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11-23-05; #3 |
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The US Open and Hospitality
By L-J Anjema © Nov 23, 2005 Laurens-Jan Anjema and SquashTalk LLC
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| The View of the Oakland Hills Golf and Country Club
from my billet in Detroit (photo © Debra Tessier) |
Tournaments in the US are great: they are held at some of the richest, most upper-class clubs in the world, they are generally well organized and the pros get treated like stars, something which in Europe and England, to put it lightly, is not always the case.
Qualifiers get put up with families instead of having to pay for expensive hotels. And those families go as far as feeling responsible to pay for every single meal and letting us use ‘their 3rd car’ for the week for easy transportation to and from the club. It’s absolutely terrific. In my opinion, hotels look the same anywhere in the world, so if I get the choice I prefer to stay with a family.
TIGER
Lately, I stayed
with a guy that literally lived at the 18th hole of the Oakland Hills
Golf & Country Club in Birmingham, Detroit, the
club where the Ryder Cup was held a year ago.
During the Ryder Cup, security was so tight, that they built huge fences to separate the gardens from the actual course. So when I asked my billet if he had actually bought a ticket and gone over to see Tiger Woods play ‘live’ he said: “No, I just watched it on TV!” I couldn’t believe it. And then he said: “When he drew his drive on the 18th…I thought…wait a minute…that’s in my back yard! Let’s have a look.”
OPRAH
On another occasion, playing the D.A.R.E Santa Barbara
Open, I stayed with a guy who lived next door to Oprah Winfrey. Not that
you could even catch a glimpse of her house from the rooftop but still…next-door
neighbors with Oprah isn’t bad.
THE STRANGE CASE AT HARVARD U
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| Razik and Anjema practicing (briefly) at Harvard's
new glass court. (photo © Debra Tessier) |
However, quite opposite to the way we normally get treated by the people at squash clubs in the US, the hospitality we received at the Harvard Squash Center in Boston, during the US Open, was a shocker.When Joey Barrington and myself and a few other pros, including Dylan Patterson (who graduated from Harvard a few years ago) were practicing, we got thrown out by the coaches in charge of the Harvard college team because of ‘team practice’. Not just thrown off the court, we had to leave the building. At our response that there were still plenty of courts available, the coaches said: “You guys are a distraction for the girls doing team practice”.
We, and especially Dylan, couldn’t believe it. Two years back he had played squash in that same Harvard team and now he wasn’t even allowed to have a lil practice on court 16.After we had all left the building and gone out for a long lunch (to wait for the amazing Harvard team practice to have finished), we came back to an empty club and started practice.
10 minutes into our hit, the fire-alarm went… Everyone evacuated, waited for 25 minutes, firemen came, nothing wrong, everyone could go back in, thanks for that.
AT THE END OF THE DAY I’m practicing with Razik on the permanent glass court to get a feel for the difficult see-through side-wall and to get used to the slippery floor when a student opens the door and tells us we’re not allowed to use the glass court ‘unless the coaches are present’.
I just dropped my racket in frustration, picked it up, walked off court and went home to my billet’s, where they DID treat me nicely…Laurens Jan Anjema
10th November 2005
Chingford, Essex, UK
Laurens
Jan Anjema: Audio Interview |
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