New York vs London Honors Sword at World Squash Day / Lambs Club

Jan 12 , 2002  by Rob Dinerman, Squashtalk © 2002 SquashTalk,.  Photos by Fritz Borchert for SquashTalk, © 2002 SquashTalk may not be reproduced without express permission.

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Jan 12, 2002      

JOHN WHITE WINS INAUGURAL WORLD SQUASH DAY TOURNEY, LONDON DEFEATS NEW YORK, WINS DEREK SWORD TROPHY By Rob Dinerman

History was made on January 11th, 2002, as World Squash Day was celebrated and homage paid to the memories of those who died exactly four months earlier in the tragic terrorist events in New York, Washington D. C. and Pennsylvania.

Pro's gathered for World Squash Day at the Lamb's Club - Peter Nicol and Paul Price had flown in that morning after the recently concluded US Open (won by Nicol) Photo © 2002 Fritz Borchert

In a moving all-day reaffirmation of the power of sport as a major life-force, both the World Squash Day Professional Tournament and the New York-London competition for the Derek Sword Trophy had their inaugural editions, hosted at the prominent Lambs Club in downtown London, with John White conquering world champion Peter Nicol in the pro event and London overwhelming their New York guests 12-2 in the Derek Sword competition.

White, Nicol and Paul Price all arrived on early-morning flights from Boston, fresh from having played in the U.S. Open, which Nicol had won in a straight-game final over an unusually tame Jonathon Power, and proceeded directly from the airport to the Lambs Club to participate in the eight-man one-day event (with matches going best-of-three instead of the usual best-of-five games in deference to the compressed timetable), which also featured PSA veterans Peter Marshall and Tony Hands, as well as local favorites Jason Barry, Steve Richardson and Broxbourne teenager Alastair Walker, who had taken the train up to London that morning from Wycliffe College in Gloucestershire as a late replacement for the injured Tim Garner.

Walker has a crowd-pleasing game premised primarily on his lightning-fast court coverage, and his penchant for spectacular gets propelled him to a 15-4, 15-11 quarter-final win over Marshall, who is still recovering from a recent back injury. He then pressed just-crowned U.S. Open champion Nicol all the way in a 15-13 first game and generated an 8-1 run in mid-second that saw him move from 5-8 to 13-9, though the last point in that rally proved a Pyrrhic victory when Walker had to leave the court to get treatment for a cut knee, thereby allowing the besieged Nicol to gather his bearings.

As so often happens following stoppages of this nature, especially when a young player is involved, Walker was unable to regain his rhythm when play resumed, and a reprieved Nicol embarked on a match-closing six-point charge for 15-13 and out. Notwithstanding this unhappy conclusion, the day provided many thrills for the precocious Walker, both intangible(in the sense of achievement his widely-applauded performance in a field of this caliber had given him) and tangible, when shortly after his near-miss with Nicol World Squash Day organizers Alan Thatcher and Laurie Maclachlan designated Walker as the first recipient of a World Squash Day bursary to help promising young players.

The bottom-half semi-final, between PSA stand-outs Price and White, was a classic display of brilliant shotmaking and non-stop attack by two specialists in this exacting discipline. The match consumed more than an hour and had to be resolved by a third game, in which White managed to build a small but important mid-game lead which he never relinquished en route to a 15-11 ticket to a final composed entirely of top-five performers on the PSA circuit.

Though Nicol, the first prominent player to endorse World Squash Day and to commit to play in this event, had to have been both jet-lagged and physically and emotionally spent by the recency of his conquest in Boston less than 48 hours earlier, he nevertheless came up with a spirited final-round performance---but this was White's day, and the array of dead-nick winners he fired from all parts of the court carried him to a 15-12, 15-12 victory and the championship.

In a ceremony that preceded the Nicol-White final, (photos in photogallery) Graeme Sword, brother of the late Derek Sword, presented the magnificent Derek Sword Trophy to London team captain Glen Wilson following the competitive but decisive London team victory over their New York counterparts. More than half of the New York contingent(which included some transplanted New Yorkers currently based in London)were members of the New York Athletic Club, located at the foot of Central Park in midtown Manhattan, which was especially hard hit by the attacks on the World Trade Center, during which it lost two dozen of its members, including several squash players, the most prominent of which was the 29-year-old Sword, a native of Scotland and longtime friend of Maclachlan who was the reigning NYAC club squash champion and who had become engaged just weeks before his horrifying death in the second World Trade Center building.

Early this past fall, as a prelude to a service honoring its many fallen members, the NYAC Athletics Committee and head pro Pat Canavan, had renamed its annual club championship in Sword's honor, and many attendees of that event, including Canavan and several of Sword's NYAC league teammates, played earlier in the day on the team representing New York, which will be hosting next year's edition of World Squash Day in what it is hoped will be an alternating tradition between the squash communities of those two prominent cities, both of whom had so many of their citizens perish in September's tragedies.

Sword's fiancee, Maureen Sullivan, was present at the Lambs Club opening ceremony (photos in photogallery) , as were his parents, David and Irene, his brother Graeme and Lambs owner Mike Corby, president of England Squash and the World Squash Federation, who invited Kathy Hadda, Economics Officer at the U.S. Embassy, to dedicate the Derek Sword Trophy and officially open World Squash Day.

After a minute's silence had been observed (with even the drills and building machinery nearby cooperatively ceasing their operations in deference to the occasion during its brief duration), Holly Clarke sang a beautiful rendition of Amazing Grace, perhaps the emotional highlight in a day that contained many special moments.

Proceeds of World Squash Day(including the prize money won by Nicol, who announced as part of his early embrace of the event that he would donate all his purse to the cause) will go to the World Trade Center Disaster Fund. Co-Chairman Thatcher, who deserved immense credit for the day's success, pronounced it a "magical" occasion and gave a "grateful thanks" to all the squash companies who generously provided their products to the auction, which was boosted by the offer of personal coaching clinics with world champion Nicol and his respected coach, Neil Harvey.

RESULTS OF PRO EVENT:
Quarters;(1) Peter Nicol d. Jason Berry, 15-12,15-7; Alastair Walker d. (4)Peter Marshall, 15-4, 15-11; (3) Paul Price d. Tony Hands, 15-12, 14-15, 15-6; (2) John White d. Steve Richardson, 17-15, 17-14.

Semis; Nicol d Walker, 15-13, 15-13; White d Price, 15-8. 13-15, 15-11

Final: White d Nicol, 15-12, 15-12