The Old Masters Are Right: Redemption at the ToC

TOC
By James Zug

Redemption is a tricky tiger to ride. You hold match balls in the finals of the world championship. You are just one point away, serving for the match, victory is on your racquet.

And then it doesn’t happen. You lose. It is awful. It is devastating. The dream deferred.
But the world doesn’t wait. That is the worst of it. You are ripped up inside, and the rest of the world is indifferent, callous, oblivious. The ship had somewhere to go when Icarus fell into the sea, Auden wrote, and sailed calmly on. The old masters were never wrong.

A month later you play in your first tournament. Will the memory of that catastrophically close loss ruin or embolden you. That is a test of a true champion: can you come back?

Both Mohamed Elshorbagy and Raneem El Welily performed quiet, invisible miracles in Grand Central Terminal, transforming their world championship losses in December into victories at the 2015 J.P. Morgan Tournament of Champions in January.

Elshorbagy never made it look easy. The number-one seed lost one game to Nicolas Müller and almost a second (Müller blew five game balls); took nearly an hour to finish off Borja Golan despite the fact they played only three, overtime-less games; and then had a five-game battle royale with his countryman Amr Shabana; and ended with a brutal, four-game final against Nick Matthew.

Diego Elias made a huge splash in his debut at Grand Central
Diego Elias made a huge splash in his debut at Grand Central

The semis v. Shabana was perhaps the match of the tournament. It was incredibly close, full of brilliant, up-tempo shotmaking. Each of our bodies is like a clock that is slowly losing time, and Shabana, after an hour and a half of intense squash, seems to have lost a split-second of speed. Somehow Elshorbagy’s victory felt like a milestone: just like the 2014 Delaware Investments U.S. Open three months earlier, Elshorbagy came out on top in a manner that suggested a passing of the torch. With Ramy Ashour’s injuries plaguing him again, Elshorbagy looks less like Shabana’s heir apparent than simply his heir.

El Welily, like Elshorbagy, had to grind as much as float through the draw. She dropped a game in three of her four matches and occasionally was fighting to stay in front. But much of the time she looked imperial, gliding from side to side, sashaying to the ball rather than hurrying, never looking nonplussed. She has always had the razzamatazz. It appears now, in the aftermath of her World Championship near-victory, she now has the confidence.

Mohamed Elshorbagy and Raneem El Welily both suffered demoralizing defeats in the Men's and Women's World Championships a month earlier, and both cast aside those demons with their first wins in Grand Central
Mohamed Elshorbagy and Raneem El Welily both suffered demoralizing defeats in the Men’s and Women’s World Championships a month earlier, and both cast aside those demons with their first wins in Grand Central

It is like she’s had an injection of iron. Shall we credit marital bliss? Last summer she married Tarek Momen and they moved out of their parents’ homes and in together. Since then, Momen has cracked the top ten for the first time and reached his highest all-time ranking of world No.7. He made the quarters at the ToC, his best result in eight trips to Grand Central. As for El Welily, one tiny explanation for her victory at the ToC might be that Momen was courtside in New York, while he was away in Finland doing a series of exhibitions and clinics with Olli Tuominen during the World Championship in Cairo.

For the first time, the ToC offered men and women equal prize-money round by round (but still with a women’s draw half the size of the men’s), and El Welily was perfect proof of the reason why parity makes sense.

South America made an impact on the ToC’s McWil showcourt in an unprecedented way this year. Peru was represented for the first time, as Diego Elias, the world junior champion who just turned eighteen, slipped into his first main draw. (The other two Grand Central debutantes were Mohamed Albouelghar and Cesar Salazar.) In the qualies Elias saved three match balls in his 3-2 win over Greg Lobban, then trounced Mazen Hesham to make the main draw. Elias then lasted for four games and over an hour against the red-hot Mathieu Castagnet. Elias is training with Jonathon Power in Toronto and since turning pro has had a meteoric rise up the rankings.

Raneem El Welily in the finals against Alison Waters
Raneem El Welily in the finals against Alison Waters

Even more noteworthy was Miguel Angel Rodriquez. The Colombian jackrabbit became the first South American to reach the semis of a Grand Slam event. In back-to-back five-game matches, Rodriguez outlasted two of the giants of the pro game, Peter Barker and Gregory Gaultier. Barker was up 9-7 in the fourth, just two points from victory but Rodriguez, the human leaping machine, wiggled past. In the next match, having never even nipped a game off Gaultier, Rodriguez was again two points away from defeat, down 9-5 in the fifth, but he reeled off six straight points. If Elias has Power, Rodriguez has his own legend from the aughts in his corner, as he has been training with David Palmer in Florida.

Rodriguez has always been known as the king of dives, but he was pushed off his throne by the electric Kanzy El Defrawy. The Trinity junior, in her one-hour, four-game tussle with veteran Camille Serme, dove a couple of dozen times. Sometimes it felt almost an excuse for poor movement—like a pinioned insect, her legs twittered wildly but not effectively. The leaps that got everyone talking were in a point in which she went airborne for four of the five strokes she played. It was acrobatic and dramatic. Half a million people viewed a video of the point at SkySports.

Serme in turn defaulted away one game in her match against Laura Massaro, hitting her serve out. Then she let a 6-2 lead in the fourth, up 2-1, go to waste, finishing the tournament in tears.

Equally intense were Nour El Sherbini’s last two matches, both decided by two points in the fifth. She barely escaped against Nour El Tayeb in the quarters (El Tayeb saved two match balls in the fourth to make it go five). At times the shotmaking was so improbably precise, it was as if they were math professors giving the Euclidean proof of Pythagoras’ theorem. But El Sherbini squandered three match balls of her own against Alison Waters in the semis. Waters had already snatched the upset of the tournament when she defeated a listless Nicol David in the quarters. Nonetheless, two great wins were all Waters had, as El Welily cruised to victory in the final.

Nine of the matches went to five games, the most ever in the eighty-one times the Tournament of Champions has been played. Like a heavy nugget not washed from the pan, the ToC seems to reveal pure brilliance every year and this year it was the marathon matches that shone the most.

Annually, I go through the results of all the Americans in the tournament. Usually it is dispiriting reading, with an occasional bright, if fleeting spot. This year Latasha Khan, Chris Gordon and Chris Hanson all lost in four tough games in their first qualies matches, and Olivia Blatchford fought hard in a five-game loss. The sole American to progress in the qualies was Sabrina Sobhy, who beat fellow American Olivia Fiechter in the opening match before losing in the next round. For the second year in a row, Todd Harrity lost in the first round of the main draw to Mohamed Elshorbagy, but this time the match was at a much higher level: Harrity won seven more points and stayed on court almost twice as long.

Nonetheless, an American making an impact in the main draw? It has been a while. Julian Illingworth twice made a splash in the ToC. In 2007 he beat Chris Walker 12-10 in the fifth in the qualies and then took out Dan Jenson by the same score in the first round; the next year he slipped past Olli Tuominen in the first round. But not since 1991 has a U.S. flag been planted next to a quarterfinalist’s name. Last year Amanda Sobhy was happy to make the main draw. This year, fresh and tan from her Harvard team’s winter training trip to the Caymans, Sobhy dispatched Low Lee Wern in the opening round. Sobhy was down 7-4 in the fourth and 7-5 in the fifth and both times spurted ahead to win. She then grabbed a game in the quarters against Raneem El Welily.

The Tournament of Champions, the oldest professional event in the world, bears the weight of a great history but yet has always been a font of innovation, especially in allowing people unable to make it to Grand Central to watch. The 2004 ToC was the first pro event to be streamed live on the Internet (engineered by Adrian Battersby of Horizon Software) and in 2010 the ToC was the first event broadcast by SquashTV (with Perform). In 2015, Moov, the British broadcast graphics company, along with Timeline Television, replaced Perform. Nev Appleton of Moov has been providing graphics for SquashTV for years and when Perform’s five-year contract was up, Moov stepped in to take over. The only constants on the crew were Appleton and Laurent Cossa.

The changes wrought included all high-definition cameras (including six remote cameras), improved play-back so exciting points can be posted quickly and more statistics: a staffer crunched numbers that then flashed up onscreen in between games. Moov is developing a light, two-person flyaway kit for smaller pro events, but with their regular crew it was very cramped in Vanderbilt Hall. To make more room, John Nimick erected a SquashTV platform to the right of the bleachers. Perched up in that aerie, the crew could see the action they were transmitting as well as they ever could.

The cameras and stats helped provide better insight into the match, but the biggest change might have been unnoticed by most fans. Using software developed by Omar Kandili, the three referees marked and scored matches not with the time-honored clipboards and sheets of paper but with iPad tablets. Just a touch with your finger and voila. This speeded decision-making and created an electronic record of decisions, which will greatly help referee training.