Safe Home: Don Goodwin Retires After More Than Thirty Years As The Voice of Squash

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“I am not sure I can pin it down,” John Nimick said after the 2014 JP Morgan Tournament of Champions, “but I believe I have either played in or produced about fifty events with Don over thirty years, and in that period he has become a partner, collaborator, coach, advisor, role model and dear, dear friend. Most importantly, he has been the metronome of the ToC, always crafting a high-quality presentation and guiding the audience from beginning to end of this amazing tournament. When Don was on the microphone, all was well in the world and everyone was in safe hands.”

Last month at the finals of the ToC, Don Goodwin turned off his microphone for the final time, ending one of the most remarkable and unsung careers in squash.

Goodwin was, in fact, dropping the curtain on a sixty-five year sports broadcasting career. He began it as a teenager in Toronto, so long ago that it was perforce in radio. He got a job in Halifax doing the sports. One night in the late 1950s, the television sports guy was sick and Goodwin took his seat. He worked in Halifax and then back in Toronto for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, eventually managing the sports division.

He chaired numerous amateur athletic organizations and he helped set up Peter Burwash International, the world’s largest sports management, but Goodwin’s raison d’etre was doing live play-by-play or color commentary for dozens of sport broadcasting events on radio and television, including kayaking, track and field, boxing, water skiing, tuna fishing, badminton (where he met his wife of thirty years), basketball and canoeing. He announced the July 1963 fight between Cassius Clay (later Muhammed Ali) and Henry Cooper in London. Beginning at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, he worked at almost a dozen Games, summer and winter. At the 1976 Games in Montreal, Goodwin managed the entire broadcasting arrangements.

The Games were both terrifying and exhilarating. At the 1972 Games in Munich, Goodwin’s room in the Olympic Village was on the same level and directly across from the building where Palestinian terrorists had kidnapped Israeli athletes. He got a glimpse of one masked gunman before German police occupied the room.

In 1996 Melissa Winstanley was on vacation on Cape Cod when she turned on the television to watch the opening ceremonies of the Atlanta Games. A familiar voice was the master of ceremonies. Around the announcement of Albania in the parade of nations, the phone rang. It was John Nimick. “Do you hear Don?” he exclaimed.

Being a master of ceremonies on court was Goodwin’s most visible talent. For thirty-five summers, he compered the Rogers Cup, Canada’s leading pro tennis event in Toronto and Montreal. The Toronto Sun dubbed him “Mr. Tennis Canada.”

In the early 1980s he started working at squash events as well, first in Toronto and then all around North America. He lost count of how many but estimated it was nearly a hundred in total. He did the North American Open, the U.S. Open, the Loews Cup. He also did the Tournament of Champions thirty times, including all seventeen at Grand Central. He brought the players onto the court with his pithy words of introduction, put together the daily report sheets and created the tournament programs. With his crisp intonations and honeyed tones, Goodwin used his masterful voice to kindle excitement and appreciation in the audience.

Goodwin loves George Bernard Shaw, running and playing tennis, his children and grandchildren and healthy eating—he’s a vegetarian. He has a place on the west coast of Florida and at age eighty-three it is now his home base.

At the very end of every tournament, Don Goodwin would give his signature sign-off which he is now following himself: Safe home.