Excerpts, Rob Dinerman's Collected Squash Histories
Excerpt No. 1 --- This
passage from the "A History Of Yale Women's Squash During The Mark
Talbott Coaching Era (1998-2004)" chapter chronicles Yale's thrilling
5-4 victory over two-time defending champion Trinity College in the
final round of the 2004 Howe Cup (emblematic of the women's national
team championship), a breakthrough that launched the Yale women to Howe
Cup titles during the following two years as well.
In the aftermath of the dual
meet win over Trinity, Yale breezed through the remainder of the
schedule, handily defeating Harvard 7-2 (with Quibell and Gross
out-playing Hall and Wilkins, in each case in four games, as would also
happen in Yale’s 6-3 win over Harvard in the Howe Cup semis 10 days
later) to clinch the Ivy League title. In the run-up to the Howe Cup
there was a team meeting, which gave the upperclassmen the chance to
impress on the newcomers the importance of the upcoming tournament,
just to make sure that everyone was on the same page and fully
committed to the looming stretch run. Almost inevitably, Yale and
second seed Trinity marched through the draw to the February 22nd
final. Just prior to the introductions, in a marked contrast between
the teams’ preparatory approaches, the Lady Bantams lined up on the
Brady Court quietly and with serious expressions on their faces as they
readied for the challenge ahead, while in the Yale team room, the
players were dancing on the couches with their two favorite songs
(“Don’t Stop Believing,” by Journey and “Hey Ya!” by OutKast) blasting
away in the background, just as they had done a few weeks earlier prior
to the dual-meet clash with the same opponent, and just as they did
before a number of their home matches throughout that whole season.
WILLPOWER
When play began, Trinity again
garnered the middle trio of matches, which were balanced by wins from
Lauren Doline and Sarah Coleman at Nos. 8 and 9 and Kat McLeod’s repeat
win over Vaidehi Reddy at No. 3. On the Brady Court, Yale No. 2 Amy
Gross fell behind Lynn Leong, whom she had never defeated, two games to
love and 5-1 in the third, while Kate Rapisarda, who had spent much of
the prior week battling a case of the flu that had sidelined her during
the first two rounds of the tournament, was forced to deal as well with
a pulled muscle in the right side of her rib-cage incurred during a
violent coughing spell that made it especially difficult for her to
reach up for an overhead volley. Her questionable physical state,
combined with the imposing deficit confronting Gross, caused
considerable concern within the Yale camp, since the Lady Bulldogs knew
they needed at least a split of those two matches for Michelle
Quibell’s impending match with Amina Helal to make a difference in the
team outcome.
That Gross and Rapisarda would BOTH
win seemed improbable at best at this juncture, especially after
Rapisarda failed to convert a game-ball in her opening game with
Fernanda Rocha and lost 9-8. But the plucky Yale freshman bounced back
to take the next two games against Rocha before losing the fourth.
Meanwhile, Gross was staging a momentous comeback of her own, forcing
her lithe Malaysian opponent out of her comfort zone, eliciting a
series of errors en route to an 8-0 spurt that rescued the third game
and carried her through the 9-7 fourth. Trinity College’s men coach
Paul Assaiante, whose squad was in the midst of a 13-year skein (from
1999 through 2011) of Potter Cup championships, the
longest-lasting dynasty in the history of college squash, was in the
gallery that afternoon to support Coach Bartlett and the Trinity
College women. He later remarked on the drama and the contrast
between the two players, with Leong the quiet, self-contained control
player, flitting around seemingly effortlessly like a graceful
butterfly and conjuring up sinewy angles with her deft ball placement,
while Gross was the voluble and emotive power player, determination
oozing out of every pore, a true Bulldog and never more so than this
afternoon. Lauren McCrery, watching from the gallery, saw Leong’s
resolve gradually melt away as the fifth game wore on to its eventual
9-6 conclusion, and she later described Gross as “a warrior. Every ball
was hers and if she didn’t get one the next ball was hers for sure. She
simply willed her way past Leong.”
An ecstatic Gross, whose
Summer 2003 decision to significantly upgrade her conditioning level in
preparation for her sophomore season found its full reward in her
dramatic comeback win over the vaunted Leong, told a Yale Daily News
reporter that, “In such a long match I think it comes down to who is
fitter and who wants it more. And I really wanted to win.”
So did both Rapisarda and her fellow
freshman Rocha, who by the time Gross-Leong ended were locked in a
death-grip and had to have realized how crucial their match had become
from the way the number of onlookers suddenly tripled as their fifth
game was beginning way down the hallway on Court 12. Rapisarda and her
classmate McCrery had formed a special connection during that season in
spite of the fact that they frequently opposed each other in challenge
matches, and they had spent the evening before the Howe Cup final
roaming the campus and reminding their friends to show up the next day.
They also had begun a ritual before big matches of painting Y’s
and ‘04’s on each other’s cheeks, and, when an exhausted Rapisarda
exited the court after losing the fourth game against Rocha, it was
McCrery who tended to her and gave her a rousing “you can do this!” pep
talk before the fifth game began. By this time, with the Yale
supporters massed on one side of the gallery and the large Bantam
cheering section on the other, there wasn’t even a pretext of subtlety,
as both players whaled away at the ball in a fifth game that became an
endless series of lengthy last-person-standing exchanges that was going
to go to the player who was better able to stay focused or who more
often was able to power the ball into a deep-court nick and/or avoid
errors. Enmeshed in a brutal battle of attrition at a time when she was
nowhere near 100%, Rapisarda found herself gasping for breath and
leaning on her racquet after almost every point, frequently appearing
to be on the verge of complete exhaustion.
Rocha was clearly feeling the
strain as well, and both players responded brilliantly to the
mind-bending exigencies of the moment as the game seesawed cruelly
along, with the court enveloped throughout that game in a ferocious
crowd-reaction din after every point --- until finally Rapisarda was
able to torturously boot-strap her way to a 9-5 win that clinched the
2004 Howe Cup crown for the delirious Yalies and reduced the
Quibell-Helal match (which Helal won) to a meaningless “dead rubber.”
Coach Assaiante’s analysis of
this pair of climactic matches was that the endings were “like two
exhausted heavyweight fighters throwing haymakers in the 15th round.
The Trinity players were trying to move the ball around and play
classic squash, while the Yale players kept running everything down and
hammering away, and ultimately the Trinity players wilted under the
Yale physicality.” McLeod, who had scored Yale’s first point of the day
and hence had a front-row view as both the Gross and Rapisarda matches
reached their culmination, emphasized that if there was a single
animating theme of the entire season, it was how bonded together that
team was, and that no better expression of that phenomenon existed than
what happened during the fifth games of those two matches. “We pulled
like crazy for each other,” she said. “We fought like lions for one
another. Kate couldn’t breathe, looked ready to collapse, yet she kept
playing, kept fighting. There was SO much heart on that team.”
Quibell and Helal would meet
for the final time that season two weeks later in the final round of
the Intercollegiate Individual championships at St. Lawrence, where
Helal’s attempt for a three-peat would be brusquely denied when Quibell
took the first game 9-5, arm-fought her way through the second 10-8 in
what would prove to be the defining sequence of the match, and never
looked back, racing through the third game 9-3. Quibell had
straight-gamed Trinity’s Reddy in her semi, while Helal had done the
same to McLeod, who in her quarterfinal match had rallied from two
games to love down against Gross.
MOVING ON
With Quibell’s triumph over Helal at
St. Lawrence, the Yale 2003-04 season ended with the Elis going
undefeated wire to wire, capturing college women’s squash “Triple
Crown” (Ivy League title, regular-season national title, Howe Cup
title) and returning the Individuals trophy to New Haven for the first
time since Berkeley Belknap had won this event 13 years earlier in
1991. It also ended with Talbott writing a letter to the Board of the
Skillman Associates in July in which, while announcing that for
personal and family-related reasons he had decided to resign his
position at Yale, he emphasized what a privilege it had been to coach
the finest team in the land. The letter concluded, “I can’t thank
everyone enough for the overwhelming support you have shown me and my
family over the past six years. It has been an honor to have been part
of the Yale tradition of greatness.”
Ultimately, while Talbott
moved on --- and is, as of this September 2016 writing, about to enter
his 13th season as the men’s and women’s squash coach at Stanford
University in Palo Alto, while still running summer squash camps at the
Talbott Squash Academy and at Stanford --- the legacy he established
during his tenure at Yale propelled the team (coached that year and up
to the present time by his brother Dave, who for the past 12
years and counting has been both the Yale men’s and women’s coach) to a
second straight Triple Crown season in 2004-05, which again ended with
Quibell capturing the Individuals in a convincing four-game final at
Dartmouth over Harvard No. 1 Kyla Grigg. Throughout that match, and
especially in the way she dominated the final three games (9-1, 2 and
5) after narrowly dropping the 9-7 opener, Quibell, in a compelling
display of the mobility she had first demonstrated in the beep drill a
half-dozen years earlier, pounced on every loose ball so early and
punished it to such telling effect, that Grigg (who would win this
tournament two years later as a senior in 2007) became increasingly
overwhelmed by the pace her opponent was setting. Afterwards, Grigg’s
Harvard teammate Audrey Duboc, herself a victim of Quibell’s relentless
march through that draw in the round of 16, described the final as “a
great, great match. Quibell broke Kyla down. She is a steady, focused
player who is hard to crack. There is no freebie with that girl.”
A third consecutive Howe
Cup title followed in 2005-06, the only national-champion three-peat in
the history of Yale squash, men’s or women’s. Hampered throughout her
Yale career by lower-back and upper-leg injuries, Rachita Vora decided
to forgo her senior season, but her classmates Quibell and Gross won
the deciding matches in Yale’s 5-4 2006 Howe Cup final-round triumph
over Trinity College on a day in which Rapisarda again contributed an
important victory as well. Quibell’s match with Reddy and Gross’s with
Ashley Clackson ended almost simultaneously after Trinity had taken a
4-3 lead. Later that year, Dave Talbott was awarded the prestigious
President’s Cup “to the person who has made substantial, sustained and
significant contributions to the game of squash,” which had been
bestowed on Mark Talbott 17 years earlier in 1989, the only time that
two members of the same family have received this award.
Excerpt No. 2 --- This
passage from the "A History Of The ISDA Pro Doubles Tour: A Ten-Match
Anthology" chapter constitutes the eighth of the 10 matches discussed
in this chapter, namely the decisive encounter of the 2007-08 season.
Kellner Cup Final: Damien Mudge/Viktor Berg d. Paul Price/Ben Gould, 10-15 15-9 10-15 16-15 16-13.
This rivalry steadily heated up as the
2007-08 campaign, Mudge/Berg's first as teammates and Price/Gould's
second, moved along. Price and Gould recovered from their
aforementioned pair of disconcerting October losses to Walker and Leach
by taking three of the following four events, while Mudge and Berg,
after taking most of the fall months to get themselves squared away
(and for Berg to regain full trust in his injured right leg while Mudge
was getting comfortable in his new spot on the left wall), caught fire
right around Thanksgiving, attaining the finals of all eight ISDA
events from mid-November to the late-April Kellner Cup, winning six of
them, two of which, in Greenwich and Brooklyn, came at the final-round
expense of Price and Gould.
Each team came into the final week of the
season knowing that by winning (and ONLY by winning) the Kellner Cup it
would both clinch the No. 1 end-of-season team ranking and come away
with that season's most lucrative winner's check and one of its most
coveted trophies. Both semifinals were challenging tests --- Mudge/Berg
were forced to a second-set tiebreaker by Russell/Quick and Price/Gould
trailed Walker/Leach 10-7 in the fourth before their 8-1 close-out dash
to 15-12 --- but both were at full strength for the final. At least
they were at full strength for the BEGINNING of the final, during the
course of which, however, both left-wall players rolled their ankles,
Price when his feet got tangled with Mudge's in the fourth game, and
Mudge when he went over on the side of his foot in the fifth. There
were a number of other tension-building play stoppages as well (several
balls broke; there were a number of urgent between-point partner
consultations; the floor often had to be toweled off on this humid,
rainy evening; the between-games breaks usually well exceeded the
two-minute scheduled time span; and several of referee Larry Sconzo's
calls were disputed by the players, though his decisions were almost
always sustained by the line judges), all of which gave the lengthy
evening a kind of dislocating quality as the match progressed
erratically but rivetingly along to its conclusion.
The play itself among these remarkably
contemporaneous (all being at the time more than six months past their
30th birthday, with none yet having attained his 32nd) and athletically
gifted superstars, though always high-paced, alternated between bursts
of brilliance and occasional miscues (the tin count was fairly high,
especially at the very end, as we will see), which consequently led to
wild swings in momentum. If the first three games (the first and third
of which went to Price/Gould) were entertaining and engrossing, it must
be said that ultimately they served mostly as a prelude for the
terrific fourth and fifth, which elevated the overall competitive and
spectating experience to an entirely different level of intensity and
drama. After Mudge and Berg had jumped out to leads of 4-0 and 6-1 in
the fourth game, Price and Gould embarked upon a sustained run of
excellence (paradoxically ENHANCED by Price's ankle injury, which
disrupted the Mudge/Berg game plan by luring them to concentrate on
moving Price, who made them pay with countering winners) in an 11-3
surge, capped off by a pair of Price nick-winners, that put them at
12-9, just three points from the title.
A furious three-point Mudge/Berg rally (on
a daring Berg serve-return drop shot, a Mudge rail past Price and a
Berg three-wall nick) made it 12-all, but in a bit of terrible bad
luck, Mudge's inside-out cross-court from the back wall hit his partner
Berg's racquet, jarring it from his hand and putting Price and Gould at
13-12. Berg then cleanly passed Price with a cross-court winner, and on
the first point of the best-of-five tiebreaker, Mudge scored on a
shallow drop shot. His lob attempt on the ensuing point sailed just
over the front-wall boundary, and on the next exchange, both Mudge and
Berg were caught up front tracking down a Price three-wall, leaving
Gould the whole court for a sizzling rail winner and
double-championship-point. This golden opportunity was thwarted first
by Mudge's off-balance and severely-angled reverse-corner (upon which
Price threw up his hands in triumph, initially and perhaps wishfully
thinking that it had caught the top of the tin) and then when Price
tinned one of his wickedly angled roll-corner volleys that seldom are
returned.
Two years earlier, as mentioned, Gould
(partnering Quick at the time) had similarly had a Kellner Cup
double-match-point chance slip away (in the third game of their semi
against Walker and Berg) and wound up losing in five. It appeared that
the same fate awaited him this time around as well when Mudge and Berg
moved out to a 10-5 lead in the fifth. But a trio of Price winners, the
last on a backhand cross-court that rolled out in front of Berg, made
it 8-10, then 8-11 on a compelling Berg forehand reverse-corner. A
mis-hit Price overhead that trickled just over the tin and a backhand
cross-court drop nick that froze Berg keyed a 4-0 Price/Gould run (7-1
overall from 5-10) to 12-11, preceding a miraculous look-away
reverse-corner winner from Berg (12-all), then a tinned Mudge
reverse-corner counter-balanced by another Berg winner for 13-all.
To that juncture, after more than two hours
of exhausting and pulsating action, the two teams had played each other
to a total statistical and territorial standstill. Price had garnered
far more winners (as well as more tins) than anyone else; Gould, who
had committed only one fully unforced error to that juncture of the
fifth game, had been relentlessly firing away with his scorching
cross-courts and drives, making Mudge play more defense (which he had
done brilliantly) than he has ever been forced into doing; and Berg,
who like Price had had his ups and downs, had come up with his best
sustained performance exactly when it had most been needed, in the
testing end-portion of those fourth and fifth games. All three had been
magnificent in their own individual way.
But if there was one overriding and
outcome-determinative phenomenon in this gripping five-part, 140-minute
epic drama that played out in the cathedral-like confines of Racquet
& Tennis on this memorable Monday evening, then surely it had to
have been Mudge's irrepressible fighting spirit, his incomparable
athletic skills and his indomitable competitive ardor. These qualities
have enabled him to switch both partners and walls as successfully as
he has, while amassing an ISDA record 95 titles and richly earning the
right (though no vote has ever been taken, nor does any such
designation officially exist) to be regarded as the ISDA Player Of The
Decade. Five years to the day removed from the only Kellner Cup defeat
that he and Waite sustained, Mudge imposed his will on the turbulent
final stretch of the match, wearing his Aussie-compatriot opponents
down and playing at least a partial role in the trio of early-point
tins (the first by Gould, who appeared to lose track of a Mudge
cross-court, and then two in a row by Price, first on an attempted
shallow rail winner and then on a routine-appearing cross-court) that
accounted for the fifth-set best-of-five tiebreaker.
If it seemed poetically unjust that a match
heretofore characterized by such captivating, lengthy all-court
exchanges would end on three swift (consuming less than two minutes
combined) unforced tins, like finding a badly misspelled word in the
last paragraph of a cherished book, it must nevertheless be said that
the story of the entire Mudge/Berg 2007-08 season was their ability to
somehow find a way, just as had been the case with Price/Gould in
2006-07. Seen in that light, the rally that the eventual champions were
able to generate from the late-game deficits they overcame in the
fourth and fifth games constituted a fitting calling-card for the
supremacy that became theirs that night and that lasted through the
2008-09 season (when they again nosed out Price/Gould for No. 1 by
defeating them in the final event of the season in Vancouver) and well
into 2009-10 as well.
