Forty-Five Years Later: A Look Back At NY Squash’s Tumultuous Summer Of 1979

By Rob Dinerman
August, 2024

The year 1979 was quite possibly the most active, exciting—and tumultuous—in the history of squash in the New York metropolitan area. This phenomenon began right in the first few weeks of January, when the Manhattan Squash Club—a 10-court facility located in the Grace Building, right across the street from Bryant Park on West 42nd Street, that had an eight-year existence from 1976-84—hosted the North American Open. This was the most historically important championship on the World Pro Squash Association (WPSA) hardball tour that had such a memorable run from the late 1970’s into the early 1990’s.  Sharif Khan won the Open for a milestone 10th time in a straight-game final over Gordon Anderson, who had rallied from 8-13 to 18-16 in the fifth game of his pulsating semifinal with New York’s best player, Stu Goldstein. The months that followed witnessed five-game finals in a number of the most prestigious tournaments run by NY Squash (then known as the Metropolitan Squash Racquets Association, or MSRA) and/or hosted by NY Squash clubs.

These included the late-April Metropolitan Pro final—won by Goldstein but only after his opponent, Bill Andruss, drew within two points of winning in a fourth-game tiebreaker—and the early-May Metropolitan Amateur event, in which Glenn Greenberg (son of the baseball Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg), survived a marathon match with Stew Grodman, who had won the third and fourth games. Greenberg, who earlier in the season had won the New York State Open (in a four-game final over Peter Talbert, the son of Hall of Fame tennis player Billy Talbert), would retain that latter title in 1979’s last tournament on the weekend just before Christmas. Greenberg’s successful defense of his States crown occurred one week after NY Squash had hosted (at the Yale Club of New York) and won the tri-city New York/Boston/Philadelphia Lockett Cup competition, and one month after Khan had survived a torrid five-game Boodles Gin Open final at the Uptown Racquet Club against Harvard’s precocious superstar (and soon-to-be WPSA No. 1) Michael Desaulniers.

Although by any measurement some of the best matches and best tournaments in all of North American squash in Calendar 1979 happened under the aegis of NY Squash, the Association’s most prominent role that year might have occurred off the court rather than on, in the ultimately successful role it played in a pair of issues—namely the 1978-79 national rankings and the composition of the U.S. team in the biennial World Team Championships held in Australia in Autumn 1979—that arose in close sequence during the late spring and summer months. Both quickly reached white-hot intensity, roiling the entire U. S. squash community and leading to some fractured alliances and even threats of lawsuits, although none of the latter were ever filed.

US Squash (then known as the U.S. Squash Racquets Association, or USSRA) had originally planned to arbitrarily (i.e. without holding any try-outs) name four talented young players—Ned Edwards, the just-crowned 1979 Intercollegiate Individual champion; Tom Page, the 1977 U S. National champion and 1979 Nationals finalist, who had just partnered Gil Mateer to a second consecutive U.S. National Doubles title; Mateer, the 1976 U.S. National Junior champion, who, like Page, had been on the 1976 U.S. team that competed in London; and Jon Foster, the runner-up to his Penn teammate Edwards in the 1979  Intercollegiates final—to its four-person 1979 squad. The USSRA eventually agreed to hold try-outs, although initially George Nedwed, who one year earlier had captained the New York team that won the 1978 USSRA Five-Man Team Championships, was told that, at age 37 (a full decade older than any of the other entrants), he was too old to be allowed into the try-outs. When Nedwed, a tough-minded former Marine, threatened to file an age-discrimination lawsuit, the USSRA allowed him to participate, but declared that the results of the try-outs would be “taken into consideration” but would not be binding, stating that it reserved the right to take factors like “perceived potential” into account as well in its final determinations.

The try-outs were held during the first weekend of May at the Uptown Racquet Club, which at the time was the only club in New York with two international-sized courts (the only other clubs in New York with any properly-dimensioned softball courts were at Broad Street and Park Place, each of which had only one).  There was a full eight-person best-of-three round-robin consisting of Edwards, Page, Mateer, Foster, Nedwed, 1979 U. S. Nationals semifinalist Ron Beck and two promising Seattle-based players in their early 20’s, namely Mark Alger and Bryce Harding. At the end of the weekend, Edwards, Page, Mateer and Alger were a clear top-four, which would have ended the matter, were it not for the fact that shortly afterwards the USSRA Board announced that a fifth member needed to be added to the squad as an alternate, even though no mention of an alternate had been made prior to the try-outs.

The situation accelerated when Foster was named as the alternate, despite his having placed below Harding, the fifth-place finisher. Although plans were in place for the newly-ensconced team members to have intensive daily practice sessions for six weeks at Uptown ahead of their looming trip to Australia, NY Squash President Ames Brown, angered by the whole way that the team selection process had been handled and with the support of the NY Squash Board, arranged for that invitation to be rescinded. As a result, the players instead had to practice on the one court at Broad Street, which caused Angela Smith, the British-born Team USA Coach who was one of the world’s best woman players at the time, to complain bitterly in a sharply-worded Squash News article about the limitations imposed on her by having to run team practices on only one court instead of two.

During this same time frame the national-ranking controversy was percolating as well. The preliminary USSRA national rankings were listed in the June 1979 issue of Squash News. Although some degree of unhappiness often attends the release of the national rankings, in this case the tentative list was universally seen as so blatantly unreflective of the previous season’s tournament results --- across the board, from the top-tier listings all the way through --- that there was an immediate outcry, especially in New York, where it was widely felt that close to a half-dozen New York-based players had been ranked well below where they deserved to be. Further investigation revealed that the USSRA Ranking Committee had completely ignored its own procedural guidelines and had failed to involve many of the Committee members in calculating the rankings it had disseminated.

Embarrassed by this disclosure—and by a slew of “appeal” letters sent by almost all of the “under-ranked” New York players—the USSRA, realizing how disingenuous any attempt would be to defend what it knew had been a flawed procedure, decided instead to stonewall. In response—and for the first and only time in NY Squash’s history—the NY Squash Board felt that its only recourse was to produce and publish National Rankings of its own in addition to its annual Regional rankings. President Brown convened a blue-ribbon Committee—headed by Pete Bostwick, the 1975 Eddie Standing Sportsmanship Award recipient, and Doug McLaggan, the dean of teaching professionals, both of whom were regarded throughout the squash world with tremendous admiration and respect—which met at the Yale Club in late July and produced rankings that were by all accounts significantly more accurate than the USSRA rankings. The NY Squash national rankings were published in the sports section of the New York Times and authenticating ranking certificates signed by President Brown were sent to all the ranked players.

As it happened, those certificates were received in the mail just one day before an early-August USSRA Board meeting at the Merion Cricket Club in suburban Philadelphia, creating what one Board member characterized as “a complete furor” among the meeting’s attendees. A number of the latter group, enraged by what they regarded as NY Squash’s act of defiance, demanded that NY Squash be expelled as a Regional Association of the USSRA. However, plenty of others at that meeting countered that NY Squash’s action was fully justified in light of how poorly the USSRA rankings had been done, both in process and result. Positions rapidly hardened on both sides of both the ranking and team-composition issues as that summer progressed. Interestingly, most people supported either NY Squash or the USSRA on both matters; there were very few “split” opinions, and virtually everyone who held any kind of position in either Association was forced to align themselves with one side or the other; no one was allowed to remain on the fence, although a few people unsuccessfully tried to do so.  Indeed one person who was on both the NY Squash Board and the USSRA Ranking Committee made a clumsy attempt to stay completely neutral, hiding behind a “double-loyalty” claim that so angered both sides that he was removed from each of those positions shortly thereafter.

What had become in a very real sense a perfect storm escalated ever further later that month when Page withdrew from the team due to a wrist injury, in the wake of which Foster was named as the official fourth member and the USSRA, which had previously claimed after the try-outs that an alternate fifth team member was needed, decided after the Page withdrawal that adding an alternate was no longer necessary after all. Although Foster had not played his best squash during the try-outs, he was regarded—deservedly, as he subsequently proved—as having a big upside, and the USSRA powers-that-be at the time decided that, one way or another, they wanted him to be on the U.S. squad (which finished in ninth place in Australia) that year.

Ultimately the stance that NY Squash took in pushing back against the USSRA on these two separate but simultaneously-arriving issues benefited both Associations and was rewarded by future developments—and by the judgment of history. The USSRA, to its credit, made significant improvements on both fronts—in the very next edition of the World Team Championships in 1981, the composition of the U.S. team was completely determined by the binding results of rankings and/or try-outs, and that has been the case virtually throughout the years that have followed. In 1981 Team USA, composed of (in that order) Andruss, Goldstein, Edwards and Ted Gross, performed better than its 1979 predecessor, with a seventh-place finish, the best-ever for an American entry to that point (later topped by sixth-place finishes in 2011 and 2023). And, in at least a tacit acknowledgment of the presence on the Committee that produced the 1979 NY Squash national rankings of figures of Bostwick's and McLaggan's stature, the USSRA upgraded the quality and transparency of its own Ranking Committee (including adding Bostwick as a Committee member), resulting in rankings for the 1979-80 season and beyond that were universally regarded as having been accurate and well done.

Edwards, Page, Foster, Andruss and Goldstein all earned top-10 WPSA rankings in the years that followed. Edwards won the 1987 North American Open and for a half-dozen years was ranked second on the WPSA tour, behind only Mark Talbott; Alger won the 1981 U.S. Nationals; Page and Todd Binns received the WPSA Doubles Team of the Year Award several times; Foster won more than 20 Metropolitan Pro, Open, Amateur and Doubles championships during the 1980’s and early 1990’s and partnered Morris Clothier to the U.S. National Doubles championship for three-straight years from 1993-95; Andruss captained the U.S. team in the annual Loews Cup competition against Canada in both 1983 and 1984 and was inducted into the Fordham University Sports Hall of Fame in 1982; and Mateer added two more U.S. National Doubles titles (in 1980 with John Bottger and 1986 with Gil's older brother Drew) to the pair that he had captured with Page during the late 1970’s.  In the end, both the USSRA and NY Squash, each in its own way, showed vision and fortitude in leading squash in the United States into what turned out to be the glorious decade of the 1980’s.

Rob Dinerman served as NY Squash’s Tournament Chairman from 1979-82 and succeeded the legendary Bob Lehman as the Official Writer for the Association’s annual yearbook from 1985-94. He has authored 16 books about squash, the most recent of which, A Century Of Champions: 100 Years Of College Squash, 1923-2023, was released in March 2024.