Last week the men's professional squash tour arrived in Denver. A half-dozen of the best players in the country competed this past weekend at the Denver Athletic Club. Most of them will go at it again on April 12-15, in the Berger Funds Squash Championship at the Evergreen Racquet and Fitness Club. Between matches, they will bunk with friends and sympathetic local pros. A handful of restaurants have agreed to donate meal vouchers to help out.
The total prize money at stake for these elite athletes over the two weeks is about $10,000. The winner of each tournament stands to earn a modest $1,400. That's typical. When all of the prize money in all of the world's squash tournaments last year was added together, professional players competed for purses worth a total of $2 million -- the same amount of money that Alex Rodriguez will earn playing shortstop in seven baseball games.
"I play in about thirty to forty tournaments a year, and it's still impossible to make a living at this without doing something else -- teaching or coaching," says Preston Quick, a Lakewood native who is currently ranked third in the country. "It's kind of like being a ski bum."
That's not the image of squash in this country, of course. Envision velvet-lawned country clubs and swell, blue-oxford chaps named Beau, Chad and Chip, and you wouldn't be too far off. "It's definitely the stereotype," agrees Tim Wyant, a recent Harvard grad who moves between No. 2 and No. 4 in the U.S ranking. "And," he adds, "a fairly accurate one."
That's too bad, because of all the racquet sports, squash practiced at its upper reaches is the most elegant, the most beautifully rhythmic and the most demanding of its players. Racquetball, the game's unruly American cousin, is all aggression and noise and rowdiness. Squash is smooth geometry and deliberation, a calculated struggle of attrition -- billiards to racquetball's eight ball, chess to its checkers.
Yet the game is far from effete. A hard-fought match can be more physically punishing than a four-set tennis final. One of the game's all-time greats, the Pakistani Hashim Khan, who built his game and lungs three-quarters of a century ago chasing balls for British military players stationed in the subcontinent (and who now lives in Denver), is considered by many people to have been the greatest athlete ever -- in any sport.
Still, the game's blue-blood pedigree hasn't played well in America, whose finest athletes tend to emerge from cornfields and steel towns and inner cities. Finding a public squash facility in this country is about as easy as finding a blacks-only golf course. "There's one in Newport, Rhode Island, another in Pennsylvania, one in Baltimore and one in Dayton, Ohio," says United States Squash Racquets Association executive director Craig Brand, thinking hard.
The game's elitism has kept it down even among its own. At the collegiate level, the best squash is played at all the predictable places: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Brown, Williams. So when the final strains of "Pomp and Circumstance" are absorbed into the ivy, where is the new grad likely to go? Directly to the hottest Wall Street brokerage, or economy class to some health club across the country to spend a weekend competing for $1,400? Last year, Peter Yik, one of the country's best squash prospects, graduated from Princeton and immediately went to work for Lehman Brothers. He reportedly hasn't picked up a racquet since.
The result is not so hard to predict. At the moment, the top-rated American in the world, Jason Jewell, is ranked 82nd, a country mile behind a bevy of hungry Brits, Aussies, Scots, Egyptians, Welsh and Pakistanis. Exactly six U.S. men occupy the ranks of the world's top 175 players.
It's not all the athletes' fault. Much of the blame for U.S. inferiority in squash began a century ago and lies squarely with a do-gooder headmaster who ended up cursing a half-dozen generations of athletes. James Conover, of St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, saw his first game of squash in 1882, while he was traveling through Montreal. Convinced the activity would be a fine way for his boys to tune mind and body, Conover imported the game to St. Paul's. He was particularly impressed by the safe diameters of the game. "Fewer heads are cracked and fewer knees and elbows barked; the danger from being hit by the ball (quite an item among young players) is cancelled," he wrote in an early newsletter.
Conover was not shy about tinkering with the new sport, though. Heated courts were several decades away, and the frigid North Atlantic air conspired to keep the traditional squash ball low and sluggish. The headmaster eventually determined that a hard ball, rather than the squishy, pliable egg of soft rubber used in the rest of the world, worked better in New England, and so a subtle change was made.
Naturally, the new ball changed the angles and the pace of the game, so the court's dimensions had to adjust, too. After experimenting with several sizes, in 1924 the United States officially adopted a court eighteen and a half feet wide and 32 feet long--nearly three feet narrower than other courts in the world. The tin, the squash equivalent of a tennis net, was also lowered, from the world standard of nineteen inches to seventeen.
For the next century or so, Americans blissfully played their own brand of squash, similar but different, while the rest of the world pounded a softer ball on larger courts. "We spent decades playing the wrong game," says Karen Kelso, a former nationally ranked player and Evergreen's current club pro. Not surprisingly, when it came to international competitions, we lost a lot.
A few years ago, a new generation of American squash players fatigued by loss finally wised up to the disproportion. By the mid-1990s, all of the important amateur and pro tournaments had at last converted to international standards. Today, about 80 percent of squash balls bought in this country are soft; most courts have been widened to match the dimensions of those in the rest of the world.
Already the change is starting to pay dividends. In 1996, at the World Junior Men's Squash Championships in Cairo, the U.S. team finished a respectable fifteenth -- its best performance ever. And this past winter, in the space of three remarkable weeks, Michelle Quibell, an American under-seventeen player hailing from Atlanta, won her division in both the Scottish and British Junior opens -- each of the victories a first for an American.
The finals of the 22nd annual Hashim Khan Squash Championships took place on Sunday morning at the Denver Athletic Club. On paper, the match had the makings of a classic. Richard Chin, 31, has been the number-one-ranked U.S. player on and off for the past couple of years. (He doesn't play many international tournaments and so does not appear in the top world rankings.) He was facing Wyant.
While similar in physique, the two men have drastically different styles of play. Chin is a strong offensive player, a shotmaker who lives and dies with his racquet skills. He frequently chokes up on his racquet and often uses half-strokes and blocks to direct delicate drop shots just beyond his opponent's reach. Wyant, on the other hand, has fluid, classic strokes. He is a chaser, a player who relies on his superior conditioning and athletic skills to wear down an adversary.
But on Sunday, Wyant was not at his best. Unlike Chin, who had breezed through his semi-final match the day before, Wyant and Preston Quick had fought a grueling duel on Saturday. The first game alone, which went into overtime, took almost half an hour. Wyant finally prevailed, but the win seemed to take a toll on his stamina.
As a result, Sunday's final was underwhelming. Chin took the first game easily, 9-3. Off-balance, Wyant began trying to take the offensive more often. But the aggressive approach doesn't suit his style, and he lost the second game 9-1. In the third, Chin quickly went up 4-0. Although Wyant fought back to tie at 5-5, Chin regrouped and won easily, 9-6. In all, the match took barely forty minutes. Within hours of his victory, Chin was on a plane, flying out of Denver.
