The finals of the 2019 FS Investments U.S. Open came within a half-inch of duplicating the 2017 edition, with the wife and husband team of Nour El Tayeb & Ali Farag again almost pulling off the historic double of a married couple winning the same title on the same...
by James Zug
Damien Mudge has an intentional relationship with velocity. For twenty years he played professional squash doubles across North America. The very first time he went on a doubles court, his boss and mentor at the University Club of New York, Gary Waite, wound up and cracked a...
Forty years ago, in March 1980, a half dozen enterprising, young women flew to Sweden for the first-ever World Junior Championships: Patrice McConnell Cormwell, Kat Castle Grant, Karen Kelso, Alicia McConnell, Diana Staley and coach Carol Weymuller. The tournament was played in Kungalv, a small village north of Gothenburg....
Lucky: Anil Nayar’s Story—A Portrait of a Legendary Squash Champion
By Jean Nayar
(New York: Five Rivers Press, 2020).
By James Zug
Lucky is the biography of one of the top amateurs of the twentieth century. Anil Nayar and his wife Jean Nayar have put together a fascinating story of a great champion...
For forty years, the DeRoy Testamentary Foundation has partnered with the game of squash.
The roots of the relationship came in 1978, after the death of Helen DeRoy. She and her husband Aaron DeRoy owned successful car dealerships in Michigan and been major philanthropic leaders in Detroit. Since its founding,...
By James Zug
Twenty-five years ago, the cover of Squash News, our predecessor magazine, featured fifty-three young athletes. That February 1996 issue was historic. It not only contained what is thought to be the most players ever collectively pictured on the cover of a squash magazine—in a masterful photograph by...
One of the benefits of the U.S. Open arriving at Drexel University in 2011 has been a myriad of interactions between the squash community and Drexel professors.
Eric Zillmer and Nyree Dardarian are two great examples of the integration. As Drexel’s athletic director and a neuroscience professor, Zillmer played a...
by James Zug
When I was working at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, a lot of fellow journalists asked why I was there, since the U.S. was not competing.
It was an easy answer. The Commonwealth Games are far and away squash’s biggest moment. Every four years the Games expose...
Steve Line tells the stories behind some of his most famous images, including Awad v. Jahangir in 1982, Jahangir in 1988 and Willstrop & Matthew in 2009.
Outside The Glass · Ep.90 Steve Line—Classic Photographs
Western Lane
By Chetna Maroo
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023)
by James Zug
Chetna Maroo’s debut novel—short and tight, at 150-pages it is really a novella—is set in the 1980s in Luton, a town north of London, and revolves around a Gujarati Indian immigrant family. The mother has just died, and the father...