By Alex Beam
From Vanity Fair





 
 
 


 
 
 
 
Let’s get the formalities out of the way first, shall we?
  
We’ll start with the obvious question: Who am I and why am I writing a blog about squash?

I am Alex Beam, a columnist for the Boston Globe. I have been playing squash, to no great effect, albeit with great enthusiasm, for about 40 years. Per the old rankings, I am a C-level player. That’s a 3.5 on U.S. Squash’s new scale: “Understands the general principles of depth, uses all four corners of the court as part of shot selection, has a fair volley and can execute a boast and a drop shot, has good physical fitness and ability to play hard matches two days in a row, forehand and backhand are hit with varying speeds in varying direction.”

Well, sort of.

I would still be a D player if I hadn’t taken a whole year to tune up my squash game at Stanford during the 1996–1997 academic year. (I nominally held a John S. Knight Journalism fellowship.) Since I left, Stanford has built the country’s only scholarship-granting NCAA squash team, led by legendary coach Mark Talbott. But I digress.

My bona fides, I: On the evening of February 3, 2005 at Harvard’s Barnaby Courts, I approached dandy-at-large/gifted writer/squash aficionado Tom Wolfe, and thrust out my hand.

“How do you do,” I said. “I am Alex Beam, the Boston Globe’s squash writer.”

“Ah, yes,” the Caped One replied. “I know your work.”

There were motes of truth in both statements.

I had just written a column about the venerable squash rivalry between Harvard and Trinity College, Hartford. (Snobs have to toss in the “Hartford,” lest the Bantams be confused with the Trinity Colleges in Dublin or Oxford). Wolfe’s son Tommy was playing for Trinity at the time, and Wolfe, pere, had read my piece. That turned out to be a Squash Night To Remember. Trinity extended its winning streak over Harvard, and the police had to be summoned to evict a too-ardent Trinity booster.

My bona fides, II: In January, I drove down to Trinity to watch them play Princeton. The word had spread on the squash tom-toms: Princeton was going to end Trinity’s astonishing 176 game-long win streak, the longest in the NCAA Division I. I have no idea how I ended up at that match, as I hardly read any squash journalism. I was drawn to those courts like the people traveling to the huge mound of dirt in the Wyoming desert in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

When I arrived at the Ferris Athletic Center, to paraphrase Brigham Young, I knew This Was the Place. BMW’s with New York license plates jammed the parking lot; the Squash People were here. Once inside, I immediately sought out Jim Zug, the nation’s No. 1 squash journalist and all-around decent fellow. (You will be reading that name again.) But Zug was occupied: the Sports Illustrated reporter had bearded him first!  S.I. at a squash match? Holey moley! Jim told me National Public Radio had sent a reporter, too. So I made a quick mental calculation: That evening, I was the fourth most important squash writer in America. Definitely a cause for celebration, or … concern.

The whole event was a bust, by the way. The dog never barked, the Princeton tiger never roared. Trinity won 6-3, and has since roped out its winning streak to 183, still the longest in the land.

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