David Ryan's 96-Hour Odyssey by Rob Dinerman David Ryan's 96-hour odyssey from non-entrant to champion as chronicled in Rob Dinerman's A History Of Harvard Squash During The Mike Way Coaching Era:
David Ryan had entered the 2018 Individuals, scheduled to be played the
weekend after the Potter Cup at the Squash On Fire facility in
Washington D. C., but his ranking wasn’t high enough to get him into
the top division, which, as noted, had been limited to the top 16
ranked players since 2015, and he had no intention of traveling to D.
C. to play in the second flight for players ranked Nos. 17 to 32.
Although he had compiled a spotless 15-0 combined record in dual-meet
and Potter Cup play that season, he had played at No. 4 and therefore
wasn’t ranked high enough to make it into the top flight. Convinced
that his season and college career were over, he did not play any
squash that week, which he instead spent reminiscing about the season,
enjoying his free time with friends and studying for a midterm exam he
was due to take the following Monday morning in a History course. But
just prior to the Individuals weekend, as the draws were being
finalized, he got a phone call from Coach Way informing him that enough
players (a full half-dozen), exhausted by the grueling three-match
Potter Cup weekend just past, had withdrawn from the Individuals top
flight for there to be a spot available for him if he was still
interested. Included in the group of withdrawing players was the 2017
Individuals champion Osama Khalifa, whose lower-back condition had
flared up enough to prevent him from defending his title, just as had
happened with his older brother Amr, who similarly had been unable to
play in the Individuals during his senior year in 2015 due to the same
injury.
Ryan had not played in the
Individuals since his freshman year, when, as previously detailed, he
surprised everyone with his run to the semis. During the intervening
seasons, he had been frustrated at not having the opportunity to
challenge the top players at other schools due to the strength of
Harvard’s top three players --- now the opportunity he had craved for
years was being dropped into his lap at the last possible moment, and
he was not going to pass it up. He advanced to the semis with Friday
wins over Andrew Douglas and Alvin Heumann, the No. 1 players at Penn
and Dartmouth respectively. Those results created an additional
challenge, since Ryan, not expecting to make it that far, had only
packed two shirts and two pairs of shorts in his suitcase! This meant
that, after defeating Heumann Friday evening, Ryan had to go back to
his hotel room, hand-wash his clothes in the shower and hope they would
be dry enough for him to wear them the following day.
His semifinal opponent,
teammate Timmy Brownell, had beaten Princeton’s top player Youssef
Ibraham in the quarterfinals and had never lost any of his many
challenge matches (the majority of which had gone five games) with Ryan
during their two years at Harvard, nor had he lost the one time they
had played each other in an official tournament at the 2014 World
Junior Championships in Namibia. This match went to a fifth game as
well, but this time Ryan jumped off to an early lead, which he closed
out with an 11-7 tally.
Waiting for Ryan in the final was
the top-seeded Kush Kumar of Trinity College, who had cracked the top
100 in the PSA rankings prior to starting college. There was very
little turnaround time between Ryan’s semi, which didn’t end until
nearly 11pm, and the Sunday-morning final, and Kumar, whose
straight-game semifinal win over Abouaish had neither lasted nearly as
long nor ended nearly as late the Ryan-Brownell match, was definitely
the fresher player. In spite of this, Ryan got off to a great start,
winning the first game 11-4 and continuing his momentum through the
second game as well. He knew that Kumar was a “momentum” player and he
therefore tried varying ways of keeping Kumar off his rhythm. These
ranged from implementing a game plan predicated on deep, straight
drives mixed with counter-attacking straight drops, to occasionally
resorting to what he later termed “tactical stoppages in play,” to
sometimes trying an unorthodox shot out of the blue. “I needed to pull
out everything I had up my sleeve,” he wrote years later about his
approach to that match, and his strategy and execution were both
throwing points on the pile and getting into Kumar’s head. But by
mid-match Ryan’s legs were feeling the strain of the weekend, and when
Kumar, who had been told by Coach Assaiante that he was leaving too
many loose balls and that he therefore needed to “tidy up the court,”
rallied to win the third game and jumped out to a 7-1 lead in the
fourth, Ryan wisely decided to let that game go in order to conserve
his energy for the fifth game.
During most of those two
mid-match games, Ryan’s increasing fatigue affected the width of his
drives, opening up the court for Kumar to run him from front to back
and impose his excellent front-court game. In the break before the last
game began, Saad Abouaish, Brownell and Coach Way exhorted Ryan that
this would be the last game he would ever play wearing the Crimson
colors and that, for better or worse, he would remember the upcoming
game for the rest of his life. Abouaish, who knew Kumar’s game well
after the several matches they had played during the past two years,
also advised Ryan to mostly drive the ball down the near wall when he
was up front, rather than going cross-court, since Kumar appeared to
him to be “sitting” on the cross-court and wasn’t reacting as well when
Ryan instead hit a straight drive.
Ryan clawed his way to a slim
7-5 advantage, but Kumar then won five of the next six points,
the last of which, a stroke call in his favor when there was contact
near the right wall, gave him a 10-8 lead, double-match-ball. The call
infuriated Ryan, which, under normal circumstances, as Ryan later
acknowledged, “would have instigated a strongly worded conversation
with the referee and a lot of bad language under my breath aimed at
Kush. But, in this instance, after a loud roar of ‘Nooooo!’ at how
wrong the decision was, it fired me up like I have never felt before.
It gave me a second wind (or third or fourth wind), to the point that I
know I wasn’t even thinking, ‘Oh no, I’m two match balls down.’ All
that was going through my head is that I am not losing another point,
no matter what.” Nor did he, as each of the match’s last four points
landed in Ryan’s column. Trailing 10-8, he volleyed a perfect forehand
drop winner off a Kumar backhand cross-court, following which he legged
down a Kumar drop shot to the front-left and hit a bold but risky
cross-drop winner. Ryan’s momentum carried him close to the left wall,
leaving the whole right side of the court open if Kumar had been able
to retrieve the ball. He dove forward in a vain attempt to reach it and
lay there on the ground for quite a while. When he finally rose to his
feet, there was a demoralized aspect to both his body language and
facial expression during the brief stoppage (while someone raced in
with a towel to dry the area of the court where Kumar had landed),
almost as if Kumar realized that his best chance to win the match had
come and gone.
At 10-all, following a tense
exchange near the front forehand corner, Kumar nearly hit a forehand
cross-court past Ryan, who got just enough of his racquet on the ball
to send it along the left wall, in response to which Kumar backhanded a
working-boast volley into the tin. It was a low-percentage shot that
appeared to have a bit of desperation to it. On the final exchange,
Kumar hit a good backhand straight-drop that drew Ryan too far out of
position to muster anything more than a weak backhand cross-court
directly onto Kumar’s racquet at mid-court. Ryan later said that by
that stage he had become so rubbery-legged that he knew that that was
his last swing of the point either way, and that all he could do was
pray that his shot would somehow catch a dead nick or that Kumar would
mishandle the return. With the entire right side of the court exposed,
all Kumar had to do to win the point was get the ball back to the front
wall.
However, whether out of mental
or physical exhaustion, his return went right into the bottom of the
tin as an incredulous Ryan jumped for joy, yelling “No way!” and
brandishing his fist to celebrate the culmination of his improbable and
extremely compressed run from non-participant as of less than 96 hours
earlier to Individuals champion. It was the first time that a player
had rallied from match-ball-down to win the men's Individuals since
1939.
The Harvard contingent
had booked a 4pm flight back to Boston, but snowy conditions in New
England caused two separate delays, and it was very close to midnight
when the plane finally landed. While they were waiting at the
Washington airport for their plane to finally load up and take off,
Ryan emailed his History teacher to request that he be allowed to take
the exam a few days later (rather than at 9am the very next morning),
citing the unexpected way that he had spent the previous few days.
Unbeknownst to Ryan, his teammates, both some of those who were on site
with him in Washington and those who had been following his progress
online from Cambridge, decided to surprise him. In a maneuver initially
orchestrated by Abouaish, the group that had spent the weekend on
campus arrived at Logan Airport in time to hide behind an escalator and
in a vestibule near the baggage-claims area.
When Ryan (carrying the Pool
Trophy he had won) and the rest of the traveling group showed up to
collect their bags, his teammates jumped out from their hiding place
bearing congratulatory posters for an informal but festive team
celebration that extended for several hours after they had returned to
campus. There was a team-wide feeling that Ryan had invested so much of
himself in Harvard squash, and had expended so much effort and emotion
in pursuit of a national team championship, that his extraordinary
individual triumph fully deserved to be saluted and celebrated in this
fashion --- even though many of them would be also taking midterm exams
the next day and the days that followed as well. As it happened, the
History teacher would not grant Ryan any postponement of his exam, but
David Ryan somehow did well on it anyway.
