Making Sense out of Sixth

Be seated... Now I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country. Men…all this stuff you’ve heard about America not wanting to fight…wanting to stay out of the war…is a lot of horse dung. Americans traditionally love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. When you were kids, you all admired the champion marble shooter, the fastest runner, the big league ball players, the toughest boxers. Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hootin’ hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. Because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans…
- George C. Scott, Patton, 1973

Admit it. When you think of Brazil, you think of a beautiful country with beautiful people where the music is hot and the dancing is hotter. You, especially the northerly-challenged beach-deprived traveler, already froth at the mouth at the prospect of a Florida vacation in December. There is no telling how incredibly Dick and Jane your day job would seem if you were to expand your lunch break daydreams to include notions of a Rio de Janeiro with more mystery and cultural charms than Florida - a place that gives new meaning to skimpy beach attire. The irony is that your perversities are right on the money. Jovial and a lot less puritanical, many Brazilians like to muse that the defining structure of Rio de Janeiro, the Cristo Santo that sits atop the city, beckons with his outstretched hands for the locals to stop their ceaseless partying and get to work. Even an awkward American can feel like the girl from Ipanema when mamboing in a dark corner amongst a sea of sweating, writhing, smiling, boogying Brazilians. In the past, I have had the opportunity to visit Brazil’s nightclubs, beaches, small rural villages and countryside. But, I did not descend upon the land-locked metropolis of Belo Horizonte last December to learn a new dance step. That time I was there to engage in trench warfare, wielding a squash racquet as my weapon and a puritanical work-ethic as my modus operandi.

But forgoing standard tourist endeavors and desires is only one of the many sacrifices that must be made if one is to make a serious commitment towards excellence. The Pan American Federation Championships demands one’s undivided attention and immaculate preparation. Held every year, with every fourth year being a Pan American Game, these Championships are comprised of the best players from North, South, and Latin America who vie for supremacy in individual and team draws. How the US team fares in this event ultimately influences our future seeding and the amount of funding and political support that our national governing body (i.e. the USSRA) receives from the United States Olympic Committee.

Since squash is not an Olympic sport, the Pan American Championships/Games are second, if not equal, to the World Championships in terms of prestige. Why then, if the event was so important, did the US team finish sixth out of tenth? We beat Ecuador and El Salvador and then lost to Canada, Colombia, Argentina, and Mexico. In the individual draw, one of our players lost in the round of thirty-two and the other three lost in the round of sixteen. Are we really that bad? Was it bad luck? Were we just outmatched? What went wrong and/or failed to happen in Belo Horizonte, Brazil? Are US players making any progress and, if so, how can that progress be gauged?

To answer these questions fully, it is not enough to know the result of our two week effort in Brazil. To understand the why’s and how’s of where US squash has been, currently is, and will be, we must delve deeper into issues such as the selection process, infrastructure, and preparation methodologies of our elite athletes.

The first challenge was, and always has been, to select the team. When I turned professional in 1997, the process for selecting national teams was disorganized, inconsistent from year to year, and bogged down in political maneuvering. Thankfully, the experimentation with different ideas and formats during the past few years has resulted in the finalization of a just team selection process.

Each player in the US talent pool was mailed a guideline of criteria for team selection at the beginning of last season. Accordingly, each player had to compete in five of nine designated events, play a trials weekend, and attend all team training events once selected on the four man squad. An unpublished ranking was compiled from the results of the designated events. An overall ranking was then created by weighing a player’s seasonal ranking at fifty-five percent and his performance in the trials at forty-five percent. The top four from the talent pool (about sixteen athletes in sum) were then chosen for the team. At the end of this objective process, Richard Chin, David Ramsden-Wood, Preston Quick and myself were selected to be members of the 2000 US National Team.

With our team chosen in a fair manner, our spirits were high and we were left to diligently prepare. We spent a training weekend in Denver in June and another week in New York in September. Away from the team, my training regimen consisted of plyometrics, court sprints, ghosting, weights, long distance biking, drills, practice matches, and a total of twenty-five tournaments in 2000. The altitude training in Denver was beneficial enough to convince me to stay in Colombia for an extra two weeks in August after a tournament. I literally got to the point where fatigue was never an issue in any of my matches. As Forest Gump would say, that "one less thing" freed my time to work on speed, economy of movement, point construction and racquet skills. My teammates took the same steps to prepare, always under the telephone or email guidance of our coach, Paul Assaiante.

A loop was thrown our way when David Ramsden-Wood decided to quit the team in late October. A playoff between Beau River and Tim Wyant took place in England, where they are currently based for training. Wyant won the duel, 2 matches to 1, and his spiritedness, geniality, and never-say-die attitude became immediate assets to our team. The only problem, to no fault of his own, was that he was in a training/improvement stage of preparation rather than in a competitive one. He had been working very hard with Neil Harvey, and because he had been focusing more on his technique than how to win, he did not compete to his full potential in Brazil. Despite this, Tim turned in perhaps the gutsiest performance of the tournament when he ended up with a broken front tooth and courageously played out the rest of the match, losing by a hair in the fifth set.

When it came time to perform, we were all faced with a set of very challenging conditions. For starters, I learned on my Thursday flight from Sao Paulo to Belo Horizonte that the courts were 80 degrees at 4,500 feet. If you have never had the opportunity to play on such a court, I can tell you that it is probably on the same magnitude of torture as the classic parental paradigm of having to walk to school in the snow, uphill both ways. Physiologically, your body needs time to adjust its red blood cell count and to adjust its metabolism to accommodate for the excessive loss of bodily fluids. I actually hyper-extended my knee at one point because I slipped on the sweat that was pumping out of my shoe with each impact of my leg.

Another obstacle that we had to overcome was the issue of reaching peak performance. Between May and December, the event was scheduled and rescheduled five times! The intensity and volume of training changes in the weeks leading up to a competition and, if the date is not known, it is impossible to schedule workouts that will be most beneficial to you on performance day. In addition, we realized several days before our departure that we didn’t have visa’s to enter the country. All of our flights had to be changed and we had a power meeting in New York to square away last minute visa’s. I ended up flying from Toronto to New York to Rio de Janeiro to Sao Paulo to Belo Horizonte. I left on a Tuesday morning and arrived on a Thursday night, which means that my practice session on Monday seemed like an eternity by Friday.

Just to round out the growing list of gripes, just about everyone had a moderate to violent brush with Mister Montezuma.

In an event as long and tiring as the Pan American Championships, one’s success is often determined by the resolution of conditions and crises such as the one’s listed above. Our coach, Paul Assaiante, likes to call the successful management of these conditions an achievement of a "positive head space." Richard Chin was the only one amongst us able to achieve this state of mind and the result was that he played brilliantly. Although I think my personal performance was abysmal – that I deserved a world ranking of 6,082 instead of 82 – I still believe in the concept of keeping a positive mind. Sure the Jorge Gutierez’s and the Ronivaldo Santos’s are squash players with skills that are hard to beat. I give them all the credit in the world and congratulate them on their success. But at the same time, I think it is important for an athlete to shun negativity from his psyche and to keep his confidence intact by recognizing the factors that he was not able to overcome and resolving to work harder on overcoming them in future practice sessions. In short, you must look forward to and envision yourself performing in every kind of hellish condition imaginable. At that point, your list of gripes becomes immaterial.

In the end, our performance was not really all that bad. Our sixth place does not pail too much in comparison to our fifth place finishes in recent years. The was still disheartening for me, though, because of all the energy and time I put into preparing. Where are we now? How can we know if we’ve made any progress? What we need to do is make the most of our talent, as Dave Talbot has been doing at Yale for a very long time. Our talent is adequate. The current situation is good: our selection process is about near perfect as possible, sponsorship dollars continue to roll in thanks to the efforts of Paul Assaiante, and there is serious talk about creating a national training center. With more money and a place to convene on a regular basis, athletes will have more money to travel, to live, to acquire a full support structure, and more coaching attention and guidance. In the next few years, American players will be begin to take part in this nurturing environment. With continued hard work, and the newfound full-time dedication exemplified in Beau River, David McNeely, Tim Wyant, and myself, the only way our progress can go is forward.