Squash Magazine: Randall Scott: A Locker of My Own

A Locker of My Own By Randall Scott

Last February I loaded up my wife and little daughter and boarded a plane for Washington D.C. We were on the move. My wife accepted a new job. Not an easy task uprooting a family, especially after welcoming a baby two months previous. But the offer was, as we thought, too good to be true. The post-9/11 aftermath was hitting my work pretty hard. Just not a huge call for photographs as magazines hunkered down and tightened budgets. So, it was the perfect time to take a break and spend four months off with my little kid in a new city. Adjusting to baby life has been fairly easy. I may not be able to jet off and play that cross-country tournament at the last possible moment. But that's okay, I was getting pretty road-rashed anyway. Now a trip requires planning and spousal approval (sometimes not easily given). Katya, the kid, and I spend three solid days a week changing diapers, playing footsy and watching CNN. We go for walks when it is not thunderstorming, or she accompanies me to the photo lab in DC where the counter people all make funny faces and compliment her on her cuteness. You get the picture. She is cute. Katya came to watch me play a local tournament in March. She fell asleep as I hammered out a five-gamer, losing on a no-let call 9-7 (a gallery of people all expecting me to destroy something—what they got was me, always congratulatory to the other player, accepting the call). Write about personal mishap and ya get labeled as a troublemaker for life. Katya just turned six months old. We bought her a three-story townhouse in the Disneyland section of Gaithersburg, Maryland for her 1/2 birthday. Hope she remembers me when I am old and need a hip replacement. So, we moved to the East Coast. To a suburb one silver dollar's throw from Washington, DC. My first spot of business was to find a new club in which to squash. I went to see Hunt Richardson who runs the program at the Sports Club-LA in DC (there is a name for ya). He suggested playing at the Potomac Club which would be only several miles from where I was living. So I made the appointment and had me a look-see. So in I go. A modest looking house-type structure on the side of a sloping hill, the Potomac Club is a key club. A KEY CLUB. Get this, I am joining a KEY CLUB. At least they did not require me to purchase all white clothing (which I have anyway—albeit with MonkeySquash stenciled on the butt, but white nonetheless). It's not as bad as I just made it seem. I actually like the idea of being able to play anytime I darn well want to. I wake up at 3a.m. with an urgent revelation regarding my backhand volley, and I am off to practice. I can do this—I have a Key! I was entering a private club with a heady membership of approximately 118 men and seven women. Do not be intimidated, this is no staunch Private Club. It does boast leather furniture, but it looks like it was bought at IKEA. I dig that vibe. I thrust my tired dogs on that lacquered coffee table with such gusto you would think I am in my garage (where my wife banishes me when I am in that thrust-my-feet-on-the-coffee-table-mood). I am home. The club has three international courts, one of them being the gallery court. There is exercise equipment strewn about in the rather confined space. That is fine, this is definitely not your run of the mill super-workout-spandex-muscleboy kind of place anyway. Spinning classes would be frowned upon, let alone allowed to even be brought up at the board meeting. Yes, there is a board. And the board governs over an impressive bunch of squash individuals, all rebels in their own way I am sure. See, because this is a rebels' club, you can tell. Heck they have a beverage machine with 50-cent beer. I live for that 50-cent beer. What sold me was the locker room. Now don't get me wrong, I am not that kind of hang out in the locker room wearing a towel (or not) kind of guy. That ain't my fancy. One thing that caught my attention was the lockers themselves. All the lockers had name tags. Blue pressure-gun punched, old-fashioned name labels. You get your very own locker with your membership. None of that “hand over your ID card stuff to get a locker pass.” Your own locker; yours, to do with as you please. You could store a month's worth of smelly Calvins and socks in that locker and no one would complain. Good-golly-jeez it's your locker and it has your name on it to prove your locker-worthiness. It's a good sized space as well. Heck, a space like this in New York goes for $1150 a month! So I moved to the DC suburbs and joined a private key club on the basis of having a locker I could call my own. My own private space, for my own private blend of sweaty clothing. I have my regular grudge matches and a steady stream of people all getting in line to kick the smarmy Squash Magazine writer's butt. I have celebrity, but I am humbled every day. See, I have a locker of my own—in the back, next to the steamroom and the showers. It has my name on it.