2023 Milestones

by James Zug Deaths Eric C. Fast Eric Fast died in July at the age of seventy-four. He served on the board of US Squash from 2004-2010 and later the founding chair of the board of the College Squash Association. He was awarded the President’s Cup in 2010. Purdy C. Jordan Purdy Jordan died...
Outside The Glass · Ep.95 Nathan Clarke
Western Lane By Chetna Maroo (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2023) by James Zug Chetna Maroo’s debut novel—short and tight, at 150-pages it is really a novella—is set in the 1980s in Luton, a town north of London, and revolves around a Gujarati Indian immigrant family. The mother has just died, and the father...
Steve Line tells the stories behind some of his most famous images, including Awad v. Jahangir in 1982, Jahangir in 1988 and Willstrop & Matthew in 2009. Outside The Glass · Ep.90 Steve Line—Classic Photographs
by James Zug When I was working at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, a lot of fellow journalists asked why I was there, since the U.S. was not competing. It was an easy answer. The Commonwealth Games are far and away squash’s biggest moment. Every four years the Games expose...

Book Review: BIG DATA

One of the benefits of the U.S. Open arriving at Drexel University in 2011 has been a myriad of interactions between the squash community and Drexel professors. Eric Zillmer and Nyree Dardarian are two great examples of the integration. As Drexel’s athletic director and a neuroscience professor, Zillmer played a...
By James Zug Twenty-five years ago, the cover of Squash News, our predecessor magazine, featured fifty-three young athletes. That February 1996 issue was historic. It not only contained what is thought to be the most players ever collectively pictured on the cover of a squash magazine—in a masterful photograph by...
For forty years, the DeRoy Testamentary Foundation has partnered with the game of squash. The roots of the relationship came in 1978, after the death of Helen DeRoy. She and her husband Aaron DeRoy owned successful car dealerships in Michigan and been major philanthropic leaders in Detroit.  Since its founding,...
Lucky: Anil Nayar’s Story—A Portrait of a Legendary Squash Champion By Jean Nayar (New York: Five Rivers Press, 2020). By James Zug Lucky is the biography of one of the top amateurs of the twentieth century. Anil Nayar and his wife Jean Nayar have put together a fascinating story of a great champion...
Forty years ago, in March 1980, a half dozen enterprising, young women flew to Sweden for the first-ever World Junior Championships: Patrice McConnell Cormwell, Kat Castle Grant, Karen Kelso, Alicia McConnell, Diana Staley and coach Carol Weymuller. The tournament was played in Kungalv, a small village north of Gothenburg....