By James Zug
Camera crews often come to film at urban squash programs. Usually they are making a short segment for local television. It is pretty common. George Polsky, the founder and executive director of StreetSquash, counted twenty different crews that visited his program.
The twenty-first has stayed. Archimedia Films is...
By James Zug
In February, the U.S. National Hardball Singles Championships had a successful farewell as a national championship at Merion Cricket Club. Eighty-one players from around the continent came to Philadelphia to play with the Slazenger fuchsia ball in the eighteen-and-a-half-foot-wide court.
The draws contained some classic hardball names—Davenport, Edwards,...
By James Zug
Kingston upon Hull, the East Yorkshire port town, has a delightful old district along the harbor: narrow, cobblestoned streets, ancient pubs, a museum about slavery in the Georgian home of William Wilberforce. On the other side of town, in West Hull, is KC Stadium where Hull FC,...
by James Zug
A couple of indelible images from the 2016 Windy City Open remain in the squash frontal lobe. The “I don’t believe it, that is a joke, an absolute joke,” sequence at 7-5 in the fourth game of Mathieu Castagnet & Daryl Selby’ s second-round match. If you...
By James Zug
When Gregory Gaultier won the 2015 Men’s World Squash Championships, the scene was perhaps as dramatic a moment as we have ever seen at the forty-year-old event. Gaultier was avenging nine years of agony.
The finals of the 2006 World Open, held in front of the Pyramids of...
By James Zug
It sounds deceptively simple. Put two kids in a squash court and let them play.
Nothing is simple in Israel. History, religion, politics impinge—disruptively—on every aspect of life.
“Back in 2012, I was talking with Variv Bloomberg at a tournament and we got the idea of trying to help...
By James Zug
The Winning Parent: A Parent’s Guide for the Journey of Competitive Sport—A System for Winning Now and Forever with Your Children in Sport
By Daniel Massaro
(New York: Mairs & Shaw Publishing, 2015)
Last year Danny Massaro published this important book about parenting and sports. A Brit in his early...
by James Zug
In January 2010 just before the men’s final of the J.P. Morgan Tournament of Champions, two teenaged girls from New York stepped out onto the portable glass court in Grand Central Terminal played a quick exhibition match. The taller girl won 3-1.
Her name was Amanda Sobhy.
Six years...
Good Literary Length: Three New Books
By James Zug
Trading Secrets: Squash Greats Recall Their Toughest Duels
Rod Gilmour
(Durrington, England: Pitch Publishing, 2015)
Oral history books are notoriously unreliable. What one person remembers might not jib with the facts, and memories tend to fade and rust over time. But oral histories also draw...