By James Zug
Cattle Call
The United States Open Squash Championships were a part of the story of the September 11th, 2001 attacks.
In 1998 tournament director John Nimick brought the venerable U.S. Open to Boston for the first time and staged it in the ballroom at the Harvard Club. In 2001 he decided to relocate it a few miles away to Symphony Hall. It was going to be the first sporting event the landmark concert hall had ever hosted.
The morning of Tuesday, September 11th in Boston started as a beautiful, blue-bird day, not a cloud in the sky. Melissa Winstanley and John Nimick were at Symphony Hall supervising the building of the portable court under the supervision of the redoubable Steiner Ericson. It was to be a tight, three-day load-in, finishing on Thursday morning.
Suddenly, the whole world changed. The first hijacked plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46am. The second plane hit the South Tower at 9:03am. The third plane hit the Pentagon at 9:37am. The North Tower fell at 9:59am; the South Tower at 10:28am.
Mid-morning, people in Boston started hearing about the attacks. It is called a flashbulb moment, one of the unforgettable instants when you hear the news of something tragic—like when John F. Kennedy was shot or Lady Diana dying—and never forget. I was billeting at my cousin’s house in Beacon Hill and had turned on the television in an empty apartment to find out the score of the Red Sox v Yankees game the night before (turned out it had been postponed by rain). Instead, I saw the horrifying news about the first plane and watched live as the second plane plow into the South Tower. I then made my way over to the Harvard Club of Boston for the cattle call.
The U.S. Open in that era was very different from today. The Boston tournament was all-male—at the time the women’s U.S. Open was held separately. It had a sixteen-player main draw, with twelve automatic slots; additionally, there were two rounds of qualifying, with sixteen players competing for the four remaining spots in the main draw. The qualifying rounds were scheduled to begin at noon on Tuesday the 11th, which meant that two hours earlier the so-called cattle call was held. This was the moment when the tournament director read out a roll call and then created a draw. If one of the sixteen players was absent at 10:00, then his slot went to the next player on the reserve list, provided he was present too.
I walked into the Harvard Club around 9:45 and in the basement grill room spied a dozen players watching the news. I sat with Mark Lewis and Preston Quick. Then at five to ten, they went into the cattle call at the bleachers near courts three and four.
By then everyone involved in the tournament knew about the attacks. Nimick found out driving to the cattle call from Symphony Hall to the Harvard Club when his wife Kate called him. Mike Riley, the tournament referee, was driving up from Rhode Island when his daughter, living in Brooklyn, called. Preston Quick, in the qualies, heard on the radio. Paul Johnson got a call from his mother—she was frantic because she had thought he might be playing in the Tournament of Champions, which used to be down at the Winter Garden Atrium. Chris Walker, who had just relocated to the States three days before, got a call from a friend. Mark Lewis biked from his home in Somerville to Union Boat Club, where he was the pro, and heard the news at the club. Tim Wyant had spent Monday night at Lowell House at Harvard, crashing on a couch with old college teammates; he was on a bus on Massachusetts Avenue when a fellow passenger listening to the radio reported the news. Jago Nardelli found out the news when he walked into the Harvard Club. Paul Price, staying at the Harvard Club, saw the news on his room’s television. Peter Marshall was in a taxi when the news came on the radio.
“I remember that moment with such sadness,” said Melissa Winstanley, the tournament operations director. She had goten a phone call from a friend in Boston.
The cattle call was surreal. The North Tower collapsed at 9:59am, just a minute or two after everyone had gone into the meeting, but by then everyone knew the U.S. was under attack.
Richard Chin did not answer the roll call. It was Chin’s thirty-second birthday. He and Janet Bostwick, a former assistant at the Southport Racquet Club, were driving that morning from New York to Boston. After his match, they planned to celebrate his birthday at dinner at Blue Ginger, the famed Wellesley restaurant run by squash player Ming Tsai. (Tsai had coached Chin at Cornell.) Chin arrived at the club late and was kicked out of the qualies. He heard about the attacks, abandoned the dinner and turned around to go back to New York.
Nimick transferred all matches to the Harvard Club because the other venue for the qualies, the University Club of Boston, was closed due to its proximity to Boston’s iconic skyscraper, the Hancock Tower. Matches began at noon. Tim Wyant faced Graham Ryding. Tim’s father Jack was on a plane that morning that landed at 9am. It was was one of the last to land before they closed the airport. He made it to the Harvard Club in time for Wyant’s third and last game against Ryding. Joe Kneipp topped Mark Lewis in three. Rodney Durbach overcame Jago Nardelli in five. “I remember being shellshocked from the attacks,” said Nardelli. “But we were playing a match for ranking points, so I thought: ‘don’t let these people destroy what you came for.’ After the match, when we went out for dinner that night, I was thinking that maybe a bomb would go off in the restaurant—you just didn’t know the extent of the terrorism. It was surreal.”
Work on installing the portable court in Symphony Hall was delayed on Tuesday when the city closed the hall for security. It reopened Wednesday and Ericson and his crew worked hard through the night to have it ready by 5pm on Thursday.
Come From Away
One of the problems were that many players in the main draw couldn’t make it to Boston in time for their matches on Thursday. The tour schedule was tight that fall. The Al-Ahram in Cairo finished on Sunday 9 September. The U.S. Open’s number one seed Peter Nicol and number two Jonathan Power had just battled it out in the finals at the Pyramids of Giza (Nicol won in a three-game, sixty-minute match). Those two men, along with Lee Beachill, David Evans, Martin Heath and Ong Beng Hee, were stuck transiting from London to Boston. “David Evans & I were walking towards the gate at Heathrow when an announcement was made telling us all flights to North America were canceled and to return to the main lounge, and then collect our bags from baggage reclaim,” remembered Martin Heath. “It was chaos. I couldn’t get a flight, so I drove to Nottingham, stayed with Alex Gough, and then drove on home to Oban on the west of Scotland to wait for whatever was going to come.”
On Tuesday, the only England-based PSA player to get on a flight was John White. After losing in the quarters in Cairo, he had returned home to Nottingham and flew on Tuesday morning from Birmingham rather than Heathrow. “Two hours before reaching the States, the captain came on the PA and said there had been an attack on America,” remembered White. They shut down the in-flight services and after another couple of terrifying reports from the captain, everyone got nervous.” The plane was diverted to Moncton, a small city in New Brunswick, Canada. “The Royal Canadian Mounted Police came on board and told us to leave our luggage. We exited the plane and they took us into an aircraft hanger. There were passengers from a half dozen other planes there. We stared at a giant screen that had the news on. I was at a loss of words. I then went and stood in line at a bank of pay phones (I had left my mobile phone back in Nottingham—this was 2001 and it wasn’t that important back then) and called my wife to tell her to call John Nimick and tell him I was coming.”
White then went to Avis and got a rental car and drove alone into the night, arriving in Boston twelve hours after he left the hanger. The well-known 2013 Broadway musical Come from Away was based on the 7,000 passengers stranded at another obscure Canadian town, Gandar in Newfoundland.
Indecision
The question was what to do. “Do you cancel the tournament and give into the terrorists, or do you honor the victims and the enormity of the moment by stopping?” said Nimick. “Should we pioneer in the face of adversity and carry on or does everyone need to focus on the tragedy at hand?”
Nimick’s indecision was natural. Other sports struggled to react. On Tuesday afternoon Major League Baseball cancelled all games from that Tuesday through Sunday. The NFL and college football cancelled all the weekend’s games. The NHL cancelled all pre-season games that weekend. NASCAR cancelled races that weekend. For soccer, there were two games that day in Columbus, OH in the Women’s U.S. Cup, USA v Japan and Germany v China, and both were cancelled. The MLS cancelled the rest of its regular season (in addition, all European soccer games were cancelled that weekend).
For golf and tennis, there was much more vacillation. The Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis was hosting the $5 million 2001 WGC-American Express Championship. Tuesday the 11th was the usual practice round. Mark Calcavecchia was on the 11th fairway with Tiger Woods when an official told them that something had happened in New York. They played another hole, heard about the second plane and went into the clubhouse where they found dozens of players and officials—much like at the Harvard Club—crowded around television sets. Initially, the PGA announced that there would be no play on Thursday and thirty-six holes on Friday. Then on Wednesday the 12th, they cancelled the tournament. The players scattered. Some stayed in St. Louis and were spotted days later hitting balls on the Bellerive driving range. With all flights grounded, Tiger Woods drove seventeen hours from St. Louis back to his home in Florida; Calcavecchia drove nineteen hours to his home in Arizona. On Wednesday other pro golf events, like the Tampa Bay Classic, the Buy.Com Oregon Classic and the Senior Tour Vantage Championships were cancelled.
The LPGA was putting on the $1 million Safeway Classic at Columbia Edgewater Country Club in Portland, OR. Like the PGA, the LPGA initially tried to continue, even though seventeen of the 144 golfers in the tournament were unable to get to Portland. On Thursday morning, they played the pro-am as scheduled and announced they were shrinking the event from fifty-four to thirty-six holes and starting it on Saturday. A few hours later they cancelled the event.
September 11th was two days after the end of the tennis US Open in New York. When the attacks occurred, the WTA was staging a $140,000 women’s tennis tournament in Waikoloa Village on the big island of Hawai‘i. The event started on 10 September and was completed as scheduled on 16 September. Sandrine Testud beat Justine Henin in the finals of the singles and two Slovenian women won the doubles.
Draw
The rest of Tuesday for the U.S. Open was mostly spent glued to the televisions at the Harvard Club and the men’s locker room. People tried to call home, but the lines were down. “My parents back in England went ballistic,” said Chris Walker. “They didn’t know where I was. It was hours before I got through.” Everyone felt isolated. The distance from home was never greater. “There was a dark mood,” said Graham Ryding.
“Back in Australia we knew that Joe was traveling to Boston, but had no idea if he was going from New York, if he was flying, if he had somehow gotten mixed up in the attacks,” said Dan Kneipp, Joe Kneipp’s brother and the director of the 2012 World Open in the Cayman Island. “So it was about midnight in Australia and we had still no idea where Joe was and quite anxious. Then we saw the U.S. Open qualifying draw was posted. Joe’s name was included. Back then, the qualifying rules clearly stated that if you were not physically in the room when the draw was made, then you weren’t included. Simply seeing the qualifying draw get posted with Joe’s name in it meant that he was at the tournament in Boston and safe. A very small thing relative to what a horror that occurred, but it was the happiest I’ve ever been seeing my brother in a qualifying draw.”
Mike Way, then a coach of Canada’s top pros, left the Harvard Club to go for a drive that Tuesday afternoon. He ended up near the Boston Harbor and sat on a quay looking at the water. A kiteboarder came up and they chatted for a while and then the kiteboarder went out onto the water. Way, an avid kiteboarder, joined him. “I was taking in the Boston skyline, the waves, the sky, the empty blue sky,” said Way. “Normally, there is such a joy in being out there, but that day it was just unreal. It felt weird to be out there, so I came back in.”
Before the second round of the qualies were to begin at 4pm on Wednesday, Nimick made a decision. After multiple conversations with leaders at the PSA, US Squash (then called the USSRA), MA Squash (then the Massachusetts SRA) and local leaders like Lenny Bernheimer and Tom Poor, Nimick suspended the qualies and created a new main draw. Everyone who had won on Tuesday was automatically placed into the main draw, as well as two lucky losers from Tuesday (Viktor Berg and Tim Wyant).
The revised 2001 U.S. Open main draw was:
[1] Paul Price (AUS) v Anthony Ricketts (AUS) [5] Stewart Boswell (AUS) v Stefan Casteleyn (BEL) [6] Chris Walker (ENG) v Viktor Berg (CAN) [4] Mark Chaloner (ENG) v Derek Ryan (IRL) [3] Paul Johnson (ENG) v Stephen Meads (ENG) [7] Graham Ryding (CAN) v Peter Marshall (ENG) [8] Joseph Kneipp (AUS) v Rodney Durbach (RSA) [2] John White (SCO) v Tiim Wyant (USA)“Delay in the start of the tournament is not judged to be a solution,” Nimick announced in a press release issued by Howard Harding, the PSA’s communications director, “since none of the remaining players, including world No.2 Jonathon Power and No.3 Peter Nicol would have been able to reach Boston from Europe until next Monday at the earliest. Furthermore, the window of opportunity for staging the event at Symphony Hall is fixed, giving no flexibility towards postponing the event. We are looking forward to a truly world class event in Boston this weekend. We are buoyed by the support of both players and fans so far which have led us to the decision to hold the event in these difficult times.”
Players and fans generally supported it, but the PSA did not. The PSA’s chief executive officer, Gawain Briars, de-sanctioned the tournament. “Whilst acknowledging the symbolic spirit of determination from the promoter and support staff to continue the event against adversity, the PSA also has to acknowledge the tragic losses incurred by the people of Boston as a result of the disasters,” Briars wrote in a press release. “Also, as a result of at least six of the main draw players not so far being able to reach Boston, the proposed ‘new’ draw incorporating on-site qualifiers provides a real risk that the event will this year lose significant if not complete ranking status. Consequently, whilst extending our support on a practical level to our promoter in Boston, the PSA, as a mark of respect, cannot officially sanction the continuation of the tournament as a five-star world-ranking event.”
“I had flown straight from Cairo to Boston and landed on Monday evening,” said Paul Price. “My original plan was that me and a friend were going to fly to New York and spend a couple of days there and then come up on the 12th but we couldn’t change our original flights so we just flew into Logan. Thank goodness. Then I became the number one seed on Wednesday. Part of me thought, well that is great, it would be a big tournament to win, it would boost my ranking and I’d make good money. But it would always have that asterisk—did I really win it? You want to win the biggest tournaments in the world by beating the best in the world. I felt a heavy sense of responsibility. It was weird. I wasn’t in the right headspace to play. It was an eerie, uncertain time. It was hard to focus on squash. It made me realize how insignificant playing the game of squash was. I remember admiring John Nimick, what he had to deal with, the pressure of deciding what to do. There was a sense of community that week, we all came together as a group, not as our individual rankings and ego. Unusual for a group of high-performing professional athletes. Today when I talk to my athletes who always striving for a better ranking, I think of what happened that week at the U.S. Open and tell them: ‘what if a genie says to you that now you are top ten in the world, you’ve won a lucky prize. Would you accept it, because you didn’t earn it? If you would say no, then stop resisting the process of earning it, of being glad for the journey.’”
Death
On Thursday, discussions continued. Ericson led the effort as they reached the finishing stage of the buildout of the court at Symphony Hall.
By then the global and personal effect of the attacks was becoming known. The Winter Garden Atrium, where the Tournament of Champions had been played from 1989 to 1994, had been extensively damaged by the falling towers; it reopened a year later.
Squash clubs had closed for the day or the week. On Tuesday at many squash clubs in Manhattan and Brooklyn, members walked in covered in dust and ash from Ground Zero. One survivor who walked away from the Towers was Avery Coleman. She was a member of Princeton’s squash team, class of 1999. Heading to get coffee, she had left her desk on the 63rd floor of the South Tower and was in an elevator when the plane struck the North Tower. Her elevator stopped twenty flights from the bottom, so she took the stairs the rest of the way. Just after she got out of the South Tower, it was hit. She took cover in the lobby of a nearby building and then walked for more than an hour to Midtown.
Downtown Athletic Club, a storied club in the financial district, closed that Tuesday. It was four blocks south of the World Trade Center, so in an exclusion zone. The club never reopened. The squash courts at the Pentagon—they had one softball court at the time and another one about to be built (Don Rumsfeld added a third court, a hardball singles court in 2004, the last new hardball court was built in the world)—survived because the airplane hit the western façade of the building, far enough from the athletic center.
So many squash people were dead. In the November 2001 issue of Squash Magazine, Tim Wyant listed some of the players who were killed: Manual DelValle, Michael Lunden, William Micciuli, Brian Murphy, Joe Zucala. One member of the community was Cathy Chirls, an avid squash mother of Nick Chirls, a Heights Casino junior. Nick went on to Yale, class of 2007, where he was captain and All-Ivy.
Derek Sword, a young Scot and club champion at New York Athletic Club, died in the South Tower. In January 2002 his old friend and teammate Peter Nicol helped stage an event to honor Sword at the Lamb’s Club in London: there was an eight-man pro tournament and two fifteen-a-side teams, one from New York and one from the UK playing each other on what was called World Squash Day. A year later, another match was played and the event grew to be a global celebration of the game called World Squash Day.
Marsh & McLennan, the insurance firm that had long been a sponsor of squash, lost 358 employees. David Emil, a longtime New York City player and father of a promising junior, was the owner of Windows on the World, the restaurants and bar atop the North Tower. On September 11th, he lost seventy-nine employees, along with ninety-one guests.
A footnote to the squash-adjacent storyline of 9-11 is Virginia Buckingham. She is the younger sister of Bill Buckingham, former staffer at US Squash and now a tournament emcee and host of the Squash Radio podcast. Virginia Buckingham started in politics as the press secretary and chief of staff for Massachusetts governor (and avid squash player) Bill Weld. In 1999 she was appointed CEO of the Massachusetts Port Authority, which runs public shipping in Boston Harbor and three airports including Logan International. Two of the four planes that were hijacked on 9-11—the two that hit the Twin Towers—took off from Logan. Amid a public witch hunt to scapegoat someone, Buckingham was drawn into wrongful death lawsuits and assailed in the media; one Boston newspaper ran ninety articles on patronage at Port Authority in the three months after 9-11. This happened even though it was legal to bring box cutters (the main weapon of choice for the hijackers) onto planes, and that airlines, not airports, were responsible for security. Six weeks after the attacks, Buckingham was forced to resign. Twenty years later, she came out with a moving, often searing memoir, On My Watch.
Decision
At 11:52 on Thursday, September 13th, just eight minutes before the start of the first round of main-draw matches at the Harvard and University clubs, Nimick called off the 2001 U.S. Open.
“As events unfolded this morning, including the designation of Friday as a National Day of Prayer and a public vigil on Boston Common, it became clear that the appropriate action would be to postpone the tournament,” John Nimick said in astatement. “While our hopes had been to proceed with the tournament at Symphony Hall, and dedicate it to those felled by Tuesday’s tragedy, ongoing developments warrant a different decision at this time.”
Kevin Jernigan, chair of the US Squash board, added: “This decision was made out of respect for the victims of the tragic events of September 11th. Our thoughts and prayers go out to everyone affected by events of the past few days and we encourage people to continue to work together to support relief and rescue efforts and to help defend our country’s belief in a free and open society.”
At Symphony Hall, there were a lot of glum faces. Steiner Ericson had to stop and reverse course and dismantle the portable court. It was about three hours from being playable. “The crew was stunned,” said Melissa Winstanley. “It was hard going forward all week, and it was harder going back.”
At the Boston Racquet Club, Chris Walker and Viktor Berg decided to play an exhibition before a capacity crowd. Mike Riley refereed. They performed magically, putting on a great show with each copying the other’s fake swings and head feints. Walker “won” 17-16, 6-15, 14-15, 15-6, 15-14. At 14-all, Riley called out “championship ball.” The crowd gave them a standing ovation.
At the Harvard Club, Paul Johnson faced Stephen Meads in the first match. “I tried to stay away from the news on Thursday,” Johnson said. “I did my warmup in a dark hardball court. I walked out just before noon and found out that we were finished. Meadsy said, ‘why don’t we play anyway?’ There were thirty-odd people there. And so we played a full, regular match, without a referee.” Meads won 3-1.
The Aftermath
Everyone tried to restart their lives. Melissa Winstanley stayed at Symphony Hall until the court was totally dismantled on Friday evening. Then she made her way to Logan on Saturday. She walked to the gate and in the waiting area for the flight to Atlanta were her next-door neighbors.
Mike Way drove Viktor Berg, Shahier Razik and Graham Ryding back to Toronto. Normally it was a nine-hour drive. It took them seventeen hours because of the queue at the border. Every person was searched. “It was chaos,” remembered Berg.
Some players couldn’t get out of Boston for days or weeks. Many of them billeted at Stephen Columbia’s house on Cordis Street in Charlestown. It was a townhouse across the street owned by a friend of Columbia’s who was overseas and offered it while he was away. By Thursday a dozen players had found a safe harbor there—including Liam Kenny, Peter Marshall, Jago Nardelli, Paul Price, Anthony Ricketts. Because they couldn’t get flights out, a half dozen were still there a week later. Steve and his son Edward, a top junior, initially made meals for everyone. One player stayed for a couple of weeks. The players trained at the Harvard Club. Many did summer-style two-a-day sessions: drilling, ghosting and fitness training in the morning and then match play in the late afternoon. Mark Chaloner and Paul Johnson had been gold medalists in the men’s doubles at the 1998 Commonwealth Games, so they spent a lot of time that week in Boston preparing for the 2002 Commonwealth Games. “We were still living the life of a professional,” said Johnson. “We had a routine and we kept to it. That was what we knew. There was so much uncertainity: we couldn’t predict if the tour would stop for a few days or a few months.”
Players went for soul-searching walks. Late on Tuesday afternoon, Paul Johnson and Peter Marshall walked down Newbury Street and into the Boston Common. They sat on a bench and talked for three hours. “Marsh and I had never had that kind of time together. I had always looked up to him. He was always brilliant, already doing good things at a young age, he was in top ten in the world at a young age. Del [Harris] and [Simon] Parke and Marsh—as I was growing up, they were the idols. And to have three hours to just sit and talk, uninterrupted, nowhere to go and so much to digest. It was something I’ll always remember.”
Richard Chin did eventually get to Blue Ginger for dinner. But it has always been a bit strange for him having a birthday on the same day as a national tragedy.
Nimick lost $62,500 on the 2001 U.S. Open. He staged two U.S. Opens in 2002, the memorial 9-11 one in January 2002 at the Sheraton (Peter Nicol beat Jonathon Power in the finals in three); and then, finally, a regular U.S. Open at Symphony Hall in September 2002 (David Palmer beat Stewart Boswell in three).
By then, everything had changed. The women had experienced September 11th in a different way. Their previous major event was the Heliopolis Open in Egypt which had ended on 4 September, so when the attacks occured all the pro women were spread around the world, rather than mostly together at an event like the men in Boston.
The next PSA event was in Detroit, the Motor City Open, at the end of the September and about half the men who were in Boston entered. Meads and Razik did the best, both reaching the semis. The next platinum event for both men and women was the Qatar Classic in Doha at the beginning of October. Many players had trouble readjusting. For the women, only five of the fifteen matches in the main draw in Qatar went beyond three games, and many men who were in Boston lost unexpectedly early and against seeding in Qatar: Durbach in the qualies; Kneipp, Marshall, Price and Ryding in the opening round; and Chaloner, Johnson, Ricketts and Walker in the second round. Both draws seemingly lacked some of the usual spark of a major event. But later that month the 2001 World Open was held in Melbourne, and the tour resumed at full speed.
Slowly the 2001 United States Open faded into obscurity. At SquashInfo.com, the Bible of pro squash, no records exist of that first day of qualies matches. It was almost a lost event. But it had been very real for those who were in Boston that fateful week twenty-five years ago.