Bill Ullman Captures 60th Annual Cate Hardball Squash Invitational by Rob Dinerman Dateline February 12th
--- Trailing two games to one against the defending and six-time
champion, former Princeton star Bill Ullman rallied to a 15-12
fifth-game victory over Ashley Kayler in the final round of the Open
division of the 60th annual Cate Hardball Invitational, hosted as
always by the Cate School in southern California. Ullman, who won this
tournament in 1986, 1988 and 1989 while attending grad school at UCLA,
thus made a triumphant return to hardball competition after having not
played in a sanctioned ranking tournament in the 27 years since he won
this title for the third time back in '89, while Kayler, a former
early-1990's varsity player at Berkeley who succeeded that school's
legendary coach Dick Crawford and ran the squash program at his alma
mater for more than a decade, demonstrated his usual high level of
athleticism and tenacity before falling just short at the very end.
Former multiple national age-group hardball champions Tefft Smith and
Palmer Page both made the trek to the west coast along with Ullman,
with Page winning the round-robin 60's event and Smith, a three-time
Cate 60's winner during the past four years, finishing behind Page and
Jim Gibbons in this flight while also reaching the final of the B
division. There he lost to Gibbons's son Rob, whose mother, Brett
Elebash, won the women's final over Mimi Munson. This was not the first
Rob Gibbons/Brett Elebash son/mother "double," as in early 2002 both
won their respective flights in the U. S. National Skill Level
Championships, in the wake of which Squash Magazine in its next issue
posted a photo of the two Gibbonses on the inside cover under the
caption "A Family Affair."
The remaining
division, the 50's, was won by Bob Mosier. Throughout the weekend
tributes were paid to Tournament Chair Terry Eagle, who has held that
role since 1982, and Stan Woodworth, who founded this event back in
1956 and ran it every year until Eagle took over, and who was famous
for the tagline that he always attached to every tournament entry form,
"Remember, It's Just A Game.” For a tournament of this standing and
popularity to have had only two Tournament Chairs throughout a duration
of this magnitude speaks volumes about the dedication of these men and
the legacy that this tournament, which fully plans to go on for years
to come, has deservedly established over this substantial period of
time.
