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 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...
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...
By James Zug Squash has gone south. The McArthur Squash Center at the Boar’s Head Sports Club in Charlottesville, Virginia, opened in May 2013. The 33,000 square-foot building boasts a four-wall, white-ball glass showcourt with stadium seating for 50, bleachers for 250 and standing room for another 700. In addition,...
By James Zug Take yourself back to the 1961 National Singles. The men are playing at Penn. In the quarters Charlie Ufford faces his former Harvard classmate Dave Watts. They are old friends and former teammates. They play together in New York. Ufford has almost always won—he played No. 1 and Watts No. 2 when they were at Harvard—and Watts...

The Little Secret Game

By James Zug Earlier this summer, I went to my local club and got on the squash court with Richard Millman. An Englishman who has been coaching in the States for a quarter century, Millman is known for innovative, out-of-the-box thinking (he promotes the iMask, for instance). We played hard...
By James Zug Forty-one years ago John Beddington wrote a tiny paperback squash manual, Play Better Squash, which was published in London by Queen Anne Press (the publishing house that Ian Fleming ran; perhaps the reason there is no squash in the James Bond books or films is that Fleming...
By James Zug During the gala dinner at the biennial World Doubles tournament in Chicago, US Squash honored Paul M. Cussen with the United States Olympic Committee Volunteer Coach of the Year Award. Cussen started his involvement with MetroSquash as one of the program’s first volunteers soon after the program launched in 2005....
By James Zug Photos by Marian Kraus The MetroSquash Academic & Squash Center, the fourth stand-alone purpose-built urban squash youth enrichment facility in the U.S., opened this spring in Chicago. The certificate of occupancy was issued on April 1, 2015. It was exactly ten years to the day after MetroSquash had been...
By James Zug Brett Meyer and James Meyer, a father and son duo in New Zealand, are the Guinness Book of World Records holders for the longest squash singles match in history. They set the original record in 2008 at twenty-five hours, fifty-five minutes. In April 2015 the Meyers went...