In the century-long plus history of collegiate squash, no team has ever matched the heights of the Whitman College men’s squad.
Whitman is a modestly small liberal-arts college in Walla Walla, a town in eastern Washington state. Walla Walla is known for its sweet onions and its grapes—more than a hundred vineyards encircle the town.
A half century ago Whitman was briefly known for its squash team. In the winter of 1977, the Missionaries powered to a perfect record, beating every college in the Pacific Northwest and clinching an undefeated season. The Pioneer, the Whitman weekly student newspaper, waxed lyrical each issue about their torrid win streak. They ran a team photograph, an action photo, reports of the squad capturing the Pacific Northwest Squash League title and quotes from opposing coaches.
It was all fake.
Whitman College had two hardball squash courts, built circa 1950s. By the mid-1970s, they lay mostly dormant. A legendary Whitman physics professor, Phil Howland, played squash occasionally on the courts. “The rumor was that if you could beat Howland, he’d give you an A,” said Bart Fite. But squash was not a varsity or club or even PE sport at Whitman. Moreover, Walla Walla was hundreds of miles from the nearest squash city, and the Pacific Northwest was still a distant entrepot far the eastern capitals of the game.
The fandango of Whitman Squash started in the library. Bart Fite had grown up in Seattle playing tennis. Squash-wise, he had gotten on the court a couple of times and knew Mark Alger—everyone did. At the time Mark was one of the top squash players in the country and would go on to win the 1979 National Singles, becoming the first open national squash champion from west of the Mississippi. One day in the Whitman library Fite came across Hashim Khan’s 1967 book, Squash Racquets: The Khan Game. After flipping through the pages, he went to the offices of the Pioneer. Fite, Bill Way and Jeff Hill decided that a hoax made sense. Whitman should have a squash team. Way had seen squash before, having been a tennis player at the Seattle Tennis Club. “We had a genuine interest in squash,” said Way, “and thought it would be pretty amusing to start a Whitman team.” Hill, who had grown up in Walla Walla and played some racquetball at Whitman, remembered that the feeling was that “squash was the perfect exotic sport for a prank.”
The team was inaugurated in the 20 January 1977 issue of the Pioneer. Amidst reporting on the Whitman basketball (serious tube socks), wrestling and swimming teams, a short piece by Bart Fite, “Squash Team Victorious,” appeared at the bottom of page fourteen. Fite reported that at a Christmas Invitational at Carroll College in Helena, MT, the team had squeaked out a 3-2 win. Jeff Hill beat Natasha Churemeyeve (“one of the best woman players to come out of Russia in over a decade”) and John Stegner overcame Chico Corillo. The tone was irreverent: “Bill Way over Tom ‘Tom’ Tom. Bill summarized his strategy as a ‘combination of reverse side spin to Tom’s backhand, juxtaposed with a quarter slice forehand down the rail.’”
But the dual-match kicker (and a fourth win in the 3-2 dual match, but who is doing the math?) was Paul Mozer. A co-editor of the Pioneer, Mozer pulled off a stunning victory against Carroll. He was down 2-0 and then “played the best squash of his young life” to win the fifth game 19-17 (a score impossible in squash at the time—more math). Remarkably, Fite reported that Mozer’s opponent was Yusuf Khan. At the time, the real Yusuf Khan, forty-something and a full-time teaching pro in Seattle, was the best squash player in the Pacific Northwest and one of the best in the country—he had won the Boston Open just six years earlier.
“I thought the prank would last one issue and the administration would figure it out,” said Fite. “I thought they’d see through it instantly.” The only one who did figure it out was Mike Alger, then a sophomore at Whitman. Alger saw the article and thought—wait, we don’t have a squash team…. and Yusuf Khan? Alger had grown up in Tacoma and his home club, Tacoma Lawn Tennis Club, had two active squash courts, where his older brother Mark was the star. “I went right to Mozer,” Alger remembered. “and I said, ‘either let me join the team as the one Whitman guy who actually plays squash or I’ll blow the whistle.’” So another guy was added to the mythical ladder. The rest of the team were Pioneer staff members: Mozer was co-editor; the sports department consisted of four writers, including Jeff Hill, Bill Way and Bart Fite; Neil Strother was the editor of the news department.
The Pioneer began weekly coverage of the brilliant squash team. On 27 January, Bill Way informed readers that Whitman pummeled Western Baptist 5-0 and Pacific Lutheran 4-1. Stanley Jenkins, No.1 on the ladder, was according to Way “the acknowledged superstar of squash” and had a “quick, wristy backhand.” Way quoted Jeff Hill saying after the Pacific Lutheran dual match: “We should have won all the games. Mozer played like a twelve-year [old] against PLU.”
“Nobody did any research,” Way recently said. “We just created characters and sprinkled in the names of Pioneer staffers. Paul [Mozer] loved farce and audacity. He gave us papal blessing to have a squash team. The Pioneer was a credible newspaper, and if Mozer said it was ok, the rest of the editors said it was ok.”
In February, Whitman Squash went from strength to strength. Against Willamette, “the perennial powerhouse of the Northwest Squash League” the Missionaries won 4-1. (Whitman’s teams were known as the Missionaries until 2016 when they became The Blues.) Then they beat Reed College 4-1. Neil Strother outlasted Reed’s Arthur Lloyd 16-6, 15-14, 15-12—another impossible scoreline (ok, no more complaints about the math). “An incredible side-wall boast that caught the nick won the tense second game for Mr. Strother,” the unsigned article declared on 4 February. At the bottom was the standings for the PNWSL, the Pacific Northwest Squash League, with Whitman an unblemished 5-0.
On 10 February, Way reported on another victory: 5-0 over St. Martins. Mike Alger “used a sharp forehand slap shot” and Jeff Hill “characteristically credited the victory to ‘fantastic play on my part.’”
On 17 February, Fite described victories over Lewis & Clark and Northwest Nazarene. Next to the page ten article was a photograph of six members of the team with the caption: “Spirits run high on Squash Team.” This image, of six motley guys on the squash court, was not easy to compose. Alger remembered going to his dorm room and collecting all the racquets he had and then finding a couple more in an equipment room in the gym. They dragooned everyone to come to the courts. In the top row (l-r) Mike Alger, Bill Way and Neil Strother; in the front row Bart Fite, Jeff Hill and Paul Mozer.
On 24 February, Fite reported that Whitman finished the season by topping Saint Mary’s in a non-conference match. Stanley Jenkins, a co-captain who went undefeated, was named the PNWSL Player of the Year; Mozer, with his 6-2 record, was voted the team’s Most Improved Player; Way had a 6-3 record; Hill, the other co-captain, went 6-2; Alger was 3-1; Fite 6-3. Fite concluded the article by comparing Whitman Squash to the 1964 and 1965 Reed College squash dynasty. He quoted Reed’s coach: “Although it’s hard to admit, I believe Whitman this year to be the best ever in the history of the PNWSL. The increased interest in the game, along with better equipment and training techniques, led me to this conclusion.”
Coincidentally, Reed and Lewis & Clark had squash courts and an important squash history: Lewis & Clark had built the West Coast’s first squash doubles court in 1964, and Reed followed with their own ten years later (Reed’s famously had an exquisite, unpainted wooden ceiling).
The rest was pure farce.
Whitman Squash, like many good undergraduate stories, needed a road trip to make it complete.
It was early March. “I was sitting in class when Mozer came in, with a big grin,” said Alger. “He dropped an envelope on the desk—it was from the Pacific Coasts.” Somehow word had gotten out—a Whitman alum who got the Pioneer in the mail, Yusuf Khan mystified by a Carroll College tuition bill?—someone had heard about an active, successful squash team at Whitman College. The Pacific Coast Association, which covered a dozen U.S. states and two Canadians provinces, formally extended an invitation to Whitman to send players to its annual championships in Calgary. The Pacific Coast Championships, founded before the Second World War, was a serious tournament, with top-level competition and partying.
Fite and Hill went to the administration. They had a meeting with Gordon Scribner, the dean of students. “We were in a wood-paneled room,” Fite said, “and we showed Scribner the letter from the Pacific Coasts. Evidently, the administrators weren’t reading the Pioneer because they didn’t reprimand us for running fake stories all winter. They didn’t rap us over the knuckles.” Instead, they offered $750 [over $4,000 in 2025] for two players and a photographer to go to Calgary
Why did Whitman shell out money for their fake team to go to a real championship?
Just a few days before the meeting, Whitman College had notoriously cancelled its football program. The Missionaries had started playing intercollegiate football in 1897 and been a regional powerhouse of sorts for a long while (beating nearby Washington State, for instance). In recent decades they had gone into an irreversible decline. In 1975 they went 1-8, with an average margin of defeat of forty-three points. The team had also been engulfed in a recent political firestorm. In September 1971 the captains had presented President Nixon, who was visiting Walla Walla, with a Whitman football jersey. A photo of Nixon receiving the jersey was widely reprinted. Many students, staff and faculty were dismayed, and a year later amidst protests about the war in Vietnam, the Whitman student council voted to ask for Nixon to return the jersey.
To go to the Coast, Whitman selected Mike Alger and Bart Fite, since they were the only Whitman students who had ever played squash, and added Hill as a reporter and photographer. “I never expected to actually play squash when I started the Whitman squash team,” said Fite. “I was just a beginner. I had only played a couple of times in high school. Mike was the one guy on campus who really knew how to play. I would have been, as it were, a walk-on.” In a preview in the Pioneer, Fite boldly predicted that Alger “has an excellent chance to come home with some hardware.” The Pioneer also ran a photo of Bart Fite stretched out and diving a la Miguel Rodriguez for a ball. “Someone kept throwing balls and Jeff Hill got me horizontal about to hit a ball,” said Fite. “It was totally staged, like everything with Whitman Squash.”
Early on Friday morning 11 March 1977, Alger drove with Fite and Hill to Spokane. They arrived late and missed their flight. At the Spokane airport they met a couple of others who also had missed the Calgary flight and then someone came up to them and offered each a $30 seat on a private plane going to Calgary.
Alger and Fite cruised to first-round wins on Friday evening at Glencoe Club in Calgary. A very late and robust night of socializing ensued, typical of the Coast. “It was a great party,” remembered Hill. “A beef dinner and disco, a lot of dancing.”
“Saturday morning broke,” Hill wrote in his tongue-in-cheek report that appeared in a four-page special issue of the Pioneer, “somewhat earlier than anticipated.” Playing at 8am, Alger lost his second-round match decisively and decided to fly back to Spokane that afternoon.
Fite, however, slept right through his 9am match time. “Awakening with somewhat less than a start at 9:15,” Hill wrote, Fite called the club, rescheduled his match, suffered spilt orange juice and stubbed toes and made his way to Glencoe. “Upon arrival at the club,” Hill wrote, “Fite slipped into his whites and burst on to the court emanating cool confidence. Forty-five minutes later, he was dragged off the court sweaty and incoherent and propped up at the bar. Puddles of tears formed at the counter.” The squash was over—it was time to socialize. Fite and Hill put in a second hard night of partying. (The weekend was so raucous that the Coasts never returned to Calgary.) Fite and Hill flew back to Spokane on Sunday afternoon and took the slow bus back to Walla Walla that night.
At the end of the article was in bold: “Editors Notes—Pioneer wishes to thank the administration for the generousity [sic] shown to the Pio’s own mythic, legendary squash team. Without their money—which the football team no longer has—Hill, Fite, and Alger never could have gotten drunk, rented planes, and flown to Calgary. We wish to thank you and hope you will be just as generous to our Drag Racing team.”
No drag racing ensued, but squash did have a final hurrah in print. In May 1977 the Waiilatpu, the Whitman College yearbook, came out. The editor was a fraternity brother of Fite and Way and was able to work in a mention of the squash team. On page seventy-nine, in the spring sports section, the yearbook ran the two sole surviving images of the Whitman squash team: the photo of the diving Fite and the team photo.
The happy-ever-after was almost typical.
Paul Mozer had dreamed of being a drummer and had attended Berklee College before transferring to Whitman. But the rock-and-roll had to wait. After leaving Walla Walla, Mozer picked up his MBA at Kellogg. In 1979 he joined Salomon Brothers’ Chicago office and later transferred to New York, becoming in 1988 the head of Salomon’s government bonds desk.
Jeff Hill, a fourth-generation Walla Wallan, trained as an artist in London and lived in Seattle for two decades working as an appraiser and fine art dealer before returning to his home town. He became a famous painter renowned across eastern Washington.
Before graduating, Bill Way became the editor of the Pioneer. Decades later he served on Whitman’s board of trustees and was in charge of budgets and the finance committee. No one mentioned the squash program. Way worked at Accenture for years. Today Way helps produce for Hollywood, Broadway and television; he’s done projects with David Byrne, Richard Gere, Natalie Portman and Sydney Sweeney. He played some squash in London, where he used to live: “I was a severely average club player,” he said. Instead, he has completed Ironman triathlons, marathons and regattas.
Having invented a squash career at Whitman, Bart Fite actually got into squash after leaving Walla Wall. He went back to Seattle after Whitman and started playing squash with some friends. In 1990 he moved to Hong Kong and got into softball, playing at the Hong Kong Country Club and American Club Hong Kong and joining the local league. In 1998 he returned to Seattle and played at the Seattle Tennis Club (head pro: Yusuf Khan) and the Washington Athletic Club. Again, he got into league squash. “I knew Yusuf,” Fite said. “I played with Shabana and Latasha. When I was in Hong Kong, Latasha would invite me to come to the pro tournaments. I credit squash with a lot of great experiences and meeting a lot of great people.” In February 2014 Fite appeared in Squash Magazine. It wasn’t a wind-up. He had gone 11-1 playing No.2 on his division II team in the Seattle league. The brief article didn’t mention he had played college squash.
Fite and Way stayed in touch and later rowed crew together in regattas like the Head of the Charles in Boston and Henley in London.
Mike Alger became a television meteorologist in Reno, Nevada. He played a bit of squash at a club there but mostly devoted himself to tennis. “My brother might be a national squash champion,” Alger joked, “but my college squash team went undefeated.”
And that is how it would have ended, a sophomoric caper—no harm, no foul; a free trip to Calgary; a legend to laugh about. In fact, Fite remembered bumping to Dean Scribner at a reunion decades later, and he apologized for the fake team. It was all water under the bridge.
But in the spring of 1991, one veteran of Whitman Squash became world famous. Paul Mozer got into the news for the wrong reasons. He brought down Salomon Brothers. Founded in 1910, Salomon was one of the largest and most influential investment banks in the world. (Remember: Michael Lewis’ 1989 book on Salomon, Liar’s Poker). In 1991 Mozer was accused to submitting illegal bids, purchasing more than thirty-five percent of Treasury securities at auction and more or less cornering the market. This violated the Department of Treasury’s rules. The scandal led to the three top Salomon executives resigning (in large part because CEO John Gutfreund found out about Mozer’s trades but kept it quiet for over three months). The Justice Department, the SEC, the Federal Reserve and Treasury all investigated. It was a major story
In August 1991, just days after Mozer was fired from Salomon, Sarah Bartlett wrote a long profile on Mozer in the New York Times entitled “Salomon’s Errant Cowboy.” The piece started on the front page of the business section, covering about half the page; and then filled all of page ten. On page one was four photos of Mozer, including the Whitman squash team photo that had appeared in the 17 February 1977 issue of the Pioneer and the 1977 Waiilatpu. It was captioned: “Paul W. Mozer, lower right, with his college squash team.”
“It Isn’t the Paul Mozer They Knew” was a sidebar on page ten written by Jacques Steinberg. He was “a short, soft-spoken man,” Steinberg reported, who “attacked his work as aggressively as he hit tennis balls on the private court outside his spacious weekend home in Sands Point, LI.”
The news reached the other members of the team. Fite was in Hong Kong, Way in London. No one could believe it. There they were, their unsmiling faces and bad haircuts on the front page of the business section of the Times.
In October 1991, Margie Boule, Whitman class of 1973, wrote about the story in her column in the Oregonian newspaper: “Fooling the Treasury, and the Times.” Boule, having interviewed Mike Alger and Jeff Hill, disclosed that the Whitman squash team photo which ran in the New York Times was a fake.
Yet, nothing more was said. The definitive book on the scandal was Martin Mayer’s 1993 Nightmare on Wall Street: Salomon Brothers and the Corruption of the Marketplace. Mozer played a central role in the book. In the index, it read below Mozer, Paul: “bids fake by; firing of; indictment of; SEC charges against” etc. Mayer made no mention of Mozer’s involvement in a collegiate prank, but almost the opposite. “He was a short, intensely argumentative and humorless thirty-six-year-old, with black hair, a broad forehead, and a narrow chin.” Mayer wrote. “Gutfreund liked him for his almost violently competitive temperament.”
In December 1993 Mozer was sentenced to four months in prison and a $30,000 fine; in July 1994 a civil trial brought by the SEC led to his conviction of a fine of $1.1 million and being barred from the securities industry for life. He and his wife and three children moved to Jupiter, Florida.
A fiftieth reunion of the fabled 1977 Whitman College squash team is scheduled for early 2027 in Walla Walla.