Thomas M. Poor was honored with the President’s Cup, US Squash’s highest annual award, last weekend at the MFS Boston Squash Doubles Pro-Am Championships.
Poor, eighty-two, had recently retired to Florida but was back in Boston to help celebrate the MFS Doubles, now in its thirty-fourth year. Poor is a legend on the court, having won more than forty national titles in both singles and doubles in the U.S. and Canada in open and age-group play. That list includes five U.S. Mixed Doubles open titles and fourteen men’s U.S. masters titles in doubles. In the 1970s, he twice played singles for Team USA in the World Championships. In January 2013, he was inducted into the U.S. Squash Hall of Fame.
“We wanted to honor Tom with the President’s Cup,” said Kevin Klipstein, President & CEO of US Squash, “not because he was such a fantastic player for well over a half century, but for his incredible contributions off the court, mainly his dedication to expanding the reach of junior squash and elevating the experience over so many years. His efforts have had a major positive impact on the sport.”
Poor, along with his longtime doubles partner Lenny Bernheimer, was a director of the Boston Open, the leading major on the 1980s pro singles tour in North America. He helped found the MFS Doubles in 1992 and ran it for decades. Exactly thirty years ago, he was a founding board member of SquashBusters, the after-school youth enrichment program in New England.
At the state-level, Poor was sui generis. For decades he ran the Mass State Doubles, the country’s largest annual state doubles tournament, now with fourteen divisions and over 220 pairs. In 1977 he helped create the Massachusetts Squash Racquets Foundation, a tax-exempt entity that has led to Mass Squash having the largest endowment of any local squash district in the nation. He served on the board of Mass Squash from 1984 to 2023 and for years was the association’s treasurer and chair of the junior committee.
In that last role, Poor became famous. He ran junior tournaments in Boston for decades, and they were considered the best run events in the country. He did the draws by hand, found great trophies and tee-shirts, ample coffee for parents and coaches in the morning and personally wrote a thank-you note to every player after the event. He even mailed back lost-and-found items. His goal was to make sure that every player, especially the out-of-town ones, wanted to come back the next time.
Chris Spahr, the squash director at the University Club of Boston, spoke movingly about his long association with Poor. “Since I got to the University Club in 1999, I have seen first-hand how Tom has spent a lifetime setting the highest possible standards in the game. His junior tournaments were carefully curated. He cared that everyone had a great experience. He has an on-court sartorial style that is trapped in the 1970s—tight shirts, tight shorts and the terry-cloth grip on his racquet—but that was a part of his charm. With an unwavering belief in the game, he made the squash community bigger, stronger and more connected.”
After a standing ovation, Poor accept the award from James Zug, US Squash’s senior correspondent. “I started playing squash on the plains of Colorado and have never stopped,” said Poor. “Squash was a tremendous combination of competition and wonderful people. It was an honor to play with Lenny. It was an honor to be in that basement room at the Harvard Club of Boston when Greg Zaff approached Mass Squash about a crazy idea that became SquashBusters. We just love this game.”
The President’s Cup is the highest individual annual award at US Squash. Treddy Ketcham, a former chair of the board of US Squash and a legendary leader of the game, inaugurated the award in 1966. In the past sixty years it has been given by the president of US Squash to those who have made exceptionally substantial, significant and sustained contributions to American squash. Past honorees include Hashim Khan, the global squash star, squash club manager Nancy Cushman, Ned Bigelow, founder of the U.S. Open, Hazel White Jones, Squash News editor and tournament director, recently retired University Club of Chicago athletic director John Flanigan and Maria Toorpakai Wazir, Pakistani equal rights campaigner. Poor is the forty-eighth recipient of the President’s Cup.
