February 24, 2004

Causing a Racket in Grand Central Station

By Dan Ackman

New York -- Squash is a tough sell. There is little or no television coverage here, and even the thickest sports section rarely finds room for it. So, with little in the way of media to draw people to the sport, John Nimick has been bringing the sport to the people. This week, Mr. Nimick is staging the Tournament of Champions, a venerable event, in Grand Central Station.

Fans pack a 500-seat theater surrounding three of the glass walls of the portable court. The front wall, where the players hit the ball, is open to passersby through the station's Vanderbilt Hall. The tourney features the top seven players in the world, including Thierry Lincou (No. 1, from France), Amr Shabana (No. 5 and the current world champion, from Egypt) and Jonathon Power (a former champion of the event, from Canada).

Mr. Power, age 30, has won the event four of the past six years. Known as the John McEnroe of the sport -- both for his propensity to argue and his uncanny racket control -- the Montreal-based player says he feels right at home in Gotham, perhaps more so than other top players, most of whom reside in England or Holland.

This year, though, he is coming off a broken hand, and his ranking has fallen to No. 6 on the Pro Squash Association Tour. He won his first two matches to set up a showdown with Mr. Lincou, 27, in the quarterfinals. Mr. Lincou, meanwhile, is still looking for his first major tournament victory, and he nearly lost in the second round to unseeded Paul Price of Australia, losing the first two games of the best-of-five match before winning the last three. Meanwhile, Peter Nicol (No. 3, from England) will be looking to defend the title he won in New York last year.

As usual, there were no Americans among the 32 men who began vying for $60,000 in prize money on Saturday. Why, in an event held across the street from the Yale Club are there no Ivy Leaguers on hand to defend the nation's sporting honor? The reason is partly that the U.S. doesn't have much of a tradition in the sport, which was invented in England and exported by the British military. (While some squash folk claim rough origins for the sport, saying it started in a debtor's prison, "The Story of Squash," written by Rex Bellamy and published by Cassell in 1978, says squash -- or squash rackets -- was invented at Harrow, the elite boarding school. It is rackets, a predecessor game, that can be traced to London's Fleet Prison.)

But the main reason for the absence of Yanks is that while squash remains in the U.S. a sport played mostly in private clubs, nearly all the world's best players grew up playing on public courts. Indeed, the closest the U.S. came to having an entrant was when Yasser El Halaby, who plays for Princeton, and Patrick Chifunda, a teaching pro at Meadow Mill Athletic Club in Baltimore, made the draw as qualifiers. Mr. El Halaby is from Egypt and Mr. Chifunda is from Zambia.

Tour players eschew college and turn pro by their late teens; just 30 or so earn a middle-class keep, which they do by hustling from tournaments around the world to club leagues in England, Holland, Germany and France. Perhaps the top five earn six-figure incomes, including from sponsorships, according to Martin Bronstein, dean of the squash press, who writes for the Web site SquashTalk.com and other outlets.

The Tournament of Champions, the most important tourney in the U.S., is a key showcase for the players and the grace, quickness, accuracy and power that it takes to play squash at the highest level. Keeping the tourney going, though, is a struggle. The event lost its title sponsor after last year and signed Bear Stearns to the role only a month ago. (It is officially the Bear Stearns Tournament of Champions.) As a result, the tournament is no longer part of the so-called Super Series, the richest and most important events in determining world rankings.

Nevertheless, Mr. Nicol, pointing up to the hall's gilded chandeliers, calls it "absolutely the best tournament in the world" owing to the grandeur of its setting.

The final six of eight sessions, the last being on Thursday, have been sold out, despite a top ticket price of $130. And the hope is that exposing the game to the 120,000 people who pass by the court on a typical weekday will generate wider interest in the game.

Aubrey Rothrock, a Washington attorney and club player attending the event, said, "to see [squash] here with the masses is wonderful." But Cynthia Phillips, a Canadian living in Germany who was passing through Grand Central, was reserving judgment. "I'm of two minds," she said. "It gets people to see a bit of squash. On the other hand, to have a major championship in a train station -- it doesn't seem quite the place for it."

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Mr. Ackman, a senior columnist for Forbes.com, last wrote for the Journal about the World Freestyle Wrestling Championships.