Arkansas State coach Blake Anderson wrote on Twitter that his wife, Wendy, has died of cancer.

FINAL WENDY UPDATE 8/20#NotFightingAlone ❤️❤️❤️ there's a celebration in heaven today cause Wendy is Home pic.twitter.com/OYwh0fQLpU

— Blake Anderson (@CHbanderson) August 20, 2019

Arkansas State announced Monday that Anderson would be taking a leave of absence from the program as his wife dealt with cancer for the second time in three years.

Wendy Anderson was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in 2017, and her husband took a brief leave before that season as well as she underwent treatment in Mexico. Further surgery to remove cancer cells allowed her to make a full recovery. However, the cancer returned within a year.

Blake Anderson announced in January that drug treatments had not been effective, and in July, the family was informed that her most recent rounds of chemotherapy had been unsuccessful.

The Red Wolves open their season at home on Aug. 31 against SMU. Defensive coordinator David Duggan will coach the team during Anderson's leave. Anderson has gone 39-25 over five seasons with Arkansas State.

ESPN's David M. Hale and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

GOLDEN STATE WARRIORS president Rick Welts was in his old office up in Oakland when the call came in. Warriors general manager Bob Myers was checking in, as he often did, after the team's shootaround in Los Angeles.

It was the morning of Game 5 of the Warriors' 2014 first-round playoff series against the Los Angeles Clippers. Four days earlier, TMZ had published voice recordings of then-Clippers owner Donald Sterling making racist statements to his mistress, V. Stiviano, throwing the NBA into a tailspin.

When Myers called his boss with a status report, he told him in no uncertain terms, "'These guys are going to walk off the floor,'" Welts recalled.

"He was with the team that morning and said the vibe around the team -- maybe both teams -- was that if this doesn't go the way the players want it to go that they could walk out on the floor and then walk right off and not play the game that night," Welts said.

Donald Sterling had been a blight on the NBA for three decades. There were dozens of incidents that could have been grounds to kick him out of the league, but this tape was something else.

"In your lousy f---ing Instagram, you don't have to have yourself walking with black people," Sterling told Stiviano. "It bothers me a lot that you want to promote, broadcast that you're associating with black people. Do you have to?"

At one point, Stiviano asks Sterling, "Do you know that you have a whole team that's black, that plays for you?"

He responds: "Do I know? I support them, and give them food and clothes and cars and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? Who makes the game? Do I make the game, or do they make the game?"

The NBA's players were appalled. They threatened to boycott playoff games if new NBA commissioner Adam Silver didn't get rid of Sterling quickly and definitively.

"There's no room for that in our game," LeBron James, then of the Miami Heat, said the morning after the tapes were released. "Can't have that from a player, we can't ever from an owner, we can't have it from a fan, and so on and so on. It doesn't matter if you're black, white, Hispanic or whatever the case may be. We can't have that as part of our game."

Silver was less than 90 days into the job, and he had a full-fledged crisis on his hands. The players were on the verge of shutting down the league in protest. And the threat was far more credible than anyone knew at the time.

"I was all-in. Like shut down the whole season," then-Warriors forward Andre Iguodala said. "Maybe that was too far, but as far as that game that day, you can reschedule it, you gotta sort this thing out, because there's some deep-rooted stuff with him that had to be addressed."

The Clippers. The Warriors. The NBA. It was uncharted territory for everyone. No team had ever refused to start a game in the NBA before, never mind the playoffs. It would have been an incredible statement.

"If we didn't play," then-Clippers guard Jamal Crawford said, "I think that honestly it would have outlived us. They would be talking about that while we're not here anymore.

"It's never happened. At that magnitude, at that level."

And if the Clippers and Warriors boycotted one game, what would happen to the rest of the playoffs?

"If we didn't play the first game," Crawford said, "I don't think we would've played any games, to be honest with you. I think that just would've been that, until something happened."

Five years later, that what-if remains one of the great unanswered questions in league history. Because something did happen to turn that train around. And instead of shutting down the league, the moment turned the NBA into what it is today.

THERE ARE MANY REASONS why this tape caused Sterling's downfall. The world he had once ruled, all the people he had once had power over -- his players, his mistress, his wife, the NBA -- finally had a way of fighting back.

Stiviano wasn't the first woman who wanted revenge after a relationship with Sterling had gone awry. But she was the first who had the technology and platform to blackmail him.

"I think the organization knew, and I'm sure the NBA knew, like we have a bad apple," then-Clippers forward Matt Barnes said. "And he finally f---ed up. And we have proof now. I mean we have tape now."

The tapes were recorded on Stiviano's cell phone. The story was broken on a celebrity website, TMZ, which hadn't existed a decade earlier, by a reporter who had no background covering the NBA.

"The first thing I did was say, 'Who's Donald Sterling?'" said Mike Walters, the reporter who broke the story for TMZ and who now runs his own website, The Blast. "I had heard the name, I knew that Donald Sterling was important, but I had no idea that he owned the Clippers."

Would a mainstream media outlet have run the story in the same way TMZ did?

"I wasn't a sports reporter -- so I think right there changes the mentality of somebody who's going to run a story like this, period. Because there's politics in news gathering," Walters said. "There is a balance between privacy of people and the public's interest. And I think everyone will agree with me when I say this -- this had to be heard, period."

Once it was heard, it couldn't be unheard. A reckoning was coming. Within 48 hours, President Barack Obama was answering questions about Sterling.

"I suspect that the NBA is going to be deeply concerned in resolving this," Obama said. "The United States continues to wrestle with a legacy of race and slavery and segregation that's still there."

Within four days, the entire course of NBA history had changed. The tapes went viral and dominated the news cycle. Everything happened at warp speed. Giant decisions, such as whether to boycott playoff games, had to be made at the same time the players were still processing what Sterling had actually said on the tapes.

"We all have family, friends, people that we hadn't talked to in a while that were like, 'You guys cannot play!'" Crawford said. "I remember Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest hit me and was like, 'You guys cannot play. This is bigger than you. It's so much bigger than you. You guys can really send a message.'

"I was like, 'Man, I hear where you're coming from.' But at that time, I didn't know what we were going to do."

The Clippers players were genuinely torn. As much as they hated what Sterling had said, they hated the idea of him derailing their season even more.

"We were trying to decide what to do, and everybody was saying we should boycott, we shouldn't play," then-Clippers forward Blake Griffin said. "The idea was like, OK, we haven't been playing for him in the first place. We didn't gather up before jump ball and say, 'Donald Sterling on three! One, two, three!'"

Instead of boycotting Game 4, the Clippers players took off their warm-up jerseys, turned them inside out to cover up the team logo and threw them down in a pile at midcourt.

If the Clippers and Warriors didn't play as a form of protest, no one is quite sure of what would have happened next.

"You gotta do some game theory there," Welts said. "Would other teams have decided not to play? Would our teams decide not to play the rest of that series? I don't know."

Welts had worked in the NBA for decades, and he had never seen anything like this.

"I flew down and couldn't get very close to Staples Center because of the police barricades and cops in riot gear on horseback," he said.

Myers had talked to his players and thought about their position.

"I mean, if that is the decision our players had made," Myers said, "who am I to tell them not to do that?"

IT WASN'T IMMEDIATELY clear what Silver could do to make it right, but his instincts told him that he must work closely with the players to find the right answers.

They would be partners in this, not on opposite sides of the collective bargaining table. But to work with the players, Silver needed them to trust him. So he asked them for a bit of time -- days, not weeks -- for due process to take its course.

In his gut, he believed Sterling had to be expelled from the NBA forever.

"I believed that he had crossed a line that broke the essence of the contract of the moral fiber of this league," Silver said. "And I didn't think it could be repaired."

But how exactly do you remove an owner -- in four days? The NBA bylaws gave Silver authority to act unilaterally in the "best interests of the game." But there's no "banned for life" clause in the NBA constitution.

"Should we kick him out? Go outside of the constitution?" Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban said at the time. "Should we start taking steps to really condemn people for what they say in the privacy of their own home? It just happens to be recorded. That's a slippery slope I don't want to get on."

Most believed Silver's powers were limited to suspending Sterling and fining him $1 million. And even that kind of punishment was fraught with risk. As everyone expected the famously litigious Sterling to sue the league, as he had previously, when he moved the Clippers from San Diego to L.A. without authorization.

"There is a balance between privacy of people and the public's interest. And I think everyone will agree with me when I say this -- this had to be heard, period." Former TMZ reporter Mike Walters

No, the only people who could revoke Sterling's ownership were the other owners, and it would take three-quarters of the NBA's 29 other owners to vote to kick out one of their own. And some of those owners had a problem with setting a precedent of taking away people's franchises because they were caught on tapes they never thought would become public?

Silver decided to do it anyway. He wrote his speech on a flight from Portland to New York and then later that night at his home.

"I will say that there was probably an advantage in my newness to the job in that it all happened so quickly," Silver said. "I didn't spend a lot of time putting my actions into a broader context of sports leagues or society because I had an immediate issue that required an immediate decision."

ON THE MONDAY before Game 5, the city of Los Angeles was anxious. Civil rights leaders such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson had flown in. NBA players such as Steve Nash and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were planning to march on City Hall. Extra police were dispatched downtown.

The phones at the Clippers' offices had been ringing off the hook with calls from angry, hurt people: You're scum for supporting a racist like Donald Sterling. You're just as racist as he is. There were death threats. The whole situation was so traumatic that the NBA had to call in a crisis counselor.

Longtime Clippers broadcaster Ralph Lawler wishes he would've seen one.

"I remember my broadcast buddy Brian Sieman saying, 'You've got to go sit down with that person and talk to him. You're all messed up,'" Lawler said. "I did not do that. I perhaps should have; I might have shortened my period of shock and grief.

"It was such a terrible time for all of us. I may have handled it as poorly as anybody, because I'd been around for so long, 35 years in or something or other, and it just really rocked me."

Clippers coach Doc Rivers heard about what the team's employees had been experiencing and felt compelled to meet with them to try to help.

"The employees were threatening to walk out," Rivers said. "They were getting bombarded by people calling them Uncle Tom, racists -- and they didn't do it. Donald did it.

"Adam had texted me several times, 'Hey, you're doing great. Just keep doing it. I don't want to give you any guidance. Whatever you're doing is perfect. Just keep doing it. But here's my number.'

"I'm thinking, 'OK, great. I'm not going to call Adam Silver.' But when I went to that meeting and saw those employees with no one leading them -- that was the day I called Adam and said, 'Help.'"

Silver couldn't tell Rivers exactly what he was planning to say at his news conference the following day, on that Tuesday morning of Game 5, but he tried to reassure him that justice would be served.

"He said, 'Doc, by tomorrow, you will never have to deal with him again,'" Rivers recalled. "I need you for 24 more hours.'"

SILVER HELD A NEWS CONFERENCE in the late morning to announce that Sterling had been banned from the NBA for life. The city erupted with joy. Cars driving by the Clippers' practice facility honked and the drivers waved flags out the window.

Instead of a shutdown, Game 5 turned into a celebration. The protests at City Hall were canceled. The stands were filled with fans wearing black. All the ads had been covered in black, as sponsors had begun to disassociate with anything connected to Sterling.

At game time, each NBA team turned its website to black, with a message: We Are One.

"I felt the energy," Rivers said. "It was the liveliest building I had ever been in as a Clipper. It was amazing."

It was a watershed moment in the league. The players had protested, and the league not only listened, but took their side against an owner.

"The only people that were going to really make a change were Adam Silver and the other owners," Griffin said. "They, to their credit, they did do that."

It validated the players' growing power in the league and signaled that Silver's leadership style would be far different than his predecessor, David Stern. Silver's NBA would be a partnership, in both growing the business and corporate governance.

"It's a fight that didn't begin with Donald Sterling," said Michele Roberts, who took over as director of the National Basketball Players Association later that year. "It's been happening historically, both in our game and other sports, for many, many, many years.

"The players I work for are men, and men don't tolerate the kind of ignorance that was Donald Sterling. You don't tolerate that in your space."

Five years later, during the 2019 NBA Finals, a minority investor in the Warriors was barred from the NBA for a year for putting his hands on Kyle Lowry as the Toronto Raptors player chased a loose ball into the stands.

The willingness of Lowry, Stephen Curry, Draymond Green and LeBron James to publicly condemn the minority owners' actions shows just how much the league has changed because of the Sterling scandal. Players had never stood so strongly against those who have power over them. Now it happens all the time, across all sports.

Accusations of sexual misconduct have toppled industry titans. A racist tweet can end a career. Even the term owner has gone out of fashion. Adam Silver prefers the term "governor." Steve Ballmer paid $2 billion to buy the Clippers from the Sterlings but calls himself their chairman, not owner.

And this summer, in a delicious irony, Kawhi Leonard and Paul George flexed their power, essentially forcing their way from the franchises to join Ballmer's new-look Clippers.

This idea of player empowerment has received a lot of attention in the NBA over the past few years. Star players asking, sometimes demanding, to be traded with years left on their contracts can be incredibly destabilizing to a franchise. Owners do not like when players have that amount of power over their franchises. And so now they look to Silver to restore the power they once had over players.

"There's enormous respect, I find, by players for management and owners," Silver said. "And I think it's an ecosystem where everyone has leverage, everyone has rights, but it doesn't mean that it doesn't require an ongoing calibration of those rights."

RIVERS DOESN'T LIKE to spend much time reflecting on Donald Sterling and why it took 30 years of misbehavior to finally get him out of the league. Nobody with the Clippers likes to reflect much on their previous owner. They've moved on. If they could, they'd forget about him and his era forever.

But Rivers remembers exactly how it went down. They all do, even if they don't like to relive it.

About 10 days before TMZ released the tapes, then-Clippers team president Andy Roeser had told Rivers that an unflattering tape of Sterling might come out. Initially, Rivers didn't think it would be a big deal.

"Honestly, I thought it was a sex tape, because of Donald Sterling," Rivers said. "But then I had forgotten about it, because nothing happened."

The eccentric billionaire had certainly gotten himself into and out of unsavory situations in the past -- federal housing discrimination lawsuits, civil cases with women that produced lewd testimony that eventually went public, even a lawsuit in which Basketball Hall of Famer Elgin Baylor accused him of having a "plantation mentality."

"When you talk about a plantation mentality, you're talking about someone who believes that my only value is what I can do for you," Roberts said. "And not because I want to [do something for you], but because I have to. It obviously harkens back to slavery, which is the most painful period for an African-American in this country.

"That's exactly what Sterling was evidencing. He was evidencing that, for him, the only value that black men had in his world was on the court where they made him money and he did not otherwise want to have them in his space unless they were doing exactly that, unless they were performing and creating value for him. Other than that, don't bring them into my space."

Sterling was a brilliant personal injury lawyer in his day, and he loved a good fight. He knew how to win them too. Los Angeles is filled with people who came out on the wrong side of a legal confrontation or real estate negotiation with Sterling.

Then he was a real estate shark, a wizard at assessing a property's value just by knowing its location and specifications.

But his players were never his property. And maybe he learned that when they stood up to him and demanded he sell his team.

"It was a stand for respect," Griffin said. "At the end of the day, that's what this is all about. It's respect for humankind. That was just a somewhat small incident that was able to ignite a whole bigger thing and to bring understanding about this.

"I always go back to the thought that it takes a very educated and thoughtful person to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

Donald Sterling was never able to entertain or accept the thought that he needed his players, more than they needed him.

He says it, over and over in the tapes with Stiviano.

"I support them, and give them food and clothes and cars and houses," Sterling said. "Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them? Who makes the game?

"Do I make the game, or do they make the game?"

After Sterling's reckoning, the answer is clear: The players make the game.

"We're going to have another [reckoning], and another one," Rivers said. "And we're going to keep getting better, but this was important. This was a group of guys that stood up, a league that stood up against something, a commissioner that stood up, coach stood up, players stood up. It was sensational.

"At the end of the day, it was a beautiful moment for our league."

The Sterling Affairs is a story of power and scandal in Los Angeles. When an audio recording of a racist rant by former Clippers owner Donald Sterling was leaked online in 2014, it caused an uproar that changed the NBA forever.

But Sterling had been a problem for decades -- in basketball, real estate and more. Why did it take 30 years to finally hold him accountable?

"The Sterling Affairs" is a five-part series from 30 for 30 Podcasts and The Undefeated, produced in collaboration with Western Sound. The series is reported and hosted by ESPN's Ramona Shelburne. All five episodes are available now at 30for30podcasts.com/sterling.

More: The Sterling saga rocked the NBA | The Undefeated Roundtable

Listen to "The Sterling Affairs"

• ESPN PodCenter | Download the ESPN App

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About this 30 for 30 podcast

Episodes of "The Sterling Affairs" are available now for fans to binge-listen. The episode lineup includes:

Episode 1: Holy Sh** That Tape
The explosive tape of Donald Sterling breaks the internet. Ramona Shelburne explains how a fight between V. Stiviano and Shelly Sterling lit the match.

Episode 2: The Opposite of Showtime
Nothing explains where Donald Sterling fits into the L.A. scene better than his relationship to the Lakers, Jerry Buss, and Showtime. Everything came easy for Buss; everything Sterling did reeked of desperation.

Episode 3: Property
Donald and Shelley grew up in the poor neighborhood of Boyle Heights, and as they built their real estate empire and bought the Clippers, they worked hard to reinvent themselves. As part of that reinvention, however, Donald Sterling also engaged in womanizing and housing discrimination -- and was rarely held accountable.

Episode 4: Fallout
With the threat of players boycotting playoff games in protest, for once it was the players -- not the owners -- who had the power to hold Sterling accountable. New commissioner Adam Silver heard the outcry and banned Sterling for life.

Episode 5: Not Fit
Sterling's ban was a bold statement, but the devil was in the details. Sterling still owned the team. Ultimately, this drama was going to be resolved where it started -- in court, with Donald and Shelly. And in a Shakespearean move, Shelly had her husband of 60 years declared mentally unfit in order to seize control of the team and sell the franchise.

Top related stories

• Shelburne The sad last chapter for Donald Sterling

• Keating: NBA spent years looking the other way

• Fish: NBA's lack of action around the mess

• Keating: Uncontested: The life of Donald Sterling

Former world number 230 Juan Carlos Saez has been banned for eight years and fined £10,300 ($12,500) for breaching anti-corruption rules.

The Chilean, 28, was interviewed by the Tennis Integrity Unit after unusual betting patterns were highlighted during matches he played in.

He repeatedly failed to hand over his mobile phone for forensic analysis.

Saez separately admitted to receiving a corrupt approach at an ITF Futures tournament, which he did not report.

That is against anti-corruption rules.

Saez is 1,082nd in the ATP world rankings, having reached 230th in September 2015.

South Korea's Lee Duck-hee has become the first deaf player to win a match in the main draw of a tournament on the ATP Tour.

The 21-year-old, who is ranked 212th in the world, beat Switzerland's Henri Laaksonen 7-6 6-1 at the Winston-Salem Open in North Carolina.

"People made fun of me for my disability. They told me I shouldn't be playing," said Lee.

"I wanted to show everyone that I could do this."

He added: "My message for people who are hearing impaired is to not be discouraged. If you try hard, you can do anything."

Lee does not communicate with sign language but instead uses lip-reading.

During his post-match interview his fiancee Soopin assisted him, clarifying answers for reporters in English.

Britain's Andy Murray is among players to have come out in support of Lee, adding it must be "difficult" to play without being able to "pick up the speed of the ball" by hearing the sound.

"It's obviously a huge disadvantage, so to be able to do what he's doing is a huge effort," said the 32-year-old, who lost in the first round in North Carolina as he continues his return to singles action after injury.

"We [tennis players] use our ears a lot to pick things up."

Lee, who faces third seed Hubert Hurkacz in the next round, played his first ATP Challenger Tour event aged 14.

He played mainly in Asia before switching to hard courts in the US, reaching his first final in three years at Little Rock in June.

Andy Murray is still searching for his first singles win since hip surgery after losing 7-6 7-5 to Tennys Sandgren in the Winston-Salem Open first round.

The former world number one played with conviction and fluency in the first set, but lost it on a tie-break 10-8.

Despite recovering from a double break down to square the second set at 5-5, Britain's Murray was broken again by American world number 73 Sandgren.

"I think there was some good stuff in there," Murray, 32, told BBC Sport.

"I think my ball striking was better than last week. I hit quite a few more winners, came to the net quite a lot. Obviously I didn't win but I do feel I was a bit more in control of what was happening out there.

"Physically I felt OK in the rallies, but I did notice in the second set that my first serve wasn't as good, and I think maybe my legs were a little bit heavy at the end there."

Last week, Murray lost in straight sets to Richard Gasquet in Cincinnati in his first singles match since January's Australian Open.

His match against Sandgren started at 22:15 local time after a five-hour delay caused by heavy rain, thunder and lightning.

And even after completing the warm up, the players had to remain in their chairs for a further 15 minutes to wait for another light shower to pass and the court to be dried with towels and electric blowers.

Murray started superbly, forcing nine deuces and one break point in a 14-minute opening game before Sandgren eventually held his serve.

Both men served very well after that, but having saved three set points in the tie-break, Murray put a stretch volley into the net and Sandgren won it 10-8.

The first set lasted 74 minutes, but after making a poor start to the second, Murray struggled in vain to take the match into a decider.

Murray will not be in New York when the US Open gets under way on Monday, but he may instead play on the ATP Challenger Tour.

He will fly home from Winston-Salem on Tuesday but is actively considering whether to compete in next week's Challenger event in Mallorca.

"I think for my body it would be a good thing because I do feel at that level I will be winning matches each week," Murray added.

"And I think it would be good for my game as well because I'm not quite seeing the points as I used to. And if I can get more matches, I'll start to work that out a little bit quicker, and see it faster.

"I would probably rather stay playing outdoors because the next couple of tour events I'm playing are outdoors in Asia, but I haven't given it tonnes of thought."

Racketlon growing in popularity with Olympic aspirations
By GORDON KERR – Squash Mad Correspondent

Racketlon combines the four ‘biggest’ racket sports in the world: Table Tennis, Badminton, Squash and Tennis. Administered by the Federation of International Racketlon (FIR), this amateur portmanteau sport is well organised and campaigning confidently for Olympic inclusion.

The four sports are played in ascending order of racket weight/head size. A hybrid scoring system applies to each; one game to 21 points but the winner must be two points clear. Serve oscillates every two points and the players change ends (except in squash where they just take a breather) when the leading player reaches 11 points. Close matches last approximately one hour.

There is a pan-European tournament circuit, and the London Open event was held last weekend at the sumptuous Roehampton Club, formerly better known as a polo club frequented by statesmen such as Lloyd George and Winston Churchill.

Two personal friends were playing. A brief explanation. Having retired from serious amateur Real Tennis competitions in 2000, I returned to squash at Southgate.

The committee asked me to play for the club’s third team in order to keep a watchful eye – particularly at away matches – on a promising 16-year-old, Alison Waters. They were worried that overly competitive adult male players would try and knock her off the ball.

Far from being miffed at playing ‘down’ in the thirds, I thoroughly enjoyed the season and managed to engineer most of the schedules such that we did not play simultaneously; I therefore watched most of Alison’s matches.

The committee needn’t have worried; she was already such a deft mover that the one or two ignorant opponents she came across failed to unsettle her; she nimbly stepped away from every potential collision. There were hardly any let calls in her entire season.

At the end of the season the good news came through that she had been selected to join the elite England set-up under the then Squash Rackets Association. We started playing and training together on Saturdays.

Fourteen years later, having switched clubs to Oakleigh Park, I started playing regularly with another promising junior, David Bennett. David, today just 17 years old, is ranked in the top ten juniors in the world at Racketlon, having won two European Under-16 junior team titles representing Great Britain. When I learned that both David and Alison were playing at Roehampton on Saturday, I willingly tore up my Ashes cricket ticket and went to watch.

I was not to be disappointed. David had entered both the Under-21 event and the Advanced Men’s B category. His first opponent was an experienced Swiss, Beat Ladner, who confided to me in the warm-up that David had last year beaten his son in a different junior event, so he was out to restore family pride.

The table tennis was nip and tuck, but Ladner edged it 22-20. At badminton, David’s agility and reflexes were too much for the slower Swiss gentleman, 21- 14. Next was squash, and I am personally acutely aware of how good David has become.

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He is so mobile that I feel I have to win each point about three times. The intelligent Ladner employed the sensible tactic of going for outrageous winners, and did well to score five points; one or two were flukes off the frame. Tennis was, however, a mere formality; David quickly secured the single point he needed.

Alison was next. She had drawn Racketlon’s world ranked number two, Zuzanna Severinova of the Czech Republic.

In our brief warm-up chat, Alison revealed that she had been surprised the previous day by the quality of table tennis play. Partnering Roehampton squash pro Paul Lindsay, they were frequently foxed by the degree and direction of spin.

A modest crowd watched as Alison showed what a quick learner she was, dealing well with the attacking play of Severinova and counter-attacking herself. Alison actually had three game balls before going down 23-25.

The badminton was a legitimate high-class ladies’ match at which Severinova’s greater experience was matched by Alison’s reaction speed and athletic lunging, notably catching the 21-year-old Czech with measured counter-drops off wonderful low retrievals at the front.

Next was the squash. 21-0 to Alison. What a brutal and perfect sport squash is, where winning a single point is a major success for the weaker player if there is a marked distinction in playing standard. And squash is the only non-Olympic sport of the four! Such was her lead that Alison needed only five points at tennis to pull off a remarkable upset.

I was not there on the Sunday, but the well organised FIR published this report.

In summary, Alison reached the final after a narrow win over Kim Hay, where she lost to the impressive German, Amke Fischer.

David Bennett, encouraged throughout by his mother Joanna, (herself a good squash player, in fact a former Middlesex County Under-16 team mate of Alison), reached the finals of both events, losing to the top seed Luke Griffiths in the Under-21 event, and to Matthew Davidson in the Men’s B competition.

Pictures courtesy of Gordon Kerr and UK Racketlon

Squash On Fire to host World Teams in Washington DC
By HOWARD HARDING – Squash Mad International Correspondent

Tickets for the 2019 World Squash Federation (WSF) Men’s World Team Squash Championship – which is being staged in the United States for the first time in the event’s 50-year history this December – have gone on sale via the tournament website.

Hosted in Washington, D.C. at the capital’s premier squash facility, Squash On Fire, the 2019 WSF Men’s World Team Squash Championship will take place between December 15-21 when 23 nations comprising the world’s leading male squash players will battle it out for the prestigious biennial World Squash Federation championship title. 

Buy tickets here.

Reigning champions Egypt will return to defend their crown, alongside Hong Kong China and former champions England and Australia and many more. Team USA will also compete on their home turf, having appeared at the Men’s World Team Championship every tournament since 1973 and who recently enjoyed a highly-successful Pan American Games campaign, winning gold medals in the men’s doubles and men’s team event in Lima, Peru.

“The Men’s World Team Squash Championship is one of the most highly-anticipated tournaments that the sport has to offer,” said Squash On Fire co-founder Philippe Lanier.

“We’re thrilled to bring the world’s top male players to Washington, D.C. for what promises to be a spectacular week of competition. Squash On Fire is no stranger to hosting major squash tournaments and we’re excited to welcome all athletes, coaches and spectators to our club. We urge squash fans to pick up their tickets now to guarantee a front row seat to see all the action.”

Tickets for the 2019 WSF Men’s World Team Squash Championship start at $20 for General Admission, and VIP packages which include access to the VIP Lounge or Premium courtside tables are available starting at $50.

For more information on the tournament, follow the event on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or visit www.worldteamsquashdc.com 

Picture courtesy of Squash On Fire and ToC