The MSRA’s Five-Man-Team’s Triumph On Simultaneous National-Championship Point in 1980
In February 1980, former (in 1964) U. S.
National Champion Ralph Howe and four of his friends decided to enter
the 1980 U. S. Nationals, not to compete in the individual Singles
event but rather to play in the Five-Man Team competition. It was
originally going to be a Piping Rock Club team consisting of John
Reese, a two-time (in 1971 and 1976) U. S. Nationals finalist, and Rick
Sterne, formerly ranked in the USSRA top-10 and the captain of the 1968
national-championship Harvard team, along with Tim Megear, former World
Court Tennis champion Jimmy Bostwick and Howe himself, all of whom were
members of that Long Island club.
But when Bostwick had to withdraw due to
injury shortly before the event began, the team reached out to Larry
Heath, a former (in 1963) U. S. Junior champion and Reese’s doubles
partner (they would reached finals of the U. S. National Doubles later
that spring for the second of four-straight times from 1979-82, finally
winning the title in 1982 after falling short in the previous three
years). Since Heath was a member of the Field Club of Greenwich,
the team competed under the New York MSRA banner (rather than Piping
Rock). With a Nos. 1 through 5 lineup composed of Reese, Howe, Heath,
Sterne and Megear, they progressed to a final-round match-up with a
Mexican contingent that had won this event twice in the prior four
years and had barely been edged out 3-2 in its 1979 final against
Princeton. As it happened, Princeton’s Jadwin Gymnasium was the host
site in 1980, but the Tigers, playing without their three best players
(namely John Nimick, Chris Sherry and Gary Fogler, all of whom were
entered in the Singles draw) and with three members of the 1979
Five-Man championship team having graduated, were eliminated in the
opening round. New York scraped past Yale 3-2 in the semis and then
opposed Mexico in a final-round match that went all the way --- and
really all the way.
Heath hammered Mexico’s No. 3 player Javier
Teran so decisively (yielding only 15 combined points) that, even
though all the matches were played at once, he actually was able to
shower, change and return to the gallery in time to watch the last few
games of several of the other matches (which is why he was the only
person dressed in street clothes rather than squash gear in the team
photo that was taken at the trophy lineup). Sterne also won in three
games over Elias Zacarias at No. 4 --- interestingly, Heath’s
position one spot ahead of Sterne was an exact replication of their
relative slots on Deerfield Academy’s lineup when they both were
seniors on that New England prep school’s squash team 16 years earlier.
But Megear lost a close four-game match (15-14, 14-17, 17-16, 15-12) to
Isaac Kirel and Reese was unable to convert a two-games-to-love lead
against Pepi Musi, who won the last three games 15-8, 10 and 7.
This meant that the championship round had
come down to the No. 2 position, where Ralph Howe, after winning the
first two games 15-12 and 15-14, was having all kinds of trouble
closing out Juan Mendez, a tenacious competitor who relentlessly ran
down virtually every ball that Howe hit in the closing stages of each
of the match’s final three games, just as his teammate Musi had done
against Reese. Howe led 10-4 in the third but lost 17-14 and then
came up just short in the 15-13 fourth game as well. He forged ahead
10-5 in the fifth, but Mendez closed to 8-10. Realizing that he had to
take a few chances, Howe successfully went for broke with a
service-return reverse-corner winner, then followed that up with an
un-returnable lob serve to make the score 12-8, but Mendez hit a
winning nick and Howe barely caught the top of the tin on the next
point. With his advantage cut to 12-10, Howe bravely hit another
reverse-corner winner, but back-to-back Howe tins preceded a perfect
Mendez drop shot that tied the score at 13-all. Howe chose the
best-of-five option, and won the next two points to give himself three
match points, the first two of which evaporated when Mendez hit a pair
of winners.
A MULTI-PART DRAMA ALL BY ITSELF
By this juncture, even though the Singles
portion virtually always draws the lion’s share of the attention at
this tournament --- and even though two great matches were being played
on Jadwin’s pair of magnificent gallery courts while the Five-Man
finals matches were played on courts down the side with much smaller
galleries --- word of this titanic match had circulated throughout the
entire squash area so thoroughly that the two exhibition courts were
comparatively empty, since most of the spectators had abandoned them
and rushed to the court where Howe and Mendez were waging their
electrifying battle. By this juncture as well, Reese, whose match with
Musi had been the last one to finish other than Howe’s, had left the
gallery, having become too nervous to watch. The
simultaneous-match-point was a multi-front drama all by itself, one
that became the most memorable moment of the entire weekend. After a
few conservative exchanges (with neither player wanting to make an
error and no opening to go for a shot), Howe, who at the time was
positioned slightly behind Mendez, hit a backhand drive that caught the
tin. The sizable Mexican contingent in one part of the gallery erupted
in cheers and the referee announced that Mendez had won. But Howe
turned to him and said that he thought the ball had grazed Mendez’s
shirt on its way to the front. The right-wall line judge agreed with
Howe’s contention, at which point all eyes turned to the left-wall
judge, who happened to be Betty Constable, the legendary coach of
Princeton’s national-championship women’s team and herself a five-time
winner of the U. S. Nationals women’s division.
Constable, who appeared to be confused as
to what had happened, said, “Yes, point,” as she pointed first to
Mendez and then corrected herself and pointed to Howe. Since the rules
of squash dictate that, when a ball hits a player as it is heading
directly to the front wall, the striker is awarded the point, at that
stage Howe would have been declared the winner. However, he was acutely
aware how controversial that outcome would have been (the Mexicans were
howling in protest at the turn of events after a point that they had
thought their man had won) and didn’t want to win the match under that
kind of cloud. Howe therefore suggested that they agree to rule it a
let and replay the point, a gesture that was greeted with a great deal
of relief and applause. The replayed point ended fairly quickly when
Mendez tinned a forehand drive, giving Howe the victory and the New
York team the championship, and constituting a nice Howe family
counterpart to the Yale team victory in this event which his older
brother Sam Howe had contributed to 21 years earlier in 1959.
In addition to providing New York with its
winning margin, Ralph Howe also played an important peacemaker role in
the aftermath of this epic struggle. The Mexican team members were so
furious at the way the match ended that initially they refused to enter
the court for the trophy presentation and refused to receive their
finalist trophies. However, after the New York team had been
handed their trophies, Ralph Howe approached the Mexicans and was able
to persuade them to reconsider, and they eventually relented and
allowed themselves to receive their trophies and to have the tournament
photographer take a team photo. As a direct result of the class with
which Ralph Howe had handled that potentially explosive situation at
Princeton, he was chosen as the recipient of the Eddie Standing Squash
Racquets Trophy at the annual season-ending banquet of New York’s
Metropolitan Squash Racquets Association that spring. The Award is
given “for exceptional sportsmanship and excellence of play,” both of
which Howe had exhibited in substantial quantity on that occasion and
throughout his career. In the years that followed, the same
Mexico quintet that had fallen just short in 1980 swept to the victory
one year later in Detroit; Mendez had a praiseworthy WPSA career
(earning a ranking as high as No. 7) and reached the finals of the
World Masters 60-and-over event in 2018; Reese and Heath, as noted, won
the 1982 U. S. National Doubles crown; and Sterne won the U.S. National
40-and-over title in 1989. Ralph Howe was inducted into the College
Squash Association Hall of Fame in 1992 and (along with his brother
Sam) the U.S. Squash Hall of Fame in 2002.
