September 5, 2007-The
International Squash Doubles Association (ISDA), was formed in January
2000, during the middle of the 1999-2000 season, when the state of
doubles squash in North America was at a crossroads juncture in its
evolution. The World Professional Squash
Association (WPSA) pro hardball tour, which had such a successful
albeit finite dozen-year run from the late 1970’s until the early
1990’s, had featured, at its apex, close to 20 hardball singles
events per season which were complemented with approximately a
half-dozen doubles tournaments as well, almost all of which (two in
Greenwich along with one each in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Toronto and
Vancouver) were in the northeastern corridor and interspersed among the
much more numerous singles stops on the schedule. The primary focus of
the WPSA tour was clearly on the singles, with the doubles tourneys
playing a solid but decidedly secondary role.
This latter situation was, if
anything, only furthered when the WPSA was effectively taken over by
the Professional Squash Association (PSA), the primary professional
world-wide softball organization, on January 1st, 1993. By then the pro
hardball events were inexorably withering away (there were only four
hardball tournaments in 1994-95, and only one, piggybacked almost as a
sidelight onto a January 1996 Greenwich doubles event, the following
season), and as the second half of the 1990’s progressed, the pro
doubles stops, mostly ignored by a PSA that was directing virtually all
of its efforts on the softball tour, were reduced to puttering
aimlessly along, burdened by small purses (almost all in the $10,000
range, save for the $25,000 Heights Casino venue in Brooklyn Heights)
and a sense of lethargy that inexorably resulted in their drawing less
and less attention from the overall squash community as the years moved
along.
As a dispiriting corollary to the
foregoing, there were almost no new doubles courts being constructed (a
few, in fact, were disappearing) and participation in the sport was
flagging in the amateur ranks as well, both at the tournament level
(the U. S. Nationals entries declined steadily during this period) and
recreationally. And as an illustrative example of how little interest
the PSA had in this form of squash, when its Wales-based executive
director Gawain Briars was already in New York to attend the Tournament
of Champions one late-1990’s January, at a time when the highly
popular pro-am O’Reilly Invitational was simultaneously being
contested at the University Club just a dozen blocks northwest of the
Tournament Of Champions, he declined an invitation from Doubles
Chairman Andrew Slater to attend the black-tie O’Reilly dinner
and see for himself what doubles squash was all about.
Alarmed at the potential
ramifications for the sport’s future if this drift continued much
longer, spurred on as well by a competing vision of the game’s
upside potential and aware that Slater’s increasingly heavy
lesson schedule as the head pro at the Cynwyd Club were making it
impossible for this dedicated Doubles Committee veteran to continue
coordinating the doubles-tour events after his praiseworthy 15 years of
service, superstar Gary Waite (who by that juncture had in the prior
six years partnered first Scott Dulmage, then Jamie Bentley, then Mark
Talbott and then Damien Mudge to the No. 1 team ranking) and his
entrepreneurial Canadian compatriot James Hewitt (who later that winter
would team up with Tyler Millard to win the Canadian National Doubles
title) organized the several-dozen PSA doubles players, most of whom
were holdovers from the WPSA era, and convinced them that the only
realistic hope for reviving pro doubles was for them to secede from the
PSA and create their own association devoted exclusively to doubles.
The ensuing parting with the PSA was
completely amicable and in fact done with the blessing of the latter
organization, which had always acknowledged that it had neither the
resources nor the interest to devote more than a token attempt at
promoting doubles, and whose leaders, as would soon become glaringly
apparent, clearly and somewhat understandably had no idea how much
potential revenue they were thereby unknowingly foregoing.
With these administrative
preliminaries safely and speedily behind them, there remained for Waite
and Hewitt the formidable challenge of coming up with enough money to
establish an office in Toronto, a crucial squash center; give the
faltering existing sites a tangible jolt; and come up with enough
viable new events to generate a credible schedule. One major boost in
this direction came almost as a godsend within a few months of the
ISDA’s formation, when the Racquet & Tennis Club in Manhattan
--- led by the beneficence of club member George Kellner and the
efforts of head pro Neal Vohr, a long-time pro doubles veteran (and
1985 U. S. Mixed Doubles champion with Gail Ramsay) and club member
Morris Clothier, who by that April 2000 stage had already won six of
his right-wall-record nine U. S. National Doubles crowns --- added the
$40,000 Kellner Cup as a glittering highlight culmination of that
1999-2000 campaign.
This championship, the first
compelling pro doubles event in Manhattan and, as noted, by far the
most lucrative pro doubles tourney ever, was such a smashing success
(the spacious R & T gallery being completely packed for the latter
rounds, especially the final, in which Waite and his power-hitting
right-wall partner Mudge topped Bentley and Willie Hosey to complete an
undefeated season) that matters subsequently escalated on several
fronts during the interceding months leading up to the September outset
of the 2000-2001 season. Clothier and a few other squash aficionados,
fueled by the Kellner Cup experience and what it conveyed about the
ISDA tour’s potential prospects, embarked on a fundraising
mission that would provide the fledgling association with $130,000
worth of seed money to be spent over the next two years, which enabled
Waite and Hewitt to promise each of the existing sites that committed
to increase their purse by $5,000 a matching amount from the ISDA fund.
Many of these tournament committees took the ISDA up on this offer,
while others, their competitive spirit engaged by the magnitude of the
Kellner Cup purse (which would itself double in the next two years),
resolved to sizably increase their own purses in response to the now
substantially raised bar. Still other sites, reacting to what they saw
was occurring and not wanting to be left behind at the gate, raced to
become new additions to the ISDA schedule.
The upshot of all this hectic
activity was that the 2001-2002 ISDA tour, which began barely 20 months
after the association had been formed, consisted of more than twice the
number of ranking tournaments (17 compared to eight) that had comprised
the schedule just two years earlier. By then, new sites had emerged in
Baltimore, Denver, Buffalo, St. Louis, Toronto (several), Long Island,
New York, Wilmington and Philadelphia, and the player pool had
correspondingly expanded so greatly in response to this enormously
enhanced and multi-front competitive opportunity that the
season-opening event at the Denver Club had more teams in its
QUALIFYING draw alone than had ever before entered the overall
tournament.
At least equally significantly,
doubles squash as a whole was galvanized by what the ISDA had wrought
during the early-2000’s, a process that was the converse of what
had happened two decades earlier with the WPSA (which flourished IN
RESPONSE TO the strong late-1970’s expansion of the overall
hardball game rather than vice-versa) and that strongly continues to
this day. The 2002 U. S. National Doubles, held in New York and
“open” to pros for the first time in the tournament’s
69-year history, had many ISDA participants in the 26-team Championship
flight (more than triple the paltry eight teams that had contested the
2001 title in Portland) that was part of a by-far-record 128-team
overall turnout, which figure, bolstered as well by vastly increased
entries in the women’s, skill levels and age-groups, was itself
handily eclipsed by the 148 teams that showed up when the event
returned to New York three years later. (In both of those events, Waite
and Clothier, collaborating as seamlessly on the court as they had done
off it in 2000 when they had combined Clothier’s fundraising
expertise with Waite’s salesmanship skills in getting the ISDA
off the ground, partnered each other to those respective 2002 and 2005
titles, in each case surviving riveting finals. In both those seasons
as well, Waite and Mudge went undefeated in ISDA ranking play, though
2006-2007 they were finally displaced as the No. 1 ISDA team by Paul
Price and Ben Gould.)
New court construction has in recent
years taken off at an unprecedented level; no fewer than TWENTY new
doubles courts, from all sectors of North America, have sprung up just
in the past three years, with more in the planning stages for the next
few months; never before have so many new doubles courts come into
existence in so compressed a time frame. The prestigious amateur
doubles tournaments, like the William White Invitational in suburban
Philadelphia at the Merion Cricket Club (which held a pro prize-money
doubles tournament last spring for the first time in the club’s
century-plus history), the Silver Racquets at Racquet & Tennis, the
Gold Racquets at the Rockaway Hunting Club in Long Island and the Smith
Chapman Invitational at Club Atwater in Montreal have all experienced
clear-cut upticks in both the quantity and quality of their draws. And
member participation, both in the pro-am events that accompany many of
the ISDA tourneys and in club championships, leagues and court
bookings, have substantially expanded as well in recent years.
The ISDA tour, the sport’s
professional showcase, remains a key engine driving this larger
expansion, as witness the number of cases (more than 75%) in which
top-echelon ISDA players are affiliated with the clubs that host ISDA
tour events. Though the now-biennial Kellner Cup has maintained its
$70-80,000 level and remains one of the tour’s truly coveted
trophies, it has now been replaced as the top purse by the biennial
Briggs Cup, hosted by the Apawamis Club in Rye, NY, and named in honor
of its long-time Racquets Director Peter Briggs, a WPSA Doubles Team Of
The Year honoree with Talbott in 1984 and two-time North American Open
champion, which debuted in 2003 as the first doubles tournament ever to
offer a $100,000 in prize money. The North American Open itself in
Greenwich has reached the $50,000 range, which other sites have begun
to approach as well.
There are prospects of even greater
gains on the horizon as doubles squash, which began in 1907 with the
completion of America’s first doubles court at the Racquet Club
Of Philadelphia, enters its second century. After firmly establishing
himself as the greatest doubles player of all time (and equally firmly
establishing himself and Mudge, whose total of 76 ISDA ranking titles
is more than ten times that of any other team, as the greatest doubles
TEAM of all time) during these past 15 years of title-filled
brilliance, former PSA top-15 and WPSA No. 1 Waite, now nearing 41, has
decided to play only a limited schedule this year and concentrate
instead on a grass-roots effort to promote doubles participation
throughout the continent among juniors. Hewitt, the Executive Director
of the ISDA tour (and 2004 U. S. Mixed Doubles co-champion with his
wife, Steph), will be overseeing the day-to-day operations, while both
men pursue the kind of umbrella sponsor that has been so helpful to
other racquet-sports tours in the past.
Price, a former British Open
finalist and PSA world No. 2, and his Australian compatriot Gould are
two of a number of PSA performers (notably 2001 British Open finalist
Chris Walker, late-1990’s PSA No. 26 Clive Leach, Australian
Institute of Sport alumnus Scott Butcher, former British Junior No. 1
John Russell, who combined with American Preston Quick to win the 2007
U. S. National Doubles, and Canadian Pan Am Fed Cup No. 1 Viktor Berg,
all of whom have attained top-10 ISDA rankings) who, finding the ISDA
tour too alluring and remunerative to pass up, have switched their
efforts away from the PSA and into the ISDA. Recent PSA President and
top-15 Mark Chaloner last season joined this group, whose number is
clearly on the swift ascent and also includes 2006 world No. 1 Jonathon
Power.
The ISDA tour itself is deeper and
more competitive than ever before. Gone, probably forever, are the days
when one team can go undefeated, as Waite and Mudge did on three
occasions in compiling their resplendent seven-year skein at No. 1;
last season there were a record four different teams than won at least
one ranking event, and each of THEM suffered at least one first-round
defeat, which never would have happened a few years ago. The sport as a
whole is certainly in better shape today than it has ever been, a
marked contrast to its stagnating state of less than a decade ago, and
quite possibly an even brighter future lies ahead if the current
momentum can be sustained and successfully built upon during the next
few years. Author’s Note: U. S. Women’s 40-and-over champion (with Julie Harris) contributed to this article.