By James Zug
This past year, three nonagenarians and one great writer died, leaving our squash landscape a lot less vivid. These four men were all iconoclasts: they were outspoken leaders and their outsized personalities left deep, historically unique imprints across our country.
John Cornish
Former Mass SRA president and the last person to have played a match on the unicorn court, John Gregory Cornish died in October 2008 at the age of 96. He lived across the street from The Country Club in Brookline.
Cornish played at Middlesex and his senior year in college was captain of the 1932-33 national champion Harvard team. He worked in insurance for Field & Cowles. During the Second World War, his squash career was put on hold while he served for 42 months at sea as an officer in the Navy. As Harold Kaese wrote in the Boston Globe in 1944 about Cornish, “Destroyer escorts have squash only in cans.”
With a very good backhand, Cornish was a leader of the 1930s hard-hitting brigade. Allison Danzig, the dean of squash journalists, said of Cornish in 1937: “The Boston youth, who has made big strides, fairly murders the ball, but he does not vary his game enough and he has not yet quite the control to make his speed pay dividends.”
He “tries for aces with hard drives. He has a well-rounded game, but depends mostly on hard, low shots,” added the Boston Evening Transcript that year. “He is strong physically and capable of lasting through a long punishing match.”
Cornish placed in the top-10 of the Massachusetts SRA rankings 11 times, including twice at No. 2. He won the prestigious Middlesex Bowl in 1937 and 1948 and lost in the finals three more times. He once beat Charley Brinton in his prime. Ten times he was the club champion at the Harvard Club of Boston, still the club’s record. He played on numerous Lapham teams, represented Boston when it won the national five-man team championship and he had the highest winning percentage of Hub players in the history of the tri-city Lockett Cup, posting a career record of 17-7.
He never won the state championship, losing twice in the finals. In 1941 he could have claimed the title by rights when Sherman Howes, the defending champion, ”received a severe leg injury in winning a two-point thriller from Harold Kaese in the semifinals,” as the Boston Herald reported in January 1941. The tournament committee awarded Cornish the title, but Cornish refused to accept it and lost to Howes when the match was played three weeks later. In veteran (40+) play, Cornish came close to a national title. In 1951 he was tied 2-2 in the finals when he pulled a leg tendon and had to default to George Waring.
With Art Sonnabend, Cornish won the 1935 Massachusetts state doubles title. It was played on the old “unicorn court” at the Boston Athletic Association the year before the venerable club closed. They beat Johnny Hall & Dick Wakeman 15-7 in the fifth after squandering match points in the fourth. Cornish & Sonnabend also got to the finals of the 1937 Canadian national doubles, where after beating Hubert & Argue Martin they lost to Art Baker & Stanley Gallowin 13-15, 15-12, 15-13, 15-12.
Cornish served on numerous Mass SRA committees and was president of the association in 1948-1949.
Eliot Berry
Softball pioneer and gifted writer Eliot Ward Berry died in November 2008 in his sleep from a heart attack. He was 59.
Berry grew up in New York and learned to play at the University Club with his father Rynn. At Penn, he was All-Ivy in football, tennis and squash, a triple feat never repeated in Ivy League history. Playing for Al Molloy, he had a miraculous run to the finals of the 1971 squash intercollegiates at Williams. He got by No. 3 seed Peter Briggs in four, then No. 1 seed and hometown favorite Ty Griffin 18-16 in the fifth before losing to teammate Palmer Page. Berry was inducted into the Penn Athletic Hall of Fame in 2000.
After graduation, he signed contracts with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Atlanta Falcons, trying to get a roster spot as an NFL placekicker. He got cut in preseason both times, but learned enough to write an action-packed, salacious novel out of the experience: Four Quarters Makes a Season (Berkley, 1973). In it, a Philadelphia placekicker misses a 35-yard field goal with time running out in the Super Bowl and Los Angeles wins by two.
Moving to Europe, Berry earned a doctorate in English at King’s College in London; his thesis on the fiction of John Hawkes became his second book, Poetry of Force and Darkness (Borgo, 1979). He then moved to Germany to be a Fulbright lecturer in Munich.
Berry coached squash in Munich and Monte Carlo and played in a number of International Squash Players Association tour events. In 1977 Berry won a match in the qualies of the British Open, lost the next match and was a lucky loser into the main draw. He faced Jonah Barrington, going down to the former World No. 1, 9-5, 9-3, 9-7. Twice more he tried to make it into the main draw of the British Open, but in both 1978 and 1979 he lost in the first round of the qualies (He also entered but withdrew from the 1976 World Amateurs in London.) In 1977 he played No. 1 on the U.S. team at the World Amateurs, winning America’s only match by beating Lars Kvant of Sweden 5-9, 7-9, 9-7, 9-0, 9-0. (Kvant had reached the quarters of the individual the week before.)
In the early 1980s, Berry returned to New York and became a real estate appraiser. He played in various amateur hardball tournaments. His love of tennis prompted two books about the pro tour—Tough Draw: The Path to Tennis Glory (Henry Holt, 1992) and Topspin: Ups and Downs in Big-Time Tennis (Holt, 1996). His books did not fully reach their audience in part because of bad timing. His football novel came out the same month as North Dallas Forty, and Tough Draw appeared a few months after John Feinstein’s Hard Courts which covered the same pro tennis season.
But Berry was a very fine writer: “Sampras moves under pressure as if he has virgin olive oil in all his joints.” “Connors seemed like a railroad man. He seemed like he could get the train over any bridge, through any obstacle, to any destination.” “Nick Bollettieri was brown as a berry and still liked to coach in just his tennis shorts with his shirt off. Bollettieri had been in the tennis business for thirty years, many of them ankle deep in soft green Florida entoutcas clay and hot sun.”
And from a description of a Rod Laver match: “The response was automatic. Laver, hanging back, hit a cross-court forehand with so much topspin and forward-moving sidespin that the ball spit over the net like a snake, landed right in front of [Roy] Emerson, and hissed at his feet, nearly tripping him, for the presumption of an approach shot into Laver’s big forehand. Emerson simply laughed and nodded. Laver was the best. Laver had not hit that ball out of desperation or a fit of ego. Great shots at all levels arrive when they have been earned, not merely wanted.”
John Fetcher
Colorado rancher John R. Fetcher died in February 2009 in Steamboat Springs. He was 97.
Born outside Chicago on New Year’s Day 1912, Fetcher first picked up squash at New Trier High School in Winnetka, which enabled him to make the freshman team at Harvard where he matriculated in 1929. He played on the Class C squash team his sophomore year and rose up to the varsity by senior year. In March 1934 playing No. 4, he won a tough four-gamer in Harvard’s 8-1 dual match victory over Yale. He was in Lowell House, where he led the house swimming squad. He graduated in 1934 with a masters degree in engineering.
After college he moved to Paris, where he worked for the Budd Company (now ThyssenKrupp Budd), the car and train manufacturer. He became the Paris squash champion and attended the 1936 Olympics in Berlin—all the more interesting since his father was Jewish (the family changed its name from Fecheimer to Fetcher in 1919). In 1937 he moved to Philadelphia and joined Merion Cricket Club. For the next decade, Fetcher was a leading squash player. He captained the Philadelphia team to victory in the 1948 national five-man teams, and with David McMullin he won the 1947 Canadian national doubles.
In 1949 Fetcher and his wife Criss, along with his brother Stanton, decided to move to northern Colorado to become cattle ranchers. They bought a 2,000-acre cattle ranch on the Elk River in the Yampa Valley outside Steamboat Springs.
Skiing was a passion. In 1925 Fetcher had learned to ski in Switzerland, in college he was one of the first to ski the headwall at Tuckerman’s Ravine in New Hampshire and in Paris he designed a pair of stainless steel skis. After moving to Steamboat, Fetcher served on a national ski jumping engineering committee and was the catalyst behind the six-hill ski jumping complex at Howelsen Hill. He was most well known as a founder of the Steamboat Springs ski area. In 1962 he carried the bull wheel for the first Steamboat chairlift on the back of his pickup truck from Long Beach (CA). to Steamboat in 48 hours and then spent Christmas Eve installing it. He oversaw the construction of a half dozen chairlifts and a gondola. In 1993 Fetcher was elected to the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Hall of Fame.
Despite for decades living 160 miles from the nearest court, Fetcher still played squash. He served on the board of the USSRA representing the Pacific Coast. He advised the Denver Club and the Air Force Academy in their construction of courts; both built doubles courts because of Fetcher’s encouragement. In 1964, as secretary of the Colorado SRA, he organized the state’s first squash league. In 1985 the John Fetcher court was opened at the Steamboat Athletic Club with an exhibition with Fetcher and Hashim Khan. In 1987 he was elected to the Jesters Club, and to black-tie dinner dances he would wear a tuxedo he bought in Cambridge in 1929.
“There is the sheer fun of walloping that ball, of occasionally besting an opponent judged better than yourself,” Fetcher told the cadets at the Air Force. “These are moments which give us all, young and old, an inner satisfying feeling. A person’s true character is quickly disclosed in competitive play.”
Fetcher kept bees, forecast the weather from beaver activity and carried a chainsaw in his truck so he could clear lodgepole pine from the roads on his ranch. Until his mid-90s he patrolled with the Steamboat’s ski patrol. Just months before his death, he was harrowing his hay meadows in a tractor and bulldozing ditches. He also played tennis indoors on Mondays and Fridays. He would like to play more, he was quoted in a local newspaper when he was 96, but he was too busy working—that would have to wait until he retired.
Frank Fiala
The sporting goods kingpin Frank C.J. Fiala died in July 2009. He was 97.
From 1946 to 1972 Fiala ran Moody & Co., one of the country’s biggest squash racquet and clothing manufacturers.
As a teenager, Frank Fiala gave tennis lessons at Germantown Cricket Club. He was a top tennis player at Penn, where he graduated in 1934. He first worked as a sales representative for a pharmaceutical company, but because of the Great Depression, the summers were so slow that he moonlighted as a seasonal tennis pro. While working at the Ocean City Tennis Club on the Jersey Shore, he met a Syracuse businessman named Arthur Moody who had a small wholesale and retail tennis company. After the war (Fiala in Algeria with the army) he started work at Moody and in 1952 bought out Art Moody’s interest.
The motto was “Everything for Tennis & Squash.” Fiala sold racquets, balls, shoes, shirts—everything, except the courts themselves. It was a family business. His wife Ruth handled office paperwork and designed clothing, trophies and the personalized tennis racquet covers that Frank printed on an old newspaper press in the basement; his children stuck brand name decals on racquets and strung hundreds of racquets. Moody became one of the major tennis wholesalers in the country and sold the first line of stretch acrylic tennis shorts. In 1972 Fiala sold the business to a consortium headed by Craig Brand, later the executive director of U.S. Squash.
Fiala was a big fan of vintage cars and jeeps (he drove across the country in 1932 and always tinkered with them on weekends), maintained hiking trails, rode horses and collected jokes (he had filing cabinets full of them). He was also a pack rat. A few years after buying Moody, Brand moved the company to another location in Milford. While cleaning out the files, he came across a box. It was labeled “FCJF’s Old Beaded Chain Door. Absolutely Useless. Do Not Throw Away.”