Dateline July 18th --- In addition to coming across as petulant and sour grapes, the recent critical comments from some of squash’s leading male and female players denouncing Rory McIlroy and the other top golfers for pulling out of the Olympic Games in Rio next month strike me as pious and self-pitying. More importantly, they ignore the very substantial role that the squash effort has for years played in orchestrating its own eventual demise. I felt that McIlroy’s statement that he “didn’t get into golf to try to grow the game,” which has drawn such ire in squash circles, was both refreshing in its honesty and fully applicable to every one of the top squash players themselves who have found his remarks so “unacceptable.” I defy any of them to claim that they took up squash, or entered the pro tour, with the ultimate goal of “growing the game.” Rather, their over-riding motivation was (quite properly) to grow THEIR OWN game, i.e. to become good enough to win important titles, attain top-tier rankings and achieve financial success, which is exactly what their goals should have been and exactly what McIlroy’s were as well. There is nothing wrong with that, but there IS something wrong, and dishonest, with squash players pompously implying that they devote themselves to their sport out of a lofty altruistic intent that puts them on some sort of higher moral plane than McIlroy.



Beyond that, the squash effort has been at times headed by administrative figures who in a number of cases have less than sterling reputations, even within their own peer group, and has also on occasion been headquartered at elite clubs whose standing and posture tend to convey exactly the wrong message. And there have been some grievous wounds, all too many of them self-inflicted, that have sabotaged the Olympic-bid effort at precisely the wrong time. It would be difficult to conceive of a more compelling instance of the foregoing than what occurred in late November 2012 in the quarterfinal round of the PSA World Series Hong Kong Open, which had previously been designated as the “showcase” event to impress the IOC members, who had made it known that they were planning to be in attendance in order to evaluate squash’s candidacy for inclusion in the 2020 Olympic Games. Of the four scheduled matches, only one was played through to its conclusion in a disastrous day marred by two walkovers and one late-match retirement, i.e. three defaults in four matches, a probable death knell for the sport’s bid.



There was a tremendous build-up to this tournament, which was planning to feature superior television coverage and an unparalleled presentation of the sport --- Alan Thatcher, who played so major a role in the success of World Squash Day earlier that autumn, eloquently stated the importance of this tournament going well when he noted in an exhortatory message (labeled “Time To Deliver”) to the players shortly before the event began that, “As the Hong Kong Open welcomes a group of visiting officials from the IOC, making an official inspection, we can only hope that the tournament delivers everything we believe our sport can offer the Olympic Games.”



What it delivered instead were a perfunctory 11-7, 7 and 4 tally by top seed James Willstrop over Borja Golan; walkover wins by Nick Matthew and Karim Darwish (both of whose respective opponents, Amr Shabana and Peter Barker, cited late-match injuries in their prior day's round-of-16 wins, while also professing their wish to be at full strength for the World Open tournament slated to begin the following week); and a Ramy Ashour vs. Greg Gaultier match in which the latter, trailing two games to one and 10-3 in the fourth (in other words, with seven match-balls against him), chose to default rather than finish the game out after a mid-court collision in which both players were shaken up.



One has to wonder what the IOC officials must have concluded about the viability of squash’s attempt to be selected over the other contending sports in the aftermath of witnessing three defaults in four matches. Both Shabana, who bruised his left rib cage in a tumble shortly before the conclusion of his match against Tom Richards, and Barker, who strained a hamstring muscle, have long and proud resumes --- as of course does Gaultier, a multiple winner of major titles --- and both clearly tried their best (in each case resorting to physical-therapy and/or painkillers in between matches) to recover in time to avoid having to withdraw. Whether Gaultier did the right thing in declining to play that one extra point, which would have at least salvaged a second completed match in a day that already had two defaults on the books, is certainly a matter of opinion.



Either way, anyone who remembers singles stars of yesteryear like Jahangir Khan, Geoff Hunt or Jonah Barrington, or the noble WPSA hardball warrior Sharif Khan, all of whom, knowing how important their presence was on their respective tours, resolutely willed their aging and aching bodies to always answer the bell, would have to conclude that, one way or another, in an event with the magnitude that fate devolved upon that 2012 Hong Kong Open, they would have found a way to make it onto the court, and, once on, would have stayed on and kept playing until the last point had been officially registered.



In one recent post criticizing McIlroy and other top golfers for withdrawing from Rio (which plenty of tennis players and other elite athletes are prudently doing as well, in part in deference to the real and growing concerns about the Zika virus), Willstrop, still one of the most respected figures on the PSA tour, forcefully asserted that, “The IOC will have to come to terms with its mistake.” I have the feeling that the IOC has no regrets or misgivings about its decision to reject squash’s bid for inclusion. I also firmly believe that the squash world needs to come to terms with ITS mistakes, and ideally to own them, learn from them and take steps to avoid repeating them in any Olympic bids that it undertakes going forward.





















