By Jay Prince He picked up a squash racquet at the age of six after first playing tennis for a few years. He became hooked to the point of being determined to master his forehand and backhand. In no time, he began adding a top-spin backhand drop shot to his...
By James Zug Photos by Steve Line/SquashPics.com It happened in a challenge match. Jose and I were both seniors, the two captains of the team, battling it out on a dark, winter night in New Hampshire for the number-one spot on the varsity ladder of our college team. The match went...
by Richard Eaton It felt as though the splash created at the U.S. Open, by awarding equal prize money to women, had sent ripples all the way across the Atlantic to the world's most venerable tournament. The ninety-two-year-old British Open saw Nicol David get back on track as a world-beater by...
By James Zug The eightieth J.P. Morgan Tournament of Champions will be remembered for the long-awaited arrival of a queen and the wildly exaggerated, misreported demise of a prince. Nicol David had done everything in the game of squash, except play a competitive point at the most iconic squash tournament in the...
  By James Zug It was a weekend of firsts. It was the 102nd time that the country gathered to play its national squash championship. Yet even after more than a century, so much was new at the annual conclave. It was the first time the National Singles was held in Virginia. The Boar’s Head hosted the weekend at...
As is now traditional, U.S. Squash presented new members of the U.S. Squash Hall of Fame during the U.S. Open, the class of 2011 and the class of 2012. All five inductees, accompanied by past inductees, were honored with on-court presentations on the first night of the glass-court matches....
By James Zug 1989 We had lost to Harvard in the regular season in 1989, 6-3 in Cambridge. A week later we beat them in the semis of the first nationals team tournament at Yale. We beat them 7-2. And then we beat Princeton in the finals. It was theoretically...
SMAG-Books 12 Summer Reading: Herewith is our second literary salon where we review the latest books about squash. Three of the four books were self-published; the fourth was privately published- all can be obtained with easy online sleuthing... By James Zug A Shot and a Ghost: A Year in the Brutal World of...
By James Zug The 2011 (Part Two) U.S. National Intercollegiate Doubles Championships came to Philadelphia as a part of the U.S. Open’s first weekend. After more than two decades of incubation and careful attention at the University Club of New York, including a tournament in March this year, the intercollegiate...

The Two Swedes

By James Zug New York was the crucible and Uptown was its red-hot center. Opened in the mid-1970s on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Uptown was the flagship of a new era. It had glamour (Woody Allen filmed a scene for his 1979 film Manhattan there; Alan Alda and Brian DePalma...