He Whiffed: The Original Streak, the Cardiac Kid, The Palindromic String and Cool as a Cucumber- The Story of the Greatest Squash Match That No One Saw

By James Zug

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1989

We had lost to Harvard in the regular season in 1989, 6-3 in Cambridge. A week later we beat them in the semis of the first nationals team tournament at Yale. We beat them 7-2. And then we beat Princeton in the finals. It was theoretically an historic victory, but we really didn’t celebrate because if anything it reinforced that we should have beaten Harvard in the regular season match which was just a few days before. Some people were happy, but I very specifically remember many people including myself who were very unsatisfied by the outcome of the season. That season we were considered the sole national champions for both regular season and the team tournament, but we were tied for the Ivy title. This is because the Ivy League did not use a tie-breaker but the CSA did. I think it was 1961 when Yale had last beaten Harvard. The difference in the celebration between the tournament win in 1989 and the regular season win the next year was a factor of about 100.
—John Musto

1989 was Dave Fish’s last home match at Harvard. It was a beautiful send-off.
—Steve Piltch, Harvard men’s coach

1989 was the first year of the national teams for the men. There was some pushback from the athletic department to create it because it did add an extra match day. But it made sense. The women had started their team tournament years before [1973] but the men, we had never had one. Before 1989 it was simply an individual men’s tournament. So even though we won this new tournament, we were not convinced we were really the national champions. There was some confusion about that in the beginning. Everything was new and the regular season had always been the sole way of determining that. OK—so we had beaten Harvard in some playoff tournament. It wasn’t enough. We hadn’t beaten them in the regular season since 1961. That was The Streak in those days. And in 1989 it reached 28 straight wins. Did the playoff win end The Streak? We didn’t feel so. Maybe we were national champions, but we still had something to prove.
—Dave Talbott, Yale men’s coach

The [1962] Intercollegiate team contest was a tight, threeway affair, but both Harvard and Yale succeeded in defeating a good Princeton team, so it came down to the last team match, even as it had in 1961 when Yale defeated Harvard 5-4 in a thriller. This one was so close that it was hard to believe. Played at Yale before a back and forth until with the matches tied at 4-all, Yale’s [Joe] Holmes and Harvard’s [John] Francis entered the fifth and deciding game. The Yale fans were overjoyed when Holmes vaulted to a 11-6 lead. However sophomore Francis rose magnificently to the occasion and with a blazing hard serve and a series of nick drop shots incredibly won the next nine points for the match and the title. The small but vocal group of Harvard fans jumped into the court to congratulate their hero.
—USSRA 1962-63 Yearbook

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The 1990 national champions from Yale University: (Back row, L-R) Dave Talbott (Head Coach), Alex Dean, Charlie Stewart, Alex Darrow, Scott Faber, Tim Goodale, Tim Levin, Kenny Katz, Jim Seldner; (Middle row) Gerard Griffin, Jeff Hoerle, Chris Hunt, Cyrus Mehta, Tuffy Kingsbury, Bill Bauman, Garret Frank; (Front row) John Musto, Dan Morgan, John Schumann, Jeremy Feinstein, Genry Morsmann.

The Elis’ bus ride home didn’t begin until after midnight. Make no mistake; it was a grim trip and even the silver linings were tarnished. The JV had swept: Yale won numbers 11-20 in a breeze. Like the 747 that lost to a Saab, they picked the wrong distance…Unlike other years, though—and here the previous 27 come to mind—1989 offered the hope of revenge. The coming weekend would be the new nine-man team intercollegiate tournament, held at the comfortable confines of Payne Whitney Gym. And revenge Yale would get, in the form of a 7-2 semifinal win. But as far as the streak was concerned, they might as well have been playing foosball.”
—Derrick Niederman, Squash News, April 1989

I’ll never forget that feeling coming back from Cambridge in 1989 in the van. We didn’t want that feeling again.
—Chris Hunt

That was a super-depressing bus ride back in ’89. The worst couple of hours of my life.
—Tuffy Kingsbury

The Teams

You’ve got a coach in Dave Talbott who created a situation where you could be your best. Growing up in Denver, I had not been a part of the East Coast scene. As a freshman I played from No. 12 to No. 16 but Dave didn’t give up on me.
—Chris Hunt

So many of us had fathers who had gone to Yale: Garrett, Alex, Tommy Clayton, my father. Yale was in our blood and the streak was killing us.
—Tuffy Kingsbury

I grew up in New Haven. My dad was a Yale professor. I started going to Yale v. Harvard matches from age 12 and Harvard would always win 9-0. I idolized the Yale squash players. It would crush me to see them lose.
—John Musto

We were a very tight team. A lot of us (me, Goodale, Tuffy, Musto) lived in Davenport [College]. A lot of us were from the Heights Casino program. A lot of us were members of Sigma Nu fraternity. We hung out together all the time. We were buddies. We had fun together. A lot of the top teams weren’t like that. We had a free spirit as a coach. It was a different era.
—Alex Dean

1989-90 was my first year as men’s coach. I had been the women’s coach for three years and when Dave Fish stepped down from the men’s squash team, I came in. 1989 was a tough season. Princeton had ended our six year, 72-match win streak and then we had lost to Yale in the nationals. Fishy was an institution. He was an extraordinary friend and mentor. Looking at the 1990 season, it was a huge transition. I thought we had a lot of ability, we had a good team. Ultimately, Princeton and Yale would push us. The truth was going to play out in the course of the year. We had serious talent: Marty Clark got to 59 in the world; Jeremy Fraiberg got to 99. Bernheimer played on the pro tour for three years. This was a good team. We had guys from four countries: Baker from England, Pandole from India, Kaye from Israel and Fraiberg from Canada. We had two fantastic American recruits, Josh Horwitz and Clark—they were the top two American juniors—to help replace George Polsky who was away that year, but our big recruit was Mark Baker. He transferred in as a sophomore from England. Physically he was an incredible player—strong as an ox, built like a house. Jon who had played No. 1 last year and Jeremy, they had to step down a notch as Baker turned out to be a fantastic hardball player.
—Steve Piltch

I had been the U19 English captain and was probably in the top ten of juniors worldwide. I had been accepted at Harvard as a freshman but I decided to go to Nottingham University in England. Then I decided to re-interview and was accepted as a sophomore. The team were a good bunch of guys, so it was not hard to integrate, and the transition to hardball was relatively easy and I was beating most players straight away. I played two tournaments that season, one local tournament [Boston Eye Opener] where I lost to Greg Zaff in the final and the Harry Cowles tournament, which I won.
—Mark Baker

We were psyched to have Mark. He was really fit and had these strong, enormous legs—a very powerful player. He picked up hardball really quickly.
—Jon Bernheimer

I had met Mark at the World Juniors in Scotland in 1988 when I was on the Canadian team and we talked about Harvard—I had deferred for a year after high school—and so I was psyched when he finally came.
—Jeremy Fraiberg

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We had a lot of talent there, with Jeremy and Mark, a lot of guys from overseas. Steve brought us together. Piltchy was a fantastic coach. He had the right balance between working hard and having fun. Amazing guy. I thought the transition from Dave to Steve was seamless. Piltchy was already there, so it was fluid. Dave was still around, he didn’t completely leave the scene. He’d give technical advice. Steve was amazing about the physical aspects of the game. We were a pretty close-knit team. We hung out together and had a good team dynamic. We worked hard. I would get them up at 6am and go running at the indoor track. A lot of guys weren’t really into that. I was a kind of maniac. Gary Waite was on campus then, and he’d come to practice. I just loved that. We’d pick his brain and talk about how to be a better player. He’d come on court and just kick the crap out of us.
—Jon Bernheimer

I remember being totally unprepared for college squash. I was the No. 2 ranked junior in the country and I showed up to practice and was overwhelmed. I was getting my ass kicked. Practices were intense. It was very humbling. I lost a lot. It was a learning experience. I wasn’t going to play top five. I was No. 9. Tuesdays and Thursdays we ran sprints on the track in the morning. Twelve 440s. Guys were throwing up. It was the worst experience of my life. We had some good times together. We used to talk on the long van rides and Fraiberg would come up with some crazy hypothetical: “What if Bo Jackson played tennis, how long would it take him to win Wimbledon? If Michael Jordan played hockey, how long would it take him to score fifty goals? If Pete Sampras played golf…” Farokh and Jonny Kaye used to goad Jeremy. That game passed the time in the van.
—Josh Horwitz

Steve was more a disciplinarian than Fish. He was a very good coach. We all got along. There were different characters on the team. There was a natural competitiveness but it didn’t extend beyond the court. We had our own groups of friends. It was fun having my brother Jon on the team.
—Jim Masland

The Yale match was circled on the calendar. We trained for it all year. They said that Yale was a loud place to play, so Piltch used to pipe in static into Hemenway so we could get used to the noise. He had a boom box and played it loud. Man, that was hard to practice with. I remember looking at Jon Pratt and saying, “this is going to suck.”
—Josh Horwitz

Wednesday

I remember it like it was yesterday. That was the impetus for my hair going gray.
—Steve Piltch

There was a giant crowd. The place was packed. I just remember the place was packed.
—Dave Talbott

You win your match pretty easily and there is not much else you can do but root and yell. There was a lot of yelling that night.
—Jon Bernheimer

They were loaded for bear. It was like a Davis Cup match. It was crazy, really hot, really loud. We were in the lion’s den.
—Jeremy Fraiberg

“It was a wild time,” Talbott said. “During the course of the match we estimated that about 700 people were in and out of the courts…[Yale president] Benno Schmidt and [Director of Athletics] Ed Woodsum were there for the whole three-and-a-half hours and when it was all over there was a ten-minute standing ovation.”
—New Haven Register, 26 February 1990

I went on second. I had no place to go to prepare, no refuge from the noise. I didn’t have a Walkman. I felt unwelcomed. Not unsafe but unwelcomed. I went into Talbott’s office. I had almost gone to Yale. I had put the acceptance letter in an envelope and then didn’t send it. I knew all these guys from New York, although they were older. I liked them. But the scene was hostile. It was louder than anything I had experienced: hot, loud, hostile. I remember being intimidated. I went up 2-0 against Darrow and lost in five. I think he pummeled me. It is not a happy memory.
—Josh Horwitz

Marty was a strong competitor. The only contentious thing was in the middle of the match that I broke a string and went out to get a new racquet. When I came back in, I wanted to hit a few balls to get a feel for the new racquet and Marty said, “Let’s go.” He said that the rule was we had to start right away, no warmup. I am pretty sure I knew that he was right. There was no ref. It was just the two of us. He was not being ungentlemanly. It is a gentleman’s sport. In hindsight, he was a fierce competitor.
—Chris Hunt

Jim Masland and I had a history. Four years earlier we had played. He was a senior at Chestnut Hill Academy and I was a sophomore at Hill School. We were both No. 1. In our first match, at CHA, he was a big man on campus, captain, and I beat him. After the match he kicked a water fountain or something and it broke and flooded the locker room with water and he got in trouble for that. A couple of weeks later we played again at Hill. I put a large headband around my head. This was around the time that Jim Mc- Mahon used to do it, when he was getting in trouble for writing on his headbands. I wrote “H2O” on it. Got inside his head and beat him again. I was a pesky kid. My nickname was “Rat.” Fast forward four years and he’s a senior at Harvard and No. 5 and I am a sophomore. He was captain, same scenario as four years before.
—Garrett Frank

There was one particular match in high school where he was irritating. I got upset. I had to spend time cleaning up the water. He and I had some backstory, a little bit of history. He got under my skin.
—Jim Masland

It was a bad loss for me. The courts were fast. Cyrus was motivated, the crowd boosted him. He was inspired. I didn’t outplay him. On paper it was an upset. It was not a good result.
—Jeremy Fraiberg

For a time it looked very bad for us. We were down 4-2 and in two of the remaining matches—Darrow against Horwitz and Musto against Baker—we were down.
—Alex Dean

I had been sick for three weeks leading up to the match, two weeks in the infirmary, missed the Princeton match. I practiced on my own at night for five days leading up to the match, hitting just three-walls and doubles boasts (shots that could end the point as I doubted my ability to last a long time). In the match I alternated between the two shots and made virtually every one I hit. My teammates were in court two pacing in circles because they couldn’t squeeze in to see the match. They would look up at the balcony to see if Yale people were cheering to see whether I had won the point or not, and if I did they would bang on the wall, which later I remembered hearing but didn’t know what it was at the time. After just a few points into my match, I was winded and didn’t know how much longer I could last. I lost the first game 15-6. In the second game, I was down 13-8 and finally felt I had got hold of my breath. I tied it up 13-all. He called set-five and went up 4-1. I felt that if I didn’t win the second game then it would be impossible for me to come back. The next points were all very long. I chipped my way back and won the first game 18-17 (5-4 in the tiebreaker). I lost the third game 15-9. I was down in the 4th 8-3 and then 10-4. At this point all the other matches had finished and everybody crowded around court one. At 10-4 I started thinking about all the training that I had done, thought about practicing on this court as a kid, and thought about the little-known enclosed track that I would run on in which you couldn’t see around the corner. I started chipping away and tied the score at 12-all. I ended up winning the game 15-12. When I got off of the court after the 4th, I was told that the match was even at 4-all. I was very calm and focused. The final game was tight the entire way up, 6-all, 10-8, 11-9. I was up 14-11, having wasted two match balls. We played a long point. I hit a forehand threewall which he got to. He hit a backhand roll corner and then time stood still. I was in the middle of the court and he was stuck in the front left corner. I had the entire court to hit to end 28 years of Yale losing to Harvard and to win the national championship. An image of all the Yale players who had lost to Harvard went flashing through my mind and I hit the ball down the rail watched it bounce the second time. I turned to the crowd and raised my arms above my head as my teammates came climbing over the wall, literally climbing on top of Harvard coach Steve Piltch, to get over the glass. They first smothered me and then raised me up over their heads. I had actually taken lessons on that very court from when I was 11, and Steve Gurney, Yale coach at the time, would tell me to imagine that I was playing No. 1 for Yale against Harvard for the national championship, with the stands full, and that it all came down to me, so in a sense I had been practicing for this moment for many years.
—John Musto

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I did not play as well as I could that day, so was disappointed with the result. On the day Musto handled the match better.
—Mark Baker

Musto was still a trifle weary and oyster-gray from a virus that had sidelined him from the Princeton match, so the secondgame reprieve was essential.
—Derrick Niederman, Squash News, May 1990

Mark Baker was like Ivan Drago from Rocky IV. He was a huge huge guy. I felt like in comparison to these international guys, we were just hacks from Brooklyn. Besides Cyrus, we were all from the States. We just tried to hang in there.
—Garrett Frank

All I remember was 4-all and down 0-2. There were contrasting styles—it was like when Mark [Talbott] played Jahinger [Khan]. Baker playing softball, straight drops and Musto using the angles, three-walls, reverse corners. It was less that Baker broke down and more that Musto upped the pace and really attacked, hitting three-walls. John didn’t want long points. Baker got rattled, as the match wore on, and started making mistakes and errors.
—Dave Talbott

It was so poetic, like it was out of a novel or something: Musto, the flat-footed, cello-playing mystical genius, the cardiac kid, the local kid, hitting these explosive double boasts. That was the thing about hardball: the speed of the exchanges. Musto was ripping roll corners, reverses, sick reflex volleys, crazy angles, the double boasts, the reverse double boasts, the Philadelphia shot, the skid boasts, the ball zipping everywhere. Astonishing upsets were possible in hardball.
—Jeremy Fraiberg

“It’s one of the greatest comebacks I’ve ever seen,” Yale head coach Dave Talbott said. “He knew it all came down to him.”
Yale Daily News, 22 February 1990

It was a crushing defeat. Piltch just got run over by enthusiastic fans after the match. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe we would have beaten Yale if we had been more of a team? Once practice was over, we sometimes went our separate ways. We were very talented but had some ego.
—Josh Horwitz

When the match ended and John won the match, I got trampled. To this day, I have a bad back because of that. I would have preferred to have been rushing into the court to celebrate rather than trying to get out of the way.
—Steve Piltch

Baker barely made it off court before the dikes burst and a sea of blue covered the T, the service boxes, most of Court 1 and all of John Musto. Such was the power of pent-up energy. The team match line score thus read YYHHYHHYY—the same on either side of the glass wall, but a far cry from the equally palindromic string of nine H’s that had characterized this would-be rivalry for so many years.
—Derrick Niederman, Squash News, May 1990

My overwhelming memory was “Wasn’t that great for Yale?” You feel the empathy. That final match came down to Musto and Baker, all this history, all this pressure. Hot as balls in there, people screaming. Quite like a Duke v. Carolina game. Given that rivalry and the history of futility. Benno Schmidt is there, the president of Yale, introduced by Talbott at the beginning of the match. It was a beautiful, great moment for college athletics. It was almost pre-ordained. They had five seniors, their last home match. They had lost forever to us. This was their moment. They had brought their president. They knew something was brewing. It was a fairy-tale ending. They weren’t going to be denied. It was their date with destiny.
—Jeremy Fraiberg

It was so intense and there was such pent-up emotion that when it was over, we plowed through the door and tackled Musto. We thought we’d have this a year ago and had to wait 365 days. It was a great feeling. For Musto, playing at No. 1, with his work ethic, to win it was awesome.
—Chris Hunt

What was so memorable was the pile-on after the Musto match. Bam! That’s it. We were climbing over the glass and there was a huge pile-on, with Musto on the bottom. He was exhausted, had the flu. I remember he was on the bottom of the pile yelling, “Get off! Get off. I can’t breathe.” There were a couple of photos of the pile-on and it was like the Miracle on Ice and there was Dave running around looking for someone to hug.
—Tuffy Kingsbury

“Color it blue.” “How sweet it is.” “We’re number one.” These were some of the phrases used to describe Yale’s win over Harvard.
Racquet Voice, March 1990

“There are no NCAA championships as such,” Talbott said. “The national champion is generally recognized as the regular-season champion, and that’s what we won when we beat Harvard. This weekend we have the [nationals]. It’s a competition we started last year to give the players more competition and a little more opportunity to get rec- ognition, but I wouldn’t trade the championship we won Wednesday for any other championship anywhere.”
—New Haven Register, 26 February 1990

“It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever been involved in in my career,” Talbott said. “It’s the culmination of a long haul and it puts us on par with the king of the game—Harvard.” Crimson head coach Steve Piltch agreed. “It was the greatest intercollegiate squash match ever played, or certainly one of them,” he said. “We put it on the line and they played better. We did everything we could do and they were just a little bit better tonight.” One fan last night was especially impressed with the Eli’s success. “It’s one of the greatest matches I’ve ever seen,” President Benno Schmidt, Jr. said. “Of course, I never doubted.”
—Yale Daily News, 22 February 1990

Here is the craziest thing: the last time we beat Harvard in the regular season, it was 1961 and my father was on that team. And he was in Payne Whitney that Wednesday watching us beat Harvard again.
—Garrett Frank

Sunday

We went straight down to Penn the next morning, with the nationals starting that Friday it just made sense to keep going rather than return to Cambridge. But it made for a very long road trip.
—Steve Piltch

Down at Penn, we practiced and thought about avenging that loss. We met for lunch, played, went to a matinee movie. I was worried about playing Yale again. I knew it was going to be another tough match. [George] Polsky had shirts made up at the start of the season, with a Letterman Top Ten list on it and one said that we hadn’t lost to Yale in 28 years. That hurt. I had one of those teeshirts and I didn’t want to own it now.
—Josh Horwitz

We beat Dartmouth 9-0 and then Princeton 8-1 and so on Sunday we once again faced Harvard in the finals.
—Alex Dean

It was an vacant building on Sunday afternoon. Looking around, undefeated season, national champions— who cares? It was kind of cool in a way because it was just us, just the players. These days, we’ve got ESPN, reporters, cameramen, the New York Times, more than a thousand people, live streaming, people taking photos with their phones, Twitter, Facebook updates. It is a circus now.
—Dave Talbott

The whole thing was an anti-climax after Wednesday. The galleries were empty, completely empty. It was frankly a bit of a let-down.
—Jeremy Fraiberg

One of the aspects of the story was that this was pre-Internet and no one really knew what happened that Sunday. This was a great match and no one saw it. My parents who lived in Philadelphia, they didn’t come. No one was there.
—Jim Masland

Alex Dean at No. 4 was the first off the court with a 3-0 win over Jonny Kaye. Whenever Deano came off the court with the first win, we had always won the match.
—John Musto

I had lost to Kaye 3-0 in 1989 and again 3-0 on the Wednesday. I wasn’t going to do it a third time.
—Alex Dean

I was up 2-1, 13-8 in the fourth. I was thinking, “I should have this one.” I lost focus a bit. Masland pushes it into the fifth. He just gets the lead. He goes up 13-8 and pulls it out. To this day, I say, “What was I thinking?”
—Tuffy Kingsbury

It was the end of a long season and few people were there. I was up 2-0 on a corner court. I was up and confident. I lost 3-2. I don’t know what happened. Darrow stepped up his game. He grinded it out. He was just a bit tougher then. He had been in college for a while.
—Josh Horwitz

The next match, four days later at Penn, may have been the greatest collegiate match that nobody saw. There was practically nobody watching—just the two teams and a couple of Penn grad students from India who were waiting to use the courts. Our nickname for Cyrus was “Chute,” a very bad Indian swear, and the grad students were aghast as we were yelling “let’s go Chute” to cheer on Cyrus.
—John Musto

What was amazing was the turnaround from Wednesday. So many people who won on Wednesday lost on Sunday and vice versa. The biggest flip was with Hoerle. Farokh was the best No. 7 in college squash history. He killed Jeff Hoerle on Wednesday, smoked him. Jeff’s just a kid out of Deerfield who picked up squash in tenth grade. He was No. 19 on the ladder as a freshman. But on Sunday, Jeff beats Farokh. That was the biggie.
—Tuffy Kingsbury

On Sunday, the courts were colder. I was focused on revenge. I had felt responsible for the team losing on Wednesday. I was motivated to win.
—Jeremy Fraiberg

Down at Penn, no one was watching our match, no one at all. We were playing in one of those back courts where there was no glass-back wall and the gallery upstairs was tiny, just room for a half dozen people. It got to 2-all. I know we are down 4-3. The match was a hard fought battle. In the fifth, Jimmy went up something like 14-12 and had a couple of match points. Then it went into the tiebreaker, set three and he’s up 16-14 with three more match points. In the tiebreaker I went to a different place. I was in the zone. It had never happened to me before. The ball was as big as a baseball. I’m ice-cold. I hadn’t lost a match in college. I had gone undefeated my freshman year at No. 7 and so far my sophomore year. I wasn’t going to lose. I won the next two points. Then I am serving, at 16-16, to his forehand from the left side. I decide to mix it up. I have to do something different. He’s been shooting off my lob serve. I hadn’t hard-served all match, really all season. I never hit a hard serve. I bang a serve. He lets it go by and it hits the back wall on the fly and comes straight out right along the right wall. Jimmy slides up and swings at the ball but misses it because it is hugging the side wall.
—Garrett Frank

I was peering through the little window. Garrett was down a couple of match balls. On the last point, he hits the hard serve— the hard serve?—and it comes along the side-wall and Masland couldn’t pick it out. Serve, swing, match over. It was a frozen moment. Surreal. No one moved: Rat, Jimmy, me. No one. For ten seconds they stood there, looking at each other. Then they came off the court and it was pandemonium.
—Dave Talbott

I don’t remember what happened in the match down at Penn. Do I want to hear it? I know it was close but I’ve probably repressed a lot. Honestly, I don’t recall the details of the match. It was a tough loss. I remember being out on the court with Frank. I don’t remember any of the details. I’ve played a lot of high-level squash and it must have been brutal. The match could have gone either way. Ninety-nine of a 100 times, I win that match. I don’t know if you’ve enlightened me or depressed me.
—Jim Masland

I was down 0-2 (15-12, 15-12) and after the second game we went over to see what was happening with Rat’s match. If Rat loses, it is 5-3 and the match is over. Dave tells me, “John you probably won’t have to finish your match because Rat’s about to lose.” He’s watching through the little 6×6 inch window in the door. There is only room for one person. He’s telling us the score. 16- 14, 16-15, 16-all. Silence. Then: “He whiffed!” We all shout: “Who whiffed?” “He whiffed, he whiffed!” “Who, who?” “HE whiffed it”—meaning Masland. Rat walks out of the court and says, “Cool as a cucumber” Dave looks at me and says, “Well, I guess you are back on.”
—John Musto

Rat comes out of the court, saying, “Cool as a cucumber,” just walking right by us like nothing had just happened. It was amazing.
—Alex Dean

Rat had ice-water in his veins. That is it.
—Tuffy Kingsbury

I walk off the court saying, ‘Ice-cold, baby. Ice-cold.” Coach picked me up and hugged me. I am on cloud nine. My first question was, “How is Musto doing?”
—Garrett Frank

They were so amped up after the Masland match. Garrett was so clutch. He was a character. Jimmy had a temper and used to break racquets, goggles, and Garrett got under his skin. I went with Farokh and we sat behind the court where Musto and Baker were playing. We were so nervous and tense that we sat there and listened rather than watched. I had a bad feeling.
—Josh Horwitz

I had been very ill on the day of the match and really should not have played, so was not disappointed with the score.
—Mark Baker

When Garrett won, I went back on court and we played the three highest quality games of all the games we played. I won those 15-13, 15-13, 15-10. We were all strangely calm afterwards. It confirmed the first match that we were, however slightly, the better team. We played very much like a team and were a very tight-knit group.
—John Musto

But Bernheimer gave Harvard its fourth match at No.3 and Yale’s Wednesday winners at No. 1, 5 and 9 all trailed 2-0. Basically Yale had to first force and then win all of the theoretical remaining nine games—and that’s exactly what happened. Darrow pulled off a déjà vu at No. 9, Frank laid probability to rest and fought off five team match points at No. 5 while Musto, in his personal version of Superman II, rallied to win 15-10 in the fifth at the pole position. If anything, the sequel may have outdone the original—but don’t tell the throngs who were at Payne Whitney that memorable day. They wouldn’t believe you.
—Derrick Niederman, Squash News, May 1990

I remember being very disappointed. We just didn’t get it done. They hung in there and played well. It was a big loss. It was a tough, tough trip.
—Jon Bernheimer

Jimmy lost a heartbreaker. That was hard. And then Baker lost. He ended up wearing the loss because it was dramatic and it was the last one but five guys had lost that afternoon.
—Jeremy Fraiberg

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I remember in that old locker room, cold and cavernous and we just sat there and listened to the Yale guys celebrating.
—Josh Horwitz

When the Harvard men’s squash team lost to Yale, 5-4, for the second time within four days, both [teams] called it an act of fate…“I guess you win some and you lose some,” Pandole said. “You have to lose some to enjoy the winning.” “I still definitely think Harvard is more talented,” Talbott said. “They had the match. I think they handled two very frustrating losses in an exceptional way. Our guys really respected that.”
—Rebecca D. Knowles, Harvard Crimson, 27 February 1990

“It proves that [Wednesday] wasn’t just a home court advantage and that we really were a better squash team,” Talbott said. “We didn’t leave any doubts in anybody’s mind.”
Yale Daily News, 28 February 1990

It was the kind of match you want kids to play. When things get really tough, you have to rely on what makes you strong. You have to keep control during the difficult moments. Don’t do anything special. But you have to do something. It was spectacular. We failed; one half-step short. I loved the experience and hopefully made a difference. That said, I would have preferred to win.
—Steve Piltch

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Aftermath

Not a word was spoken on the way home, not for six hours. We stopped for dinner. No one talked at dinner. My roommates had come down to New Haven for the match on Wednesday and I couldn’t face them on Sunday night. We met on Tuesday for a little bit. We were so devastated. Fraiberg and Baker didn’t want to go to the nationals. I remember Bernheimer practicing.
—Josh Horwitz

We pulled over in New Jersey at some rest stop to get dinner. We got out and the Harvard team was getting back into their van. Piltch said, “We can’t get rid of you guys”
—Alex Dean

No one went to class on Monday morning. It was an epic night.
—Garrett Frank

At the banquet after the season, there was a big annual award normally given to a senior as the most valuable player. It was given to all five of us seniors. It was a nice way to say goodbye.
—Tuffy Kingsbury

In the past fifty years Yale men have only once been both national champions and Ivy League champions in the same season in squash and that was 1990.
—John Musto

After the matches, we were pretty upset and I think some of the guys wanted the year to be over. Mark and Jeremy were burned out and had injuries so they didn’t go to the individuals. Me being a senior, I just went. John Anz [the Harvard assistant coach] and I drove down to West Point alone. I beat Cyrus in the final in three. Winning the individuals was the biggest win of my life.
—Jon Bernheimer

The women’s intercollegiates were at Brown, so I was there and watched the finals in which Jenny Holleran beat Berkeley Belknap 17-16 in the fifth. That was exciting and then I heard that Jon had somehow won the men’s title.
—Steve Piltch

We didn’t know Jon had won the individuals till Monday. There were no cell phones or email, so word didn’t filter down until there was an article in the Crimson. He held a huge party the following weekend in Currier House, holding up the trophy. It took some of the sting out of what happened in February.
—Josh Horwitz

It was pretty quiet on the drive home from Philly that night. It was clear that we had settled on what would happen the next year. I think we learned that you need to know how to respond to defeat. The nice thing in sports is that there always is a winner and hopefully you’ll get another chance to be the winner. We learned one hell of a lesson about ourselves and grew up as squash players and as a team. We got some of that arrogance knocked out. Had we beaten Yale those two times, I am not sure we would have been as good the next two seasons. We did pretty well the next two years. We beat them 7-2 in the 1991 regular season and then 7-2 in the nationals. We internalized the lessons. We understood: don’t talk the talk, you’ve got to walk the walk. You learn much more from losing and we did. That is the irony: out of disappointment comes growth. I am really a believer in this, that athletics if they are done right, what really matters is lessons learned and how you apply them. 1991 and 1992 bear that out.
—Steve Piltch

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We used the losses to Yale as motivation. No one said it explicitly. We all knew. We were not going to let them beat us again. It stung. We didn’t make tee-shirts. We just smoked them. It was a defining moment for us to get better. We didn’t want to live in the past. You can’t let the past drag you down. I remember two years later going back to Yale and beating them, just crushing them 8-1. On the court for introductions we knew and Yale knew that we were going to beat them. We were up 3-0, 4-0. We just knew it was a matter of time. That was very satisfying. There was never any doubt. Our biggest problem was figuring out who was going to play No. 1. Any of our top five could play one and any of the bottom four could play No. 6.
—Josh Horwitz

Last year Yale squash captain John Musto scraped out a fifth-match, fifth-game victory to clinch the competition for the Elis and wrest the national championship from Harvard. But this year, that exhiliration turned to pain, as top-seeded Harvard junior Jeremy Fraiberg battled him to a decisive fifth-game. Fraiberg prevailed in an overset match to nail the coffin on the Elis.
Harvard Crimson, 20 February 1991

That was the biggest match of my career: my junior year beating Musto. It was so symbolic for the team, after what he had done to us the previous year. Musto had absolutely hammered me at the Ivy Scrimmages in November. So at the team match at Harvard in 1991, I was up 11-4 in the fifth, and Musto managed to come back and tie it at 13-all. It was crazy. That cardiac kid again. In the overtime, he made a bad error on a sitter and I won the match. It was a bookend. We would have won the match anyway, but it was pretty sweet to win. I let out a roar after winning the last point.
—Jeremy Fraiberg

After graduating, I went pro and played for a few years. I trained with Gary [Waite] in Switzerland and on my way home I stayed with Mark Baker in Nottingham for three or four weeks in his flat and trained with him. That’s the last time I’ve seen him.
—Jon Bernheimer

We didn’t know it at the time, but those two matches were the last hurrah. It was the end of the hardball era in only a couple of years. It was the end of having the national championship team with eight Americans in the top nine—the overseas recruits were coming. And it was the end of the finals of the nationals being such an obscure event that no one came to watch. It was only 22 years ago but it seems like it happened a hundred years ago.
—Dave Talbott