Squash MADNESS!

What a wild weekend. My friends and I headed up to Courtney this weekend for a squash tournament. It was the first B draw I've entered since winning the city championships two weeks ago and moving from C division to B division. Harder games, longer rallies, more tiring, etc. etc.

I wasn't too nervous about the tournament - being seeded to win a tournament means you have a lot of pressure on you to play well and to win your games. The city championships were very intense for me and a lot of my friends expected me to win it. In general we do everything better when we're relaxed, and pressure has a tendency to bump you in the opposite direction. I was pretty anxious the whole way through. As I said, this was the first tournament that I was playing in division B, so I didn't really have any expectations on myself to win and would have been content to just play good squash and take a few games off of the people that I played.

The car ride up started fine, but went sideways pretty quickly. Bevan, Dan, Sarah and myself were being goofs and having fun when the car sputtered just above the Cobble Hill turn off. I wondered out loud how you can stall an automatic, just before the car did exactly that and died completely. Hmm. That sucks. Dan and I got out and pushed the car over to the side of the road, and Bevan got his cellphone and called BCAA.

BCAA came and picked us up, and I mentioned to Bevan that there was no way that we'd all be able to fit in the tow truck. He casually waved that off and said that there'd be no problem getting us all in there. The driver walked up to us and said "Okay, I can only take two people, who will it be". I wish Bevan had been right. Dan and I stayed behind so that Sarah didn't have to walk and because Bevan needed to be there for the car.

We were about 10 kilometers from Duncan where Bevan had the car towed to. We weren't really sure what we would do if the car couldn't get fixed in time, but were hoping that renting a car was an option we wouldn't have to go with. Dan and I started walking and stuck our thumbs out hoping we'd get picked up before the clouds looming overhead started to dump down on us.

We ended up getting picked up by some cartoon character. If he wasn't a cartoon character, he sure as hell should star in his own show. It looked like he'd just run a stick of butter through his hair, then slicked it from the very base of his neck all the way up to the front of his forehead. We chatted with him about where we were from and then he started telling us about his high maintenance girlfriend in Victoria that he had just dropped off. She was apparently "Blonde, six feet tall, hot". Dan and I saved our skeptical glances to each other for later - after all, he was nice enough to pick us up. He dropped us off at Quizno's subs, which mostly salvaged the current situation. We ate some subs, then got in touch with Bevan. Huzzah, the car would be fixed in time, and we'd be able to make our matches.

We got up there and played our matches, and we did pretty good. Bevan and I actually made it through to the semi-finals, then both got knocked out and played each other for 3rd and 4th spot. We both know each other's game very well, and go back and forth - he wins for a month or so, then I start to win for a month or so. I have been winning recently, though he's starting to dominate again. I was hoping I'd be able to hold that off for a little while longer, but I was completely out of gas by the third game in our match, and he took the victory in four games. Still, considering that we just moved up to this division, we were feeling pretty good about things.

The other story of this trip is the most surreal. In tournaments, the winner of a squash match goes on to referee the next match. It's a good system, because it forces you to learn the rules better yourself, and (in spirit) encourages people to be better sports, since you're getting refereed by someone you know. I won my first match on Saturday, and found out that the next person playing on my court was Kevin Smith. From what I've seen of him on court, I think he's a bit of a poor sport (that's purely a subjective opinion). When I play, I try and maintain composure (it's really hard sometimes), and I don't like to take things out on the other players, and especially not the referee.

The game went pretty much how I thought it would. Kevin wasn't happy with a good chunk of my calls. He questioned many of the decisions I made, told me that I was making bad calls, missing calls, said the other player was cheating by not calling his balls down, etc. I stood firm behind my decisions, and Kevin lost the match. Afterwards I went and thanked the other player for being a good sport and being patient with me. He told me that he felt I reffed well and that some of the calls were tough but that I had nothing to worry about.

See, the thing is, I don't pretend to be a great referee. I haven't taken classes or lessons to do it. However, I give all of my concentration to reffing the match (which is not necessarily the case for everyone), and I try my best. I think that's really all someone can expect. If you want to have someone else referee your match, that's an option and you can ask for that.

After talking to Wayne (Kevin's opponent), I was talking to a few other people that had been watching. They agreed that the match was a tough one to referee. I told them that Wayne was a really good sport, but that Kevin had been a bit of a prick that match. I think Kevin overheard this - he was standing behind us. Oh well, we all vent sometimes.

We had about three hours before our next match, so we left our gear at the club (this is pretty common) and headed back to our hotel room to hang out for a bit (it was ultimate fighter weekend on Spike TV!). We passed the time and then came back with about ten minutes before we were scheduled to go on court. I went to my bag to get my shoes to put on, and lo and behold someone had gone into my bag, taken the two beers I'd had in there, poured one of the beers into my squash shoes and poured the other one on the clothes that I'd brought to wear at the banquet that night.

Make no mistake - this wasn't an accident, like the beer leaking or something like that. These were cans of beer, they were opened and deliberately poured into my shoes and onto my clothes. I took my shoes out of my bag, went to the bathroom, wiped them out with paper towels, and then put them on and played in the stinkiest, beeriest squash shoes you could possibly imagine.

I want make it clear. None of us ever saw Kevin do this. So I can't really hold him accountable for it, and I don't want to have this taken as me accusing him and especially not confirming that he did it.

That being said, I can't fathom who would do something like this. I get along with almost everybody, and the likelihood of some kid randomly opening squash bags until they find beer, then deliberately pouring that beer into the shoes of the bag and the clothes seems pretty close to nil. The idea of a 33-40 year old doing something like this seems pretty impossible too. Actually, the idea of anyone other than a pre-pubescent kid doing this seems surreal.

When I told Dan about what had happened, he mentioned to me that someone had told him that Kevin had apparently done this to someone a few years back.

So yah, that was ridiculous. Some people suggested retaliation, but I don't think that ever really solves anything. Not only that, but it's not really something you can justify retaliating against when you don't have any evidence or proof of who did it.

So, as you can see, the weekend was pretty wild. I'd still do the whole thing over though, and I wouldn't change a thing. We had a blast, we placed well in the tournament, and everyone in Courtney and Comox was really cool and friendly. We felt very welcome and had a great time. I'll be heading up again next year, provided no one pours beer into the gas tank of our car.

UPDATE (April 5): Thanks for posting guys.

I talked to Aaron Hook tonight (April 5th) about all of this, and he mentioned that he felt I wasn't fair to Kevin in this column. The more thought I've given it, the more I think he's right.

As I mentioned, we never saw anyone doing this, so if I lead suggestion towards Kevin doing this, that wasn't warranted. However, in my defense, I think that anyone in my situation would probably have reacted in a similar manner. Try playing your semi-final game in beer-soaked shoes and then stay totally objective when you look at the various things that happened throughout the day.

I just want to re-iterate the fact that none of us ever saw Kevin do this. I've talked to Aaron Hook, and he says that Kevin wouldn't do anything like this. I don't have any experience with Kevin outside of the court, so I can only take that at face value. If he didn't do this, I would feel bad if people were to assume otherwise.

This has actually blown up quite a bit more substantially than I had expected (this was originally intended just as a means to not have to describe the entire events of the weekend to people over and over again), and I've written Kevin an e-mail so that we can hopefully resolve this and put it behind us. Thanks to everyone again for reading!

UPDATE (April 6): I've talked with Kevin over e-mail, and he was very civil and understanding of the situation. I apologized for not being fair to him when I initially wrote out this entry, and he apologized for how he had acted when I was reffing him. Apologizing for something like that isn't always easy, and I appreciate it.

As far as the beery shoes go, I think it's best at this point to let it rest and chalk it up as a pretty funny (in retrospect) squash story. I'm not sure what the PSA rules are, but I'm not aware of any rule against playing in beery shoes, so next time you're watching a high level squash game, listen very carefully to see if you can hear any squelching noises. I've donated the beery shoes to Dan who is going to clean them out and sell them as rare antiques. Barring that, I understand that they'll be given to the winner of the A draw in our club champs tournament this weekend.