During a brief visit to Washington, D.C. this past weekend, I found myself enjoying cigars with a group of friends at a historic club. Our crowd of reporters, attorneys and a pleasant retired planner (yes, that’s an understatement of his professional achievements that he would appreciate!) gathered and chatted about many topics, including politics, travel, history and of course, our deep love of Clubland.
“Leonard, do you know what is the best part about being a part of a good Club is?” the planner said. “You don’t know who you just might meet.” I hope I wasn’t a disappointment.
This week’s issue is in the back drop of news that Mayor Eric Adams has suspended his re-election campaign. For clubby New Yorkers, this means the loss of a good, albeit imperfect, friend who certainly should join a Gold Standard club soon. Yours truly shares some of his appreciations for one of this Manhattanite’s favorite club cats.
Ishaan Jajodia writes about how club courts are often the porte d’entrée for thriving careers in the world of professional squash.
Dispatches from Clubland is brought to you by Ishaan Jajodia. - LR
From Club Courts to Pro Courts
A club’s squash courts has often served as the porte d’entrée for many players who reached elite performance, such as the Professional Squash Association or National Squash League.
“I first started playing at the [New Haven] Lawn Club with my dad,” Spencer Lovejoy, the newly-appointed CEO of the National Squash League, told me. “My dad might say differently, but it was a rainy day. I had always played tennis growing up and I was decent at tennis.”
The New Haven Lawn Club, where Lovejoy first played, produced countless legends in squash world, such as all-American squash player T.J. Dembinski and the 2019 British Open Masters’ winner John Musto. Lovejoy, Dembinski, and Musto all not only learned to play at the New Haven Lawn Club reaching the top of the junior game. Each was also a captain of the Yale’s Men’s Squash Team.
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Hizzoner Gives Up Mayors Club Card
Eric Adams, a member of the swanky, privately-owned Zero Bond, dubbed himself as the “Mayor of Nightlife” during the early days of his first term. As part of this effort, Hizzoner set an example to return back to a New York routine of attending shows and laughing over dinners with friends in dimly-lit restaurants without masks — and yes, Adams stated with his actions, that occasionally meant inside of your Club’s dining room.
Few mayors in living memory have embraced New York’s Clubland like Adams.
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Dispatches from Clubland
Mayhem at the Ryder. The Ryder Cup, a team-based golf tournament pitting top Americans against European golfers, recently concluded at the publicly owned Bethpage Black golf course in Bethpage, NY, in an absolute dismal show of crowd spirit. While the European team, captained by Englishman Luke Donald, won, the first win by an away team since 2012, the crowd and the announcers were at various times in a drunken stupor or out of control. An announcer resigned after leading sailor-appropriate chants against Irishman Rory McIlroy, whose wife narrowly escaped being assaulted with a beer can. Gentleman’s game much or Ruffian’s Draw?
The Joker Strikes Again. The world’s best squash player, Mostafa Asal, sadly has the skills of a genius and the charm of an irascible brute. At the Egyptian Open’s finals, the Egyptian bull rammed Peruvian squash player Diego Elias’ knee, and repeated incidents left Elias sliding across the court and the subject of out-of-control swings. Shortly after the match, which Asal clearly thought was held in a rage room, not a squash court, Elias announced that he had to undergo surgery from a torn meniscus. We wish him the very best of luck on his recovery and hope the PSA finally finds it within itself to discipline Asal.
West of the Hudson. Today’s Wall Street Journal features the expansion of the plague of non-Gold-Standard clubs west of the Hudson, to Lexington, KY, and Savannah, GA. The troubling part: the Journal reports that “most of the new membership clubs require little more than filling out an application”: what a dastardly thing to do. Time for Clubland to play Whack-A-Mole more furiously.
Clubland Down-Under. The men-only Savage Club in Melbourne, Australia, prematurely ended a trial that would have introduced the fairer sex into a dining room for luncheon, part of the “Female Dining Initiative”. The reason cited: “fear of upsetting a ‘Karen’ at the other end of the dining room”.