Squash Magazine: Grant Pinnington

Grant Pinnington The Entertainer By Amy Boytz Pictures by Randall Scott

Rumor has it that if you find Grantley Pinnington in a crowded bar and call his name, he may not hear you. But bellow his childhood nickname in an Aussie accent and he looks straight up. “Boghead!” Whoosh! he'll turn round, thinking you're a flash from his past. Pinnington, head squash pro at San Francisco's Bay Club, came to the US from Adelaide more than a decade ago with no intention to ever again touch a squash ball or racquet. “I originally came out to play racquetball, believe it or not,” he admits. Hardcore squashers might view this as a twisted regression, but Pinnington says he was just plain burned out on squash. It figures. He grew up alongside the game's greats, including his older brother David and friend Chris Ditmar. Pinnington won three junior national titles and mopped up on some of squash's future world-beaters, like Ditmar and Brett and Rodney Martin. At some point, though, these gents ascended the world rankings while Pinnington plateaued—he was stuck working non-squash jobs to pay the bills when Ditmar and company were traveling the circuit and aiming toward world No. 1. “Boggy” eventually came to the US to search for a squash job, arriving first in Los Angeles. There he spot-tested the WPSA hardball tour for a few months—racquetball, after all, didn't hold his interest. He enjoyed the North American game, but with most WPSA events played on the other coast, the tour was a logistical nightmare. Soon he returned to softball. “He's not a normal softball player,” says friend Kevin Jernigan, commenting that Pinnington's tank-like body affects his squash style. “He's a shooter, but not just any shooter… He's aggressive and will shoot a millimeter above the tin over and over again. And not softly—he'll hit as hard as he can. Hammer it into the nick, just put it away.” Pinnington's style baffled opponent Peter Karlen during the 2000 US nationals. Karlen came off the court, shaking his head and complaining that Pinnington never hit the ball straight. Karlen presumably expected traditional play: up and down the wall, opponents trading spots on-court and eventually putting away shots. Not so with the stocky, powerful Pinnington. “Peter was confused,” Jernigan recalls. “He didn't know what the hell it was. It wasn't squash. Not squash the way he had learned it.” When he's not pummeling squash balls or leading lessons at the club, Pinnington is jaunting to SoCal to play golf or off on fishing or water-skiing adventures. He loves to hang with his motor racing buddies on the Sears Point racetrack in Sonoma (Audi is his favorite team, for the moment). And city life in San Fran enthralls him: “I like the hustle and the bustle, to be right on the pulse.” Judging from the rowdy stories about Pinnington—most deemed unprintable in Squash Magazine by the tales' tellers—Pinnington is the life of the party. “The thing that will always be said of Grant is that he is extremely entertaining on and off the court,” friend Debbie Brown says. “Grant celebrates, win or lose.”

Grant Pinnington

The Entertainer