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In Memoriam - Stephen J. Vehslage - 1939-2002

National Champion in 1965, 3 Times Intercollegiate Champion

May 2002, By Rob Dinerman © 2002 SquashTalk
Photos: © 2001 SquashTalk

Stephen T. Vehslage, Former National Champion, 12/10/39 - 5/5/02

The American squash community lost its fourth truly significant figure in barely over a year earlier this month when Stephen Thomas Vehslage, three-time winner of both the Junior Nationals and the Intercollegiates and the USSRA National hardball champion in 1965, died on May 5th in Greenwich, CT after a year-long battle with brain cancer at the age of 62. He is survived by his wife of more than 40 years, April, his two children, Stephen Jr. and Cynthia, six grandchildren and his older brother Ramsay, with whom he won every major invitational at one time or another during the 1960's and formed one of the highest-ranking doubles teams of the 1960's.

Stephen Vehslage in 1965

His death was preceded by those of Harvard's nonpareil 92-year-old coach Jack Barnaby in February, Ed Hahn, his two-time predecessor as National Champion in 1950 and 1951 who died at age 88 in November and 1977 Nationals winner Tom Page, one of the greatest American-born doubles player ever, who collapsed and expired on a New York sidewalk in late April 2001, when he was still just 44 years old. Like Page, Vehslage learned his squash at the venerable Merion Cricket Club in suburban Philadelphia, where he was coached by the club's famed pros William White and Brendan McRory, and was part of an especially gifted crop of teenagers that included Jim Zug Sr., Kit Spahr, Claude Beer and the Howe brothers, Sam and Ralph, both of whom were inducted into the U. S. Squash Hall Of Fame earlier this spring.

The entire group benefited greatly not only by the outstanding coaching they received and excellent sparring partnership they provided each other but also by the Merion tradition of having exceptional juniors often practice with the club's best adult players, which at that time included such luminaries as Diehl Mateer, Stanley Pearson, Carter Fergusson and Ben Heckscher, who between them won six Nationals between 1948 and 1963, as well as Hunter Lott and Charlie Brinton, former multiple-national champions who conducted clinics for boys on weekends.

THREE TIMES JUNIOR, THREE TIMES COLLEGE CHAMP
The inaugural National Junior championships in New York in 1956 occurred during Vehslage's junior year at the Haverford School, by which time his always impressive athleticism and several years of exposure to squash enabled him to rise superior to the rest of that eight-player field and to defend this title during his pair of remaining age-eligible years as well. That last title occurred during his freshman year at Princeton, where he starred both in soccer and squash, twice earning first-time All-Ivy honors and teaming with Zug as starting fullbacks on the soccer squad and leading the squash team to consecutive first-place finishes at the annual ISA championships during his sophomore and junior years while winning the Intercollegiate Individual squash crown, later named the Pool Trophy in honor of its first champion Beekman Pool, during all three of his varsity seasons from 1959-1961, the only Tiger ever to accomplish this extraordinary feat.

Stephen Vehslage (left) with Brother Ramsay, teammates at Princeton 1959

MERION INTRAMURALS
His back-and-forth rivalries with the Howe brothers and Heckscher were an intrinsic part of the amateur invitational scene during the 1960's, with each member of this Merion quartet winning the Nationals at least once during the six-year period from 1962-67; the lone non-Merioner to win that prestigious title during this substantial stretch was Victor Niederhoffer in '66, when he defeated first Ralph 15-12 in the fifth in the semis and then Sam in overtime in the fourth in the final.

Vehslage's foremost nemesis during that time was the four-time Nationals winner Henri Salaun, 13 years his senior but still very capable, against whose mobility, experience and counter-punching expertise Vehslage often experienced great frustration throughout the prime period in his career. Salaun would keep the ball tight to the walls and often keep Vehslage off balance to a degree that prevented the young slugger from ever getting his best shot in against him.

1965 NATIONALS
For the 1965 edition of the Nationals, which was hosted at the Hartford Golf Club from February 20th-22nd, the unseeded Vehslage was dealt a difficult draw that required him to face rising Canadian star Colin Adair (who would win this event in both '68 and '71), against whom he lost overtime sessions in both the second and fourth games before asserting himself 15-9 in the decisive fifth game.

This hard-earned triumph brought him to the quarter-finals, where he was scheduled to face the second-seeded Salaun. But this dreaded confrontation was averted when a knee injury incurred shortly the tournament began worsened during Salaun's first-round match with Larry O'Loughlin to the point where he had to default his second-rounder to Howard Coonley, against whom Vehslage felt much more confident and whom he defeated in four convincing games (15-5 in the fourth) to reach the semis. There he defeated the fourth-seeded Sam Howe, his victim in two of Vehslage's Pool Trophy finals in college, 15-8, 13 and 12.

PEAKING PREPARATION
In both that match and the ensuing final, Vehslage played some of the finest squash of his career, a culmination of a dedicated "peaking" mission which had begun several weeks before when he had fallen behind Pete Bostwick two games to love in the semi-finals of New York's Metropolitan A event. Though Vehslage had rallied to win that match, he had been sufficiently chastened by his near-defeat to embark on a concentrated effort to step up the level of both his conditioning (which he enhanced by doing sprinting drills on the spacious racquets court at the Racquet & Tennis Club) and his overall game, which he addressed by scheduling numerous practice sessions against the best competition he could find.

The top half of the Nationals draw had been highlighted by the quarter-final upset perpetrated on the top-seeded defending champion Ralph Howe by his former Yale teammate and recently-crowned Canadian Nationals champion Bob Hetherington, who had then dropped a close four-game semi to Niederhoffer, the No. 3 seed who had won the Pool Trophy as a Harvard senior the previous year and who just one month prior to the Nationals had won the Harry Cowles Invitational. Niederhoffer had previously been severely tested first by his '64 Intercollegiates co-finalist Tom Poor and then by the redoubtable Charlie Ufford, who had forced a fifth game before succumbing 15-7.

VEHSLAGE OUTPOINTS NIEDERHOFFER
All of these pre-final battles had taken their toll on Niederhoffer and by contrast Vehslage was still strong and riding the momentum generated by his brilliant and remarkably error-free performance over Sam Howe one round before. His recent fitness upgrade had increased his confidence level, which was also boosted by the faith he had in his game plan (to hit the ball as hard as possible, even on his serve) and the in-the-zone quality of his stroke production from mid-tournament on.

This exhilarating feeling of being on a roll at exactly the optimal time inevitably and inexorably imposed itself on the course of the final, which saw Niederhoffer win a hard-fought opening game 15-11 and earn a small mid-game advantage in the second only to buckle at that juncture in the face of a resolute Vehslage charge that was too overwhelming for a tiring Niederhoffer to resist. After evening the match with a 15-8 second game and grinding his way through the pivotal 15-12 third, Vehslage surged to a lead early in the fourth game and never looked back, pasting his rails and crosscourt drives and forcing defensive responses which he pounced upon and nailed for winners, and drawing a number of tins as well from his retreating foe, who could not muster more than seven well-spaced points harmlessly sprinkled in the midst of Vehslage's unstoppable charge to the finish line.

"Hard-hitting Vehslage Takes Singles Over Favored Niederhoffer," the USSRA Yearbook's headline declared, in an accurate reflection of the tenor of that final. It was the crowning achievement of the 25-year-old Vehslage's career. His attempted title defense in the '66 Nationals in New York was foiled by Salaun in four games in the quarter-finals. That year's crown was eventually won by Niederhoffer, who at the trophy presentation ruefully acknowledged Vehslage's performance one year earlier by noting that he was "making the acceptance speech I had planned on giving last year." Vehslage did get to the semi-finals in his final Nationals appearance in '67 in Chicago, where he lost in three to Sam Howe, who didn't drop a game all weekend, throughout which he played at the same peak performance that Vehslage had attained two years earlier in Connecticut.

Other noteworthy achievements of Vehslage's career included the '62 Cowles, the '62 Gold Racquets (where his victory marked the first and only time a member of the host Rockaway Hunting Club won its flagship invitational) and the '64 Canadian Nationals, where he defeated Adair in a hard-fought four-game final. Certainly he was the best junior and college player of his era and one of the very top American amateur protagonists for a half-dozen years after his graduation from Princeton, but his tournament participation even during this time was fairly spasmodic, largely due to the travel demands of his position at IBM, where he served several lengthy tours overseas in France; in fact, further on in his life, he was for many years a senior executive for IBM Europe and later a Vice President and Director of IBM Americas Far East.

He married April shortly after his college graduation and they had their children within the first few years, and his family commitments limited his available time for squash tournaments as well. Ironically, the very achievement that highlighted his career probably contributed to its brevity as well.

Pressure Game

Barnaby in particular displayed his fabled perspicacity when he described Vehslage as "primarily a pressure player" who "literally crushed his opponents, his low powerful drives totally inhibiting their hopes for shot making until he was able himself to make a winner. Winning in this manner requires iron conditioning, and after copping the title once, Steve did not wish to make the effort to reach the peak again. Like other hard hitters before him, he knew that the only way is to initiate a long conditioning program…Many hard hitters find too many other things in life that they do not wish to put aside, year after year. Steve had the distinction of defeating Niederhoffer in the final (author's note: something no one else would do in any of Victor's five subsequent Nationals finals), so who can blame him for resting on his laurels?"

OTHER PURSUITS
Actually, though Vehslage's squash career ended when he was still in his 20's and therefore did not have the breadth of his elite contemporaries like the brothers Howe, he did anything but rest on his laurels, either athletically or in other areas of what became a very full life. He and his brother Ramsay won every major doubles invitational at one time or another during the 1960's and came within two points of taking the '63 U.S. National Doubles in their only final-round appearance, leading Sam Howe and Bill Danforth 2-0, 13-12. In addition to these exploits, he became an outstanding court tennis tennis player in both doubles, where he won the U. S. Court Tennis Championship with Alistair Martin in '66, and in singles, while also excelling at tennis and golf. In his later years, he became an avid and accomplished fly fisherman as well.

These varied athletic accomplishments in such a diverse number of sports is especially remarkable for the highly unusual health condition with which he had to cope and which began while he was still an undergraduate at Princeton. Every so often, Vehslage had a frightening tendency to collapse when he was struck in the chest or shoulder area by a ball or player, a phenomenon whose genesis was never discovered despite the scores of doctors who attempted to do so and the countless tests they administered in their effort to diagnose and cure this mysterious malady.

Sometimes he would be untroubled despite sustaining a solid blow, yet on other occasions a seemingly innocuous incident, like a glancing carom off his upper body by a slowly-moving tennis ball would so undo the normal workings of his neurological system as to cause a collapse. Whenever this happened, Vehslage would have to remain on his back for a few minutes, but then would arise and be able to resume the game immediately, often playing at as high or higher a level than prior to the event!

These episodes would occur unpredictably and disturbingly frequently, perhaps as often as nearly a dozen times per year. Efforts to trace it's cause to some early accident or trauma were unsuccessful, and the doctors were convinced that it had no relation to the fatal brain tumor that he battled throughout the final year of his life, but it probably played some role in his decision to abandon the racquet sports at which he so excelled at a relatively early age in favor of activities, like golf, where the likelihood of a mishap that could trigger another episode was much more remote.

The wide variation of athletic activities in which Vehslage experienced success was a microcosm of his life as a whole, his medical condition notwithstanding. Indeed, his longtime friend Treddy Ketcham called him "a man for all seasons." In addition to his highly productive business career with at IBM, from which he retired two years ago after nearly four decades of meritorious service, Vehslage was extremely well read (Shakespeare was a special favorite), an expert gardener and a connoisseur of fine wines, a pursuit that began during his years in France. He was a past president of the Round Hill Club in Greenwich and a Director of the Prouts Neck Country Club in Maine, where he and April often vacationed during the summer.

He was known as a determined competitor, yet also, in Bostwick's knowledgeable words, "one of the finest gentleman I have ever known." An exceptional parlay for an exceptional person, who in a relatively brief squash career rose to the very top, successively, of the junior, intercollegiate and amateur games while surmounting a disconcerting medical condition to also attain excellence in a number of related and unrelated sports and in the business world as well.

Editor's Note: Mr. Dinerman would like to thank Treddy Ketcham, Pete Bostwick, Sam Howe and Anne Farrell of the USSRA Office for their outstanding assistance and support for his research on this article.

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