A large contingent of New York’s squash players went to Amsterdam this August to play in the World Masters Squash tournament and we’d love you to join us next year. An announcement is looming, but the rumor is that the upcoming tournament is going to be in Brisbane, Australia. For those of us with young children or perhaps grandchildren, you’ll know that’s where they set the popular cartoon Bluey (as if you needed another reason to go).
I spent almost two weeks in Amsterdam and managed to get my world ranking for my age—I’m the world’s 80th best player at 60+. That’s pretty good! The guy who won in the 35+ category was being coached in the final by world number 3, Paul Coll, and there’s a natural thinning of the herd as you get older. I’ve charted my progress in the rankings and estimate that if I keep it going, I could be world number one by the time I’m 100. It’s a journey, this squash practice of ours!
I was scared to go to the World Masters for a while, nervous about embarrassing myself. I missed the tournaments in Hong Kong and South Africa. Eventually I went along to the tournament in Charlottesville, here in the U.S., a few years ago. My first match was on the glass court against a Japanese player, and I won. I couldn’t believe it. Now, I did lose the next three matches. I ran into a buzzsaw after that. But I fell in love with the idea of playing in the tournament. So I went to Poland, and now, Amsterdam.
The Dutch capital is a lovely city. I ended up spending $1,500 on my share of an Air B’n’B and put my flights on points. I cycled from the apartment to the stadium and got annihilated in my first game. But I won my second. In the end, I won two out of six matches and given that I was competing on the world stage, that’s not terrible. The great thing about the tournament is you play as many matches as the winner of the tournament. It’s super well-structured. I was able to work remotely while I was over there, and I also got to meet a ton of squash players from all over the world.
The Australian team asked me to dance with them at the player’s welcome dinner, and I played with the only guy in the world competing from Tanzania. I lost to him 11-9 in the fifth. I was serving, and he hit a devilish crosscourt that I didn’t see coming. That’s squash.
The first guy who beat me owns a club in Portugal. And there’s a growing community of squash Masters nomads, now, who see that there’s a tournament somewhere and they anchor their trip around that. They go to the tournament in Malta, the tournament in England, and they have a cracking time. I’m honestly quite envious of these people.
Our whole American team were wearing our great t-shirts, and a few people, admittedly, got Covid, but I feel like that’s just a part of international travel, these days, and it didn’t put me off. Amsterdam has great weather in the summer, not too hot, and it’s also an amazing cultural capital. I went to the Van Gogh Museum, to the Rijksmuseum, I went out to Zandvoort, which is where the F1 races take place, and there was a beach where we went swimming in the ocean. There’s a great maritime museum that did a good job of exploring Dutch naval history. The food was also spectacular—I had some amazing Indonesian food, thanks in part to the Dutch colonial legacy explored so effectively in the maritime museum!
The best part about the trip, honestly, was when I came back into Open Squash’s Bryant Park location and played, and everyone said ‘hi’ to me and asked me where I’d been. I can’t express how moved I was by the warm welcome home. It was unbelievably moving to have people be excited to see me and welcome me back into my own community. That’s a very special thing about our community in New York at Open Squash, and we can rightly be proud of it. If you’re interested in Masters squash send me an email and we’ll be sure to include you in our planning for 2025.