A History Of The Atlantic Coast Championships
by Rob Dinerman
July 4, 2001 -"Match
Point" was the way the managers of Atlantic City's venerable Resorts
Squash Club billed their farewell party, and finding a more fitting
sobriquet would be an almost impossible task for a facility whose pair
of fabled and delightfully eccentric courts have probably hosted more
match points, and certainly hosted them at more disparate times of the
day or night, than those of any other club in the world.
More than 125 die-hard loyalists, most of them either members of the
club or longtime attendees of the longest continuously running hardball
invitational, the Atlantic Coast Championships, turned out on the
evening of June 23 to bid a fond but wistful good-bye to a cherished
and soon-to-be-departing friend and linchpin of the American hardball
game.
Master of Ceremonies Jim Copsey, who has been actively involved in
organizing this tournament for more than 30 of its 59 consecutive
annual editions, gave an emotional speech from the spacious gallery, in
which he singled out some of the club's longest-serving members (like
the 80-year-old Bob Gill, who has played there for the past 35 years,
and the much-beloved Paul Karch, who was first a club member and then
the pro from 1946 until his death in 1992) and cited a few of the
highlights of the Invitational's history
And what highlights they were! In its tenured position on the third
weekend in January, the event became a major cog in the crucial stretch
of amateur invitationals that during the hardball sport's glory days
culminated in mid-February with the U. S. National Championships.
Perched between the early-January William White event at the Merion
Cricket Club and the month-concluding Harry Cowles tourney at the
Harvard Club of New York, the Atlantic Coast Championships provided not
only a competitive and prestigious challenge in its own right but also
an important bridge between these two well-spaced aforementioned
events, thereby enabling the top contenders and the rest of the field
to create or sustain impetus for the big push to the Nationals.
There are in fact a number of instances in which the Atlantic Coast
winners rode their momentum to victories in the Cowles or the
Nationals, or both.
There were also several occasions in which a budding star had his
much-awaited breakthrough performance in the Resorts International
Hotel's top-floor venue---in 1979, for example, Penn junior Ned
Edwards, whose noteworthy firepower had elicited high expectations
which he had never to that point been able to fulfill, saved a total of
six fifth-game quarter-final match-points against '76 Champion (and '77
and '78 finalist)David Page, gratefully accepted a fortuitous wood
winner on simultaneous match-point, surmounted a 2-1 deficit in the
semis the following morning against the favored (and '77 titlist) John
Bottger and romped through the final to record his first significant
title.
Buoyed by this result, Ned dominated Bottger (three single-figure
games) in the semis of the Cowles en route to also winning that title,
and his marvelous career was thus truly launched. North American Open
Champion, three-time winner of the Boston Open, perennial No. 2 ranking
on the WPSA Pro Tour---it all began in the boisterous confines of the
Atlantic City courts.
That rowdiness had a certain charm to it as well, constituting as it
did a kind of refreshingly earthy interlude between the much more
sedate and structured circumstances that invariably attended most of
the other invitationals, nearly all of which were hosted by exclusive
private clubs, with whites-only ambiance to match. By contrast with the
foregoing, in Atlantic City the jockeying for the next available court
was more overt, the galleries noisier and more emotive, the referees
somehow a little more vocally involved, the play more overtly physical
and competitive and the entire atmosphere more viscerally charged.
It was almost as though the rough edges of the city itself were
able to impose themselves on the tenor of the action on court, ripping
away the veneer of forced courtesies, a welcome respite for many, a
contrast similar in tone to that in major-tournament tennis between
Wimbledon and the U. S. Open.
This dissonance was doubtless abetted both by the round-the-clock
continuity of play that characterized the period between late Friday
afternoon and early Saturday evening (necessitated by the presence of
100+ entrants having to forge their competitive destinies on only two
courts) and by the state of the courts themselves, which were usually
quite warm (hard to lay the ball down) and exceptionally gritty (good
for the traction, bad for those seeking a predictable or consistent
bounce, very bad for the ripped-open skin of those who dove or fell).
If a vote were ever taken among squash aficionados as to which squash
courts anywhere in the world came closest to recreating the dynamics
that prevailed in the gladiator's pits of the Roman Coliseum, there is
no doubt that the Resorts courts would win in a walk---and that the
voters would feel that they were HONORING the club with their vote
rather than in any way denigrating it.
In the last 25 years alone, there were a plethora of significant
results that became conversation-pieces during the subsequent summer
and benchmarks of the tournament's already-swollen legacy. In addition
to the Edwards breakthrough these included: a three-year appearance by
the WPSA Pro Tour from 1979-81, with Sharif Khan winning the first two
finals (reprising his '71 U. S. Pro title-winning march on these
courts) but losing in the '81 semi to Gordy Anderson., who, as he did
all too often during this period following his wins over Sharif, Gordy
lost in the ensuing match, this time to an opportunistic Stu Goldstein,
for whom this would turn out to be the last title of his WPSA career;
twilight-of-their-career performances by Michael Pierce and Scott Ryan,
both of whom had vainly vied for the championship for several decades
(in Ryan's case beginning when he was an underclassman at Navy in the
early 60's) and each of whom finally gained their coveted victory at a
time when it seemed well beyond their reach; David Page winning the '76
final over older brother Palmer Page, losing the '78 final to younger
brother Tom Page, with John Bottger defeating BOTH Palmer and David in
winning the interceding '77 tourney; Gil Mateer continuing this family
theme by adding a pair of Atlantic Coast championships in the 80's to
the septet his father Diehl annexed a few decades earlier; and Tom
Harrity seeing his mid-90's bid for a what would have been a record
fifth consecutive title fall one agonizing point short when he lost the
'97 final by that excruciating margin to Rob Hill, who one month later
would punctuate this achievement by winning the first of his three
straight Nationals.
All of these noteworthy moments, plus a horde of others we are
prevented by space considerations from enumerating, played an important
role in the history of the American hardball game during the past six
decades --- a history the organizers of this Championship are
determined to continue to contribute to by moving the event to the new
Shore Club at nearby Somers Point and holding it, still as a hardball
event, on their thirty-inch-wider softball courts, possibly with a
doubles competition thrown in as well.
But everyone recognizes that the flavor and distinct character that has
permeated this event and this venue can never be truly replicated. The
Atlantic Press eloquently summarized the (more bitter than sweet)
bittersweet circumstances of this club's "farewell tour" and "Match
Point" festivities, when it concluded its front-page article on the
club's imminent demise by describing two of the club's old-timers
walking off the court after a work-out thusly: "It is a walk they took
many times over the past 36 years. A walk they will no longer do. Game
over."