknowledging that he is also a
member of a health club and gets his exercise there. Part of the reason
for his driving the renovation project (which would replace the
existing court and 125-seat gallery area with an expanded exercise area
for stretching and machines) stems from his stated view that this
upgrading of the exercise facilities would attract new members who now
belong to health clubs.
However, neither the outgoing or incoming President nor the Council as
a whole at any time offered any financial projections or estimates of
how many members it would take or over what period of time to recoup
the capital expenditure of the sixth-floor renovation, which is
expected to exceed a half-million dollars and further cost the club
significantly more money in lost revenue while the floor is completely
unused for the entire summer and the members are inconveniently
dispersed to other nearby private clubs by reciprocal arrangement.
The Council's position was significantly undermined by the
aforementioned two-thirds late-May vote solidly opposing the project's
going forward, and by the discovery that the initial premise that the
area created by the renovation could eventually be converted into a
fourth softball court was flawed due to structural and engineering
issues and the enormous additional cost that would be involved.
FOLLOWING SWIMMING'S LEAD
During the late 1990's, when it appeared that the club's fifth-floor
swimming pool might have to be sacrificed in a project involving that
floor's locker room facilities, a Save The Pool Committee was formed
which threatened to go to the New York newspapers and/or bring a
lawsuit. In the end, the plans were scrapped and the pool was allowed
to remain.
Rather than threaten similar action in this case, the Ad Hoc Committee
exercised their right under Club by-laws to to petition for a special
meeting of the entire club membership to vote on the proposed
renovation project, only to be informed, the two-thirds vote
notwithstanding, that such a meeting would not be allowed to occur.