The original 2001 U.S. Open schedule

By James Zug

Cattle Call

The United States Open Squash Championships were a part of the story of the September 11^th, 2001 attacks.

In 1998 tournament director John Nimick brought the venerable U.S. Open to Boston for the first time and staged it in the ballroom at the Harvard Club. In 2001 he decided to relocate it a few miles away to Symphony Hall. It was going to be the first sporting event the landmark concert hall had ever hosted.

The morning of Tuesday, September 11^th in Boston started as a beautiful, blue-bird day, not a cloud in the sky. Melissa Winstanley and John Nimick were at Symphony Hall supervising the building of the portable court under the supervision of the redoubable Steiner Ericson. It was to be a tight, three-day load-in, finishing on Thursday morning.

Suddenly, the whole world changed. The first hijacked plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46am. The second plane hit the South Tower at 9:03am. The third plane hit the Pentagon at 9:37am. The North Tower fell at 9:59am; the South Tower at 10:28am.

Mid-morning, people in Boston started hearing about the attacks. It is called a flashbulb moment, one of the unforgettable instants when you hear the news of something tragic—like when John F. Kennedy was shot or Lady Diana dying—and never forget. I was billeting at my cousin’s house in Beacon Hill and had turned on the television in an empty apartment to find out the score of the Red Sox v Yankees game the night before (turned out it had been postponed by rain). Instead, I saw the horrifying news about the first plane and watched live as the second plane plow into the South Tower. I then made my way over to the Harvard Club of Boston for the cattle call.

The U.S. Open in that era was very different from today. The Boston tournament was all-male—at the time the women’s U.S. Open was held separately. It had a sixteen-player main draw, with twelve automatic slots; additionally, there were two rounds of qualifying, with sixteen players competing for the four remaining spots in the main draw. The qualifying rounds were scheduled to begin at noon on Tuesday the 11th, which meant that two hours earlier the so-called cattle call was held. This was the moment when the tournament director read out a roll call and then created a draw. If one of the sixteen players was absent at 10:00, then his slot went to the next player on the reserve list, provided he was present too.

I walked into the Harvard Club around 9:45 and in the basement grill room spied a dozen players watching the news. I sat with Mark Lewis and Preston Quick. Then at five to ten, they went into the cattle call at the bleachers near courts three and four.

By then everyone involved in the tournament knew about the attacks. Nimick found out driving to the cattle call from Symphony Hall to the Harvard Club when his wife Kate called him. Mike Riley, the tournament referee, was driving up from Rhode Island when his daughter, living in Brooklyn, called. Preston Quick, in the qualies, heard on the radio. Paul Johnson got a call from his mother—she was frantic because she had thought he might be playing in the Tournament of Champions, which used to be down at the Winter Garden Atrium. Chris Walker, who had just relocated to the States three days before, got a call from a friend. Mark Lewis biked from his home in Somerville to Union Boat Club, where he was the pro, and heard the news at the club. Tim Wyant had spent Monday night at Lowell House at Harvard, crashing on a couch with old college teammates; he was on a bus on Massachusetts Avenue when a fellow passenger listening to the radio reported the news. Jago Nardelli found out the news when he walked into the Harvard Club. Paul Price, staying at the Harvard Club, saw the news on his room’s television. Peter Marshall was in a taxi when the news came on the radio.

“I remember that moment with such sadness,” said Melissa Winstanley, the tournament operations director. She had goten a phone call from a friend in Boston.

The cattle call was surreal. The North Tower collapsed at 9:59am, just a minute or two after everyone had gone into the meeting, but by then everyone knew the U.S. was under attack.

Richard Chin did not answer the roll call. It was Chin’s thirty-second birthday. He and Janet Bostwick, a former assistant at the Southport Racquet Club, were driving that morning from New York to Boston. After his match, they planned to celebrate his birthday at dinner at Blue Ginger, the famed Wellesley restaurant run by squash player Ming Tsai. (Tsai had coached Chin at Cornell.) Chin arrived at the club late and was kicked out of the qualies. He heard about the attacks, abandoned the dinner and turned around to go back to New York.

Nimick transferred all matches to the Harvard Club because the other venue for the qualies, the University Club of Boston, was closed due to its proximity to Boston’s iconic skyscraper, the Hancock Tower. Matches began at noon. Tim Wyant faced Graham Ryding. Tim’s father Jack was on a plane that morning that landed at 9am. It was was one of the last to land before they closed the airport. He made it to the Harvard Club in time for Wyant’s third and last game against Ryding. Joe Kneipp topped Mark Lewis in three. Rodney Durbach overcame Jago Nardelli in five. “I remember being shellshocked from the attacks,” said Nardelli. “But we were playing a match for ranking points, so I thought: ‘don’t let these people destroy what you came for.’ After the match, when we went out for dinner that night, I was thinking that maybe a bomb would go off in the restaurant—you just didn’t know the extent of the terrorism. It was surreal.”

Work on installing the portable court in Symphony Hall was delayed on Tuesday when the city closed the hall for security. It reopened Wednesday and Ericson and his crew worked hard through the night to have it ready by 5pm on Thursday.

2021 U.S. Open poster

Come From Away

One of the problems were that many players in the main draw couldn’t make it to Boston in time for their matches on Thursday. The tour schedule was tight that fall. The Al-Ahram in Cairo finished on Sunday 9 September. The U.S. Open’s number one seed Peter Nicol and number two Jonathan Power had just battled it out in the finals at the Pyramids of Giza (Nicol won in a three-game, sixty-minute match). Those two men, along with Lee Beachill, David Evans, Martin Heath and Ong Beng Hee, were stuck transiting from London to Boston. “David Evans & I were walking towards the gate at Heathrow when an announcement was made telling us all flights to North America were canceled and to return to the main lounge, and then collect our bags from baggage reclaim,” remembered Martin Heath. “It was chaos. I couldn’t get a flight, so I drove to Nottingham, stayed with Alex Gough, and then drove on home to Oban on the west of Scotland to wait for whatever was going to come.”

On Tuesday, the only England-based PSA player to get on a flight was John White. After losing in the quarters in Cairo, he had returned home to Nottingham and flew on Tuesday morning from Birmingham rather than Heathrow. “Two hours before reaching the States, the captain came on the PA and said there had been an attack on America,” remembered White. They shut down the in-flight services and after another couple of terrifying reports from the captain, everyone got nervous.” The plane was diverted to Moncton, a small city in New Brunswick, Canada. “The Royal Canadian Mounted Police came on board and told us to leave our luggage. We exited the plane and they took us into an aircraft hanger. There were passengers from a half dozen other planes there. We stared at a giant screen that had the news on. I was at a loss of words. I then went and stood in line at a...

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