By James Zug
Photos by Jay D. Price/SquashMagazine.com
Like a feather caught in a vortex, Julian Illingworth floats around the squash court with a whirling flash of insouciance. He has the angularity and confidence of a true athlete. He gets to the ball, gets there early, takes it early and takes...
By James Zug
Photos by Steve Line/SquashPics.com
Remember Kurt Hulton’s 1934 photograph of Grand Central? Soft shafts of light streaming down on the tiny, doll-like people meeting and parting and hurrying. But exactly three-quarters of a century later, any reader of this magazine thinks: oh, just out of the frame of...
By James Zug
During the JPMorgan Tournament of Champions, one special event occurred 17 blocks north of Grand Central. It was a sneak-peek screening of Keep Eye on Ball: The Hashim Khan Story. Directed by Josh Easdon and produced by Beth Rasin, the documentary tells the biography of the world’s...
By James Zug
It was about storytelling.
Beneath the carapace of elegance and the thick scrim of black-tie and evening gowns and silver scoops of potato leek gratin and tangerine segment and cabernet reduction, it was just a brace of old and new friends gathered together and telling stories.
We heard about...
By James Zug
This month is the 25th anniversary of the first U.S. national softball tournament. With the dominance of softball today in America—the mass conversions of the 1990s, the incredible retreat of hardball—it is strange to imagine that the first sanctioned softball nationals was held just a quarter century...
By James Zug
On a bright, cloudless summer day, Mark Talbott is rushing to the Palo Alto train station to pick me up. He is late. He has borrowed a car from one of his Stanford squash players—the Talbotts are a one-car family—and the exchange took longer than it might have,...
By James Zug
In the summer of 1989 Tom Jones and his wife Hazel White Jones, the publisher and editor of Squash News—this magazine’s predecessor—cobbled together a coterie of seven small pro softball tournaments under the umbrella of the Grand Prix circuit. Thirty-seven pros from 15 countries played in the Grand...
By James Zug
Photos by Steve Line/SquashPics.com
Everyone wants Ramy Ashour and James Willstrop to be the next great PSA rivalry. Now that Jonathon Power and Peter Nicol have retired, another mano-a-mano global face-off is considered by many observers as critical to ratcheting up interest in pro men’s squash. Twenty and...
By James Zug
Photos courtesy of Bert Armstrong
Looking for an old book? How about a British Open racquet from Geoff Hunt? A Johnny Skillman letter? A Sarah Fitz-Gerald stamp? A1907 squash salt trophy?
Go to Melbourne. There in Australia’s loveliest city is the world’s greatest collection of squash memorabilia. I wrote...
By James Zug
In October 1997 the first issue of Squash Magazine arrived in your mailbox. Some people then might have been surprised to see it reach its tenth birthday. The layout in that first issue was a bit choppy; the size was a bit small (24 pages, half its normal...