Squash
A History of the Game
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- $22.99
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
The first comprehensive history of squash in the United States, Squash incorporates every aspect of this increasingly popular sport: men's and women's play, juniors and intercollegiates, singles and doubles, hardball and softball, amateurs and professionals.
Invented by English schoolboys in the 1850s, squash first came to the United States in 1884 when St. Paul's School in New Hampshire built four open-air courts. The game took hold in Philadelphia, where players founded the U.S. Squash Racquets Association in 1904, and became one of the primary pastimes of the nation's elite. Squash launched a U.S. Open in 1954, but its present boom started in the 1970s when commercial squash clubs took the sport public. In the 1980s a pro tour sprung up to offer tournaments on portable glass courts in dramatic locales such as the Winter Garden at the World Trade Center.
James Zug, with access to private archives and interviews with hundreds of players, describes the riveting moments and sweeping historical trends that have shaped the game. He focuses on the biographies of legendary squash personalities: Eleo Sears, the Boston Brahmin who swam in the cold Atlantic before matches; Hashim Khan, the impish founder of the Khan dynasty; Victor Niederhoffer, the son of a Brooklyn cop; and Mark Talbott, a Grateful Dead groupie who traveled the pro circuit sleeping in the back of his pickup. A gripping cultural history, Squash is the book for which all aficionados of this fast-paced, exciting game have been waiting.
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In this detailed account of a sport few Americans know much about, Zug, a former Dartmouth squash player and freelance writer, intersperses throughout his narrative elements of surprise with analogies and references to draw readers into this unfamiliar terrain. For instance, he begins by explaining that squash, known primarily as an elitist endeavor reserved for prep schoolers and yuppies, developed in London's Fleet Prison in the early 1800s. But Zug makes squash relevant by capturing an interesting parallel between the game and American social movements as he details squash's evolution from the pastime of America's most exclusive universities and clubs to the emergence of women on the American squash scene in the 1920s and America's fitness obsession in the late 1970s and '80s, which made the game accessible to the middle class and brought squash courts to every neighborhood YMCA from coast to coast. Furthermore, realizing that a sport is only as compelling as its champions, Zug presents colorful bios of the game's best and most eccentric players, including college dropout and Deadhead Mark Talbot, John McEnroe like Victor Niedhoffer (who retired in his prime to protest the sport's anti-Semitic stance in the 1960s) and Roshan Khan (from a famous squash family, his "lusty" lifestyle led Ted Kennedy to say he came from the "Irish part of Pakistan"). While only squash fanatics will find this detailed work a must read, Zug's passion for and knowledge of the game make this a unique addition to the library of sports histories.
