The 1963-64 season that followed would turn out to be the third in a
row in which each Howe brother won a USSRA national championship. Ralph
Howe --- who moved to Long Island after his college graduation to take
a job with the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation as a control
system Aerospace Engineer working on the Lunar Excursion Module for the
moon landing of the Apollo Project --- won his only U. S. National
Singles title, which ironically was held at a site, the U. S. Naval
Academy, whose team Coach Skillman had banished from the Yale schedule
after the lineup stacking five years earlier. Unseeded (just as Sam
Howe had been when he had won his
first U. S. Nationals in Buffalo two years earlier) in spite of his
victorious run through the Atlantic City draw a few weeks earlier,
Ralph Howe, who had lost 3-0 to David Pemberton-Smith in the
quarterfinal round of the Canadian Nationals just one week earlier, was
forced to --- and did --- survive a murderous draw that required him,
after an opening-round win over Buffalo’s Steve Gurney (later, as noted
in the Musto quote, the Yale squash coach throughout the eight-year
period from 1975-83), to post sequential wins over Steve Vehslage (whom
Ralph Howe had only previously beaten once, in the 1961 Yale-Princeton
dual meet, before then losing to Vehslage in that year’s Individuals
final); Ben Heckscher, the top-seeded defending champion; Charlie
Ufford, a finalist in this event one year earlier, who had survived a
five-game quarterfinal with Sam Howe; and Henri Salaun, the second seed
and four-time U. S. Nationals winner. John Smith Chapman, the No. 1
foreign seed and recently-crowned (for the third straight time)
Canadian National champion (with wins over Sam Howe in that event’s
final round in both 1962 and 1963), was a surprising first-round
casualty, courtesy of Claude Beer.
Ralph Howe’s wins over both Vehslage and Heckscher were in
straight games, but his 17-14, 15-6, 11-15, 15-11 semi with Ufford was
much closer than those scores would indicate, since Ufford led 14-10 in
the first game (before yielding the next seven straight points) and 9-3
in the fourth, preceding a nine-point Howe spurt that gave him a 12-9
lead and control of that close-out game. Salaun similarly advanced to
the semifinal round without dropping a game, but his back-and-forth
route-going semifinal with Niederhoffer (who a few weeks later would
close out his college career by winning the Individuals title) was
tortuous and marred by what one write-up termed “a black mark on the
shining shield of squash. Starting with the unfortunate necessity to
assign a substitute referee, and with one of the judges inexperienced
and indecisive, a horrible mess resulted in a situation which
constantly demanded strict control and firm decisions.” Drained by his
contentious eventual 15-12 fifth-game win over Niederhoffer, and by
then less than two months shy of his 38th birthday, Salaun faded in the
last two games of his next-day four-game final with the 22-year-old
Ralph Howe, who determinedly followed his pre-match strategy to keep
Salaun (the craftiest of shot-makers when given an opportunity up
front) deep in the court, pounce on any loose balls that Salaun coughed
up and utilize his superior youth and athleticism to force the pace.
The telltale final score was 15-8, 10-15, 15-9, 15-10, and on the final
exchange, Howe lashed a backhand drive which Salaun tried to return by
hitting the ball into the back wall, but it died in midflight and never
made it to the front.
The USSRA Yearbook’s write-up of the tournament admiringly
concluded, “Ralph on this weekend was truly the National Singles Squash
Racquets Champion, not alone because he won it, but because he won it
so well,” while Bob Lehman struck a similar theme in his MSRA Yearbook
report when, citing the poise with which Howe had successfully handled
every challenge that his five-match march threw at him, Lehman
approvingly noted that, “Even when given less than an even break on
calls, he was completely undisturbed --- in fact, he rose superior
under adversity of stress…He richly deserved every rung on the ladder
to his enviable goal.” Ralph Howe’s game was qualitatively different
from Sam’s, though both of them had all the shots and hit the ball
beautifully off either flank. Sam, whose classic, flowing strokes on
both flanks were right out of a squash textbook, never appeared
flustered and played with a calm demeanor no matter what was happening
on court, whereas Ralph by contrast exuded a more visible (though
controlled) level of intensity, both in his facial expression and in
the way he attacked the ball, and he possessed a greater level of speed
and athleticism --- “like a panther” was the description of one of his
contemporaries --- that he tried, usually successfully, to impose on
the competitive terrain. His 1964 U. S. Nationals match with Salaun
marked the latter’s ninth and last appearance in the U S. Nationals
final --- all of them occurring within the compressed 14-year period
from 1951-64 --- although he did get to the semis two years later
before barely (in a fourth-game overtime) losing at that stage to Sam
Howe.
SIMULTANEOUS-CHAMPIONSHIP-POINT(S)
Four weeks after the 1964 U. S. National Singles ended,
Sam Howe and Danforth traveled to Minnesota in an attempt to justify
their top-seeded status and retain the U. S. National Doubles title
that they had annexed one year earlier. This they successfully
accomplished, albeit by literally the barest of margins, i.e. 15-14 in
the fifth. Both this pairing and the Kit Spahr/Claude Beer duo, seeded
second by virtue of having captured the prestigious David C. Johnson
Memorial Doubles a few weeks earlier, won their trio of pre-final
matches in straight games, including in the top-half semi, where
Howe/Danforth met the Vehslage brothers in a rematch of the five-game
1963 final that, however, in this case was resolved with a downhill
15-13, 12 and 3 tally. Spahr and Beer similarly dispatched 1960 U. S.
National Doubles champs James Whitmoyer and Howard Davis in straight
games in their semi, then split the first two games of the final and
seemed to be in great position when they won the third game 18-15,
running off the last four points of the tiebreaker session.
But in the fourth game, Sam Howe scored a number of winners on
the same kind of shallow backhand cross-court nick that he had hit on
the final point of his U. S. Nationals singles final two years earlier
against Heckscher. He and Danforth were able to force a fifth
game, which seesawed throughout, with neither team able to amass more
than a two-point advantage. Leading 14-12, Howe and Danforth
surrendered the next two points, then, to the surprise of almost
everyone in the packed gallery, called no-set, partly in the hope that
its “surprise effect” would unnerve their opponents and partly as well
because Sam Howe’s legs had been increasingly cramping up as that game
moved along. The choice created a simultaneous-championship-point,
which landed in their column when Danforth blasted a forehand
cross-court on which Spahr retreated, hoping to play the ball off the
back wall, only to have it instead find the nick in back and roll out
at his feet.
Sam Howe would win his second
simultaneous-championship-point title in just nine months when he edged
his brother Ralph in the final of the Gold Racquets Invitational at the
Rockaway Hunting Club early the following December, when Ralph tinned a
forehand reverse-corner at 17-all in the fifth. That early-December
weekend, during which Ralph had weathered a five-game semi with Ufford
and Sam’s pre-final wins had come against Zug and his former nemesis
Steve Vehslage, jumpstarted a fine 1964-65 season for both Howe
brothers. Ralph won the Atlantic Coast event for the second straight
year (in a 3-2 final over Diehl Mateer), Sam triumphed in both the
William White Invitational at Merion and (with Danforth) the Canadian
National Doubles for the first of three-straight years (in this case
with a straight-game final-round win over their American compatriots
Whitmoyer and Davis) and the two siblings faced off against
each other in the U. S. National Doubles final in Baltimore, where both
the sultry and unseasonably warm weather conditions and the scheduling
of the matches played a role in the outcome. Ralph Howe and Mateer, who
had partnered up for the first time when they won the Baltimore
Invitational Doubles on the same University Club of Baltimore court
just a few weeks earlier, had advanced to the final without dropping a
game, including in their concise Sunday-morning semifinal against Spahr
and Beer, who were pardonably still tired after a lengthy route-going
quarterfinal (in which they had trailed, two games to love) the
previous afternoon against Victor Elmaleh and Maurice Heckscher, Ben’s
younger brother.
By contrast, the top-seeded two-time defending champions Sam
Howe and Danforth had played their semifinal with Steve Vehslage (the
newly crowned U. S. National Singles champion by virtue of his
four-game final-round win over the favored Niederhoffer) and his
brother Ramsay after the
bottom-half semi, a breach of the established protocol of allowing the
No. 1 seeds to play first that drew some protest from the normally
imperturbable Sam Howe, whose prescience would be borne out before the
day was over. That match had turned into a murderous marathon in which
Howe/Danforth, after failing to reach double figures in either of the
first two games, surged back to push the match to a fifth game that
inched evenly along all the way to 14-all, no-set, before ending on a
Danforth three-wall that nicked on the left wall in front of Steve
Vehslage.
This marked the second straight year in which Sam Howe and
Danforth had won a simultaneous-match-point on the final day of this
national championship. But in this case (unlike a year earlier) they
still had one more match to play, with very little turnaround time, and
when the ensuing final began barely over an hour later, Danforth and
Sam Howe found themselves facing an even more daunting task when they
dropped both of the first two games in tiebreakers to Ralph Howe and
Mateer, the first when at 17-all Sam Howe’s attempted overhead volley
drop-shot caught the top of the tin, and the second when they were
swept in a best-of-five overtime session. Sam Howe and Danforth
resiliently fought their way into a fifth game, their 10th game of the
day, and one more than they could handle, with cumulative fatigue
playing a visible and defining role as the anticlimactic game moved
swiftly along to a clear-cut 15-6 conclusion. This turned out to be the
first of a stretch of seven editions of the U. S. National Doubles
(from 1965-71) in all of which at least one Howe brother played in the
final and in all but one of which (1968 being the lone exception) both
Howe brothers played in the final, either as opponents (from 1965-67)
or as partners (from 1969-71). No other pair of brothers has ever even
come close to matching either of those figures.
A PROFOUND AND LASTING IMPACT
The whole 1965 tournament experience had a profound and
lasting impact on Ralph Howe, who was playing in the U. S. National
Doubles for only the second time in his young career (he and Sam had
entered the 1961 event in Cedarhurst, pretty much on a lark, and pushed
defending champs Whitmoyer and Davis to a fifth game) after graduating
from Yale less than two years earlier. The benefits he would accrue
from teaming up with the extremely wise and vastly more experienced
Mateer would play a crucial role in the six U. S. National Doubles
(that year and the next with Mateer, then three-straight from 1969-71
with Sam Howe, plus the 1976 event with Peter Briggs) and two Canadian
Doubles titles (with Sam in 1969 and Briggs in 1976) that he would
collect during his career.
Even more than four decades after that 1965 tournament, Ralph
Howe (whose attempted defense of his National Singles title had been
stymied by his former Yale teammate Hetherington in a four-game
quarterfinal a few weeks earlier) vividly recalled how well organized
and focused Mateer had been throughout the tournament weekend, how
meticulously he scouted upcoming opponents, how he would arrange formal
pre-match meetings to discuss strategy for their upcoming match and how
he would always hold his racquet on the same side for his forehand.
Prior to the Baltimore Invitational final, Mateer and Howe had sat next
to each other in the gallery watching Ian McAvity and David
Pemberton-Smith win their semifinal, and whenever (as happened quite a
few times) McAvity would rocket one of his scorching forehands down the
middle and nick it out at the back wall, Mateer would lean over to his
much-younger partner and whisper into his ear, “Those balls are yours
when he hits them against us!” Their U. S. National Doubles win marked
the tenth time that Mateer had won this title with his fifth different
partner (having previously done so with Hunter Lott in 1949, 1950 and
1953, Calvin MacCracken in 1951, Dick Squires in 1954 and John Hentz in
1958, 1959, 1961 and 1962), with a successful defense to follow one
year later, leaving Mateer with an all-time record career total of 11.
MacCracken, a former Princeton star who in later years would win a
total of nine national age-group singles titles (the 40’s from 1960-63,
the 50’s from 1970-72 and the 60’s in 1980 and 1981), had, however,
played very little doubles and was an emergency replacement when Lott
became ill shortly before the 1951 event was scheduled to begin. Yet,
remarkably, a few practice games with Mateer at Merion during the week
were enough for the two of them to rise superior to the field in
Pittsburgh that weekend, a result that would be often cited as a
testament to Mateer’s mastery of the sport.
