By James Zug
In searching for a squash vacation in the sun, I found something perhaps unique.
I went down to Sea Island Resort in September as a part of a Squash Doubles Association weekend. Last season the amateur winner in each tournament’s pro-am draw received a trip to Sea Island, one of the sponsors of the SDA tour. With this on the line, the pro-am draws filled quickly, and the matches were a bit less of a hit-and-giggle and a bit more full-on, blow-the-doors-off.
Doors are something you barely touch at Sea Island. The place is renowned for its service. A cadre of ear-piece rigged porters, drivers and bell-hops so avidly manned the front door of the Cloister, Sea Island’s grand main building, that I made it a game to see if I could sneak up and begin to open it without any of them seeing me. I was finally successful on my last attempt, but it didn’t really count since it was a quarter past five in the morning and I was leaving to catch a plane home.
All weekend, it was like that for the two dozen amateurs and a cohort of pros, almost all with spouses. We floated around the resort as if we were all on frictionless clouds of happiness.
Sea Island is sui generis. It was founded in 1928 and so has the luxury of being an old-school, traditional community. There is a wide range of housing for visitors (about 600 homes also dot the island). They range from the economical to the very very luxurious, including rooms that are bigger than a doubles court, with high ceilings covered with wooden boards that remind you of a salt-box bungalow.
There are fourteen restaurants at the resort and, unlike many getaway places, regional and local geography appears on the Sea Island menu—you actually know you are in the south with the fried green tomatoes, and on the coast with plenty of fresh fish. The waiters are wonderful and adept. At one meal, upon just a hint of discussion from an insider, one waiter calmly solved a Rubik’s Cube in forty seconds. We timed it.
Sea Island offers perhaps the widest variety of activities of any U.S. resort: four golf courses (with Davis Love III on site and running an annual PGA event each autumn); sixteen tennis courts (run by Malcolm Jensen, the ebullient former French Open doubles champion); shooting of every variety (skeet, trap, clay) and a huge preserve down the coast for hunting quail and pheasant; fishing in-shore and nearshore; horseback riding on the beach; and kayaking and paddle boarding in the salt marshes. Sea Island is right smack dab in the middle of an incredible, protected ecosystem. Little St. Simons, a preserve a few miles north of Sea Island, is the most famously wild part of this coastal region.
One day I tried some- thing new for me: paddle-boarding. I loved it so much that the next day the guide, a sunburnt, San Diego native named Gavin, took me out on the ocean side of the island where we paddled and surfed on the waves. It was exhilarating and challenging, especially when Gavin, after riding a frothy, curling wave while doing a headstand on his board, turned to me and said, “Don’t walk too much on the floor of the ocean—you might step on a stingray.”
But Sea Island also is completely new. Half a dozen years ago the grandson of the founder completely re- built the core of the resort, including the Cloisters. He didn’t simply renovate. He tore it down and created something extraordinary, down to every little detail: lead-glass windows, cut stone walls. So you get early twentieth-century grace and style married to early twenty- first century convenience.
As a part of the expansion in 2006- 07, Sea Island built a 65,000 square-foot citadel to the body: spa, fitness, pool, and a squash facility with one doubles and two singles courts. After short tenures by two Australians—Ben Gould (now at the Racquet & Tennis Club in New York) and Matt Jensen (now at Charleston Squash Club)—Steve Hall has come to operate the squash.
A Canadian who long was based in South Carolina while working at Dun- lop, Hall has been able to rejuvenate the squash program. I had lunch one day with the resort’s executive chef, David Carrier. A burly, bearded man who very much looks the way a still-active rugby player should, Carrier told me that Hall has even gotten him out on the court. And Malcolm Jensen, the tennis pro who creates buzz whenever he floats past, extolled the squash program as the perfect complement to his tennis instruction. Over Thanksgiving this year, Hall has scheduled an adult and junior squash camp with former world No.1 Peter Nicol.
The squash this weekend came off well. Damien Mudge & Ben Gould and Mathur Manek & Yvain Badan gave a rousing exhibition one evening (Manek & Badan took it in four), and a rotating round-robin among the amateurs produced a lot of sweat, a few injuries and no clear winners. At the same time people were constantly getting pulled away by all of Sea Island’s alluring attractions, including the most obvious ones by the beach and pool.
The band was covering Jimmy Buffett’s “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere” when I went down there for a midday swim in the ocean in between matches. With my toes in the sand, it was easy to daydream my life away.
