feature article - The Hill School

shot, the skid boasts, the ball zipping everywhere. Astonishing upsets
were possible in hardball.
—Jeremy Fraiberg
“It’s one of the greatest comebacks I’ve ever seen,” Yale
head coach Dave Talbott said.
“He knew it all came down to him.”
—Yale Daily News, 22 February 1990
It was a crushing defeat. Piltch just got run over by enthusiastic
fans after the match. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Maybe we would have beaten Yale if we had been more of a
team? Once practice was over, we sometimes went our separate
ways. We were very talented but had some ego.
—Josh Horwitz
When the match ended and John won the match, I got trampled.
To this day, I have a bad back because of that. I would have
preferred to have been rushing into the court to celebrate rather
than trying to get out of the way.
—Steve Piltch
Baker barely made it off court before the dikes burst and a
sea of blue covered the T, the service boxes, most of Court 1 and
all of John Musto. Such was the power of pent-up energy.
The team match line score thus read YYHHYHHYY—the same
on either side of the glass wall, but a far cry from the equally palindromic
string of nine H’s that had characterized this would-be
rivalry for so many years.
—Derrick Niederman, Squash News, May 1990
My overwhelming memory was “Wasn’t that great for Yale?”
You feel the empathy. That final match came down to Musto and
Baker, all this history, all this pressure. Hot as balls in there,
people screaming. Quite like a Duke v. Carolina game. Given
that rivalry and the history of futility. Benno Schmidt is there, the
president of Yale, introduced by Talbott at the beginning of the
match. It was a beautiful, great moment for college athletics. It
was almost pre-ordained. They had five seniors, their last home
match. They had lost forever to us. This was their moment. They
had brought their president. They knew something was brewing.
It was a fairy-tale ending. They weren’t going to be denied. It was
their date with destiny.
—Jeremy Fraiberg
It was so intense and there was such pent-up emotion that
when it was over, we plowed through the door and tackled Musto.
We thought we’d have this a year ago and had to wait 365 days.
It was a great feeling. For Musto, playing at No. 1, with his work
ethic, to win it was awesome.
—Chris Hunt
What was so memorable was the pile-on after the Musto
match. Bam! That’s it. We were climbing over the glass and there
was a huge pile-on, with Musto on the bottom. He was exhausted,
had the flu. I remember he was on the bottom of the pile
yelling, “Get off! Get off. I can’t breathe.”
There were a couple of photos of the pile-on and it was like
the Miracle on Ice and there was Dave running around looking for
someone to hug.
—Tuffy Kingsbury
John Musto (Below) being hoisted onto the shoulders
of the victorious Yale men, (and Right with Jen Spiegel)
rightly proclaimed that on this long weekend in February,
1990, that Yale was truly No. 1.
30 | SEPTEMBER 2012