Squash, Not the Vegetable

Three-wall nicks and boasts.
Grey peaks, milky turquoise lakes,
and blue skies beyond.

I. Beginnings

I reached my peak as a squash player in my mid-thirties, sometime during the 1980s —a good decade to be chasing a small black ball around four walls in the Midwest. I had started playing in law school, mostly because I wanted an indoor sport immune to Chicago’s meteorological mood swings. I had previously played tennis, but squash struck me as the most elegant of the enclosed games: strategic, quick, a mix of geometry and psychology.

I played first on the old narrow hardball courts, with their worn maple floors and solid back walls, the sound of the ball like a muffled gunshot—pop-pop-pop. The rhythm hooked me. There was a clean perfection to the stroke, wristy and controlled, like cracking a whip or skipping a stone. I remember thinking it was the only time in law school when my body and mind worked in tandem—briefly liberated from casebooks and fluorescent lights.

When I married and moved to the northern suburbs, the rhythm changed. The younger, hungrier players still played downtown after work, sweating through their shirts before the last Metra train north. I became a lunchtime player, sneaking out between client calls and depositions, returning to the office with salt on my temples and a handful of peanuts to tide me over. My legal assistant used to cover for me by saying, “He’s in court.” She never specified which kind.

I wasn’t trying to be secretive; it just seemed more professional that way. Squash was, for me, both release and ritual—a good way to get away from the everyday pressures of a lawyer’s life.

II. The University Club

Most serious players in Chicago eventually made their way to the University Club on Monroe Street at Michigan Avenue. The U Club was more than a building; it was an ecosystem, a throwback to an era when men in three-piece suits took elevators to mahogany locker rooms and discussed business over lamb chops. Founded just after the Civil War, the Club occupied a twelve-story Gothic revival pile across from Millennium Park, with a leaded-glass library, dining rooms, a swimming pool, sleeping quarters, and, crucially, its squash courts.

By the time I joined, the Club had gone coed, though its manners were still faintly Edwardian. The membership hovered around fifteen hundred, of whom roughly three hundred were “squashies,” and ten of the twenty board seats—unofficially—belonged to them. Governance followed the ball.

I first visited the U Club in college, as a guest of my university’s president. He had brought me to lunch to display to the trustees what a “tame student” looked like, in contrast to the radicals then occupying administration buildings. Afterward, wandering the clubhouse halls, I peeked into the library and saw a row of old men dozing in leather armchairs, newspapers draped like blankets across their laps. I thought they were hired props, paid to provide atmosphere. Part of me envied them. They seemed at peace, surrounded by wood paneling and the gentle hush of privilege. I remember thinking: Someday I’d like to nap here.

Years later, I did join—and occasionally I did nap—but mostly I played. The club’s courts had a particular smell: sweat and varnish, a trace of cigars drifting from the men’s grill upstairs. The sound of the ball echoed through the stairwell, a percussive heartbeat.

Lunchtime squash became a small society of its own. We’d appear in our suits, change in silence, play forty-five minutes of frantic, lung-burning points, then shower and reemerge in the same suits, pretending we hadn’t aged a year. In the locker room, players discussed mergers, divorces, knee surgeries. The court was a place where partners could settle arguments or where opposing counsel could become temporary allies, at least until the score was seven-all.

The U Club also hosted major regional tournaments, drawing players from Milwaukee, Kansas City, St. Louis, Detroit, and Cleveland. During those weekends,

the building vibrated with energy: sweaty men in headbands queuing at the juice bar, spectators leaning over the balcony rail to watch the semifinals, the pros circulating like demigods. To be on those courts was to belong to a peculiar fraternity of obsession.

III. The Game

For the uninitiated, squash looks like racquetball’s austere cousin—same box, smaller ball, tighter strokes. But the feel of it is entirely different. A good squash stroke is compact, wrist-driven, more about timing than muscle. The ball, struck properly, makes a soft thup and dies neatly in the back corner.

After hitting a shot, the player must return to the “T,” the small intersection of lines at mid-court. The T is home base, command center, and battleground all at once. The prime directive is simple: after striking the ball, you have an affirmative duty to clear the way, giving your opponent an unimpeded path and a clean view of the front wall. Squash, at its best, becomes a kind of dance—two players exchanging positions in a wordless choreography of anticipation and retreat.

A shot that strikes the side wall before the front wall is called a boast. A perfect shot that hits three walls before dying at the junction of floor and side wall—a three-wall nick—is a thing of beauty. It’s the game’s version of a checkmate: graceful, final, impossible to return.

The game itself began in unlikely places. In 18th-century London debtor prisons, inmates passed time playing “racquets” against high walls. At Harrow in the 1830s, schoolboys punctured the balls, creating the distinctive “squash” sound and softer bounce. From there the game spread across the British Empire, carried in steamer trunks to India, South Africa, and beyond.

By the 1920s, two versions existed: hardball squash in North America, using a smaller, faster ball on narrower courts, and the international (softball) game everywhere else. The divide was partly cultural, partly practical—the colonial outposts favored endurance and craft, while Americans preferred pace and precision.

I began with hardball but, like most Chicago players, eventually switched. The transition felt like moving from chess blitz to marathon. Rallies stretched into minutes-long exchanges. Fitness mattered more than finesse. Where once a clever drop shot could end a point, now you needed lungs like bellows.

IV. The Golden 1980s

In those years, I lived in a rhythm of court and commute. I played or trained five or six times a week, often driving on Fridays to tournaments in Madison, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Detroit, or Cleveland. The format never changed: single elimination, thirty-two players per draw. Friday night meant your first match, usually against a local hopeful; Saturday meant two more if you survived; Sunday, the semifinals and finals.

At the Saturday night party, you could always tell who was still in the draw—those were the men sipping water and leaving early. The rest of us drank beer, swapped injury stories, and debated the ethics of borderline lets. It was a circuit of camaraderie and competition: fierce on the court, forgiving afterward.

Chicago itself was a lively squash town. The U Club was its cathedral, but there were outposts in Lake Forest, Winnetka, Evanston. At the Winter Club in Lake Forest, where I sometimes played doubles, the racquets pro was a young man named Mark— handsome, athletic, primarily a tennis player moonlighting in squash. We met in a local tournament once. He had textbook strokes but still moved like a tennis player, lunging when he should glide. I won narrowly, ending the match with a straight drop that left him gasping. He called out, “Oh!”—that small exhalation of surprise that every squash player secretly treasures.

It was an era of transition not just in equipment but in style. The North American hardball scene was dominated by the showmen—chief among them Sharif Khan, son of the great Hashim. Sharif was magnetic. He’d play to the crowd mid-rally, flicking his eyes at the audience before hitting a kill shot. He made the game theatrical without cheapening it.

Internationally, the sport belonged to Pakistan. Hashim Khan, the patriarch, had begun as a barefoot ball boy in the 1920s at a British officers’ club in Peshawar. After hours he practiced alone, developing a compact, lightning-quick game. In the 1950s he won the British Open eight times, then emigrated to the U.S., teaching in Detroit and Denver. His nephew Jahangir—JK to fans—would become the greatest player of the 1980s, perhaps of all time, winning more than five hundred matches consecutively, a streak no one has come close to touching. I later connected with him on LinkedIn, a digital echo of the old international fraternity. He remains in Pakistan, a dignified ambassador for the sport.

There was a strange symmetry in it: a game born in colonial prisons now dominated by the descendants of the colonized. On court, hierarchy dissolved into reflex and muscle memory.

V. Decline

No sport flatters the passage of time. In your thirties, you feel indestructible; in your forties, you learn the vocabulary of ice packs. My decline came gradually: first the knees, then the shoulders, then the Achilles tendons—one, then the other, both snapped during points I can still replay in my mind.

The first rupture came at the Illinois State Doubles finals. A loud pop, like a gunshot, and I was on the floor, unable to rise. Months of rehab followed: the clumsy walking boot, the slow reintroduction of motion, the humiliation of realizing you can’t climb stairs properly. The second injury arrived years later during a singles match against a U Club pro. I knew immediately what had happened. Pain, then resignation. You don’t make the same mistake twice—but sometimes the body does.

After that, my play changed. The reflexes dulled. I could still place a shot, still coax a dying drop from the front wall, but my movement lost its elasticity. I began losing to players I once taught. The lunch-hour games grew more social, less competitive. I told myself that was maturity, but it was also surrender.

The sport itself was fading at the Club. The younger members preferred golf, triathlons, boutique fitness classes, or just their computers and cell phones. The courts were quieter, the walls less scuffed. Squash never had great television appeal, even with the advent of all glass walls—the ball too small, the action too fast for cameras to follow. It remained a connoisseur’s game, one best experienced from within the glass box, where every breath and heartbeat reverberates.

VI. Egypt and the Present

If Pakistan gave squash its legends, Egypt gave it immortality. Beginning in the 2000s, Egyptian players transformed the game with artistry and audacity. They were fearless shot-makers, combining the discipline of the Khans with Mediterranean flair.

There was Mohamed El Shorbagy, “The Beast”, relentless and physical; Karim Abdel Gawad, “The Baby-Faced Assassin”, all finesse and angles; Mostafa Asal, “The Raging Bull”, whose blocking tactics made him both villain and spectacle. On the women’s side, Nour El Sherbini, “The Warrior Princess”, became a four-time world champion before turning twenty-five; Nouran Gohar, “The Terminator”, crushed opponents with power; and Raneem El Welily, “The Enigma”, floated through rallies with balletic grace.

The Egyptians’ dominance was total, but also poetic—a nation that had inherited the British game and reimagined it in Arabic rhythms. Among them, there was even a rivalry of geography: Alexandrian players versus those from Cairo, each claiming a purer lineage of style.

I still watch their matches online, amazed by the precision and athleticism. The rallies stretch impossibly long, the ball struck a hundred times before dying in a perfect nick. It feels like watching an evolved species of the game I once knew.

My favorites among the non-Egyptians—Paul Coll, “Superman” from New Zealand, for his unbreakable stamina; Joel Makin, “The Golden Tiger” from Wales, fierce and analytical; and Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, “The Colombian Cannonball”, whose flying dives turn rallies into theatre—remind me that the game, though global, still speaks a universal grammar: angles, anticipation, grace under pressure.

VII. The Court as Mirror

Sometimes I think squash was my first philosophy. Inside the court, you confront the self stripped of excuses. Every point is a miniature moral experiment: the line between aggression and restraint, calculation and instinct. The court measures not just physical skill but emotional discipline—the capacity to recover from a bad bounce, a lucky nick, a missed let.

The “T” at center court becomes a metaphor for equilibrium. Every shot drives you away from it; every recovery is a return. Life outside the court, too, is a constant rally between extremes—work and rest, ambition and fatigue, winning and letting go.

There’s a story old players tell: a novice once asked a pro what the secret of squash was. The pro replied, “Hit the ball and get out of the way.” It’s both tactical and existential advice.

VIII. Coda

I still play, sometimes, though “play” is generous. The legs are slower, the rallies shorter, the recovery time longer. But the pleasure remains—especially in that moment when the ball leaves the racquet, arcs toward the front wall, and dies just right.

I no longer chase rankings. I play to feel that rhythm again, the whispering thud of the ball, the brief illusion that time hasn’t changed anything essential.

Afterward, I sometimes walk past the U Club library, where the old armchairs still sit beneath portraits of forgotten members. The same silence hangs in the air, a faint smell of dust and polish. I imagine those dozing men of my youth—props or not— nodding in approval.

Squash, like the law, teaches you to live within constraints: a box, a rulebook, a time limit. But within that confinement lies possibility. Every shot is a negotiation between order and chaos, every rally a dialogue between two people who understand the terms.

The game has outlasted my knees, my ambitions, even the culture that once sustained it. Yet whenever I step onto the court, I feel the same quickening, the same gratitude.

The ball hits the wall, rebounds, and for a few seconds I’m back in that echoing space between youth and age, winning and losing, past and present.

Three-wall nicks and boasts.
Grey peaks, milky turquoise lakes,
and blue skies beyond.