3030 5.8.225.8.22
AMANDA SOBHY took the court for her fi rst
match at the Windy City Open on a snowy Thurs-
day evening in late February. The $500,000
tournament, one of the richest events in pro
squash, was being held at the University Club
of Chicago, around the corner from Grant
Park; a portable glass-walled court had been
set up on the ninth fl oor, in a room known
as Cathedral Hall, a space that called to mind a
medieval church. Despite the weather, 100 or so spec-
tators had come out to watch. A few days later, the tennis legend Billie Jean
King would attend the semifi nals and fi nals.
Sobhy, the fi rst American-born player to crack the world’s Top 10 in squash,
arrived in Chicago ranked fourth. Her opponent on this night was a fellow
lefthander, Canada’s Hollie Naughton. The 5-foot-8 Sobhy is an aggressive
player — she pounds her forehands and backhands, volleys as often as she
can and seldom hesitates to go for winners. She also has an almost preter-
natural ability to anticipate where the other player is likely to hit the ball. Her
game can be smothering, and she dispatched Naughton 11-5, 11-6 and 11-2
in a mere 29 minutes. Along the way, she showed fl ashes of the humor and
pugnacity that have made her one of squash’s more forceful personalities.
‘‘Were you watching?’’ she sarcastically asked the referee while disputing a
call, a comment that elicited laughter in the bleachers. ‘‘I love performing,
grinding it out, putting on a show,’’ she told the crowd after the match.
Sobhy, a Long Island native, has carried the hopes of American squash for
more than a decade, ever since she won the world junior championship in
- By her own admission, it has been a heavy burden at times because of
the peculiar history of squash in the United States. Starting around 1993, the
year Sobhy was born, Americans gave up their version of the game, called
hardball, and adopted the version played by most of the rest of the world,
which was referred to as softball. The diff erences were partly self-explana-
tory — one ball was harder than the other — but softball also used a wider
court. From an infrastructure standpoint, converting to softball was a huge
and costly endeavor. But a bigger challenge was becoming competitive at it.
Sobhy had one critical advantage over other American kids when she
took up squash: Her father, Khaled, had played professionally in his native
Egypt and had a deep understanding of softball. He coached all three of his
children, and two of them became pros: Amanda’s younger sister, Sabrina,
is currently ranked 23rd. Khaled Sobhy has been called the Richard Williams
of squash, and the comparison is not unwarranted: Like Williams, Khaled
was a headstrong fi gure determined to produce champions and at no small
sacrifi ce for all involved.
Amanda went undefeated over four seasons at Harvard, and a little more
than a year after graduating, in 2015, she was ranked sixth in the world.
But her career has not been without setbacks. In 2017, she tore an Achilles’
tendon, which sidelined her for months. More recently, she revealed that
she had battled an eating disorder for much of the previous decade, which
was at least partly connected to the pressure she felt as the standard-bearer
for American squash. She says she has recovered, and in April last year, she
entered the Top 5.
Sobhy, along with her sister, is part of a quartet of highly ranked Amer-
ican women. Olivia Fiechter is 11th, Olivia Clyne 17th. On the women’s
side, at least, the United States has fi nally become a power in squash.
(The American men are progressing, too, albeit not quite as quickly: The
highest-ranked American man, Todd Harrity, is No. 36.) If the 28-year-old
Sobhy can get to No. 1, it will be an epochal achievement for American
squash. But the personal dimension is even stronger. ‘‘I want to do it for
myself because I know how much I’ve overcome,’’ she says.
To reach the top, however, she will have to fi nd a way past the three
Egyptian women ranked ahead of her. Egyptians have dominated men’s
and women’s squash in recent years, with a freewheeling style — lots of
clever shots, abundant use of angles and deception — that has done much
to change how the game is played (while also making it more entertaining).
Sobhy has the same quick-strike attitude as the Egyptians; the question is
whether she can execute it well enough on a sustained basis to eclipse them.
She had an opportunity to take a step in that direction at the J.P. Morgan
Tournament of Champions in New York in early May. Now an even bigger
one awaits: The world championships get underway on May 13 in Cairo. On
the back of Egypt’s success, the city has become squash’s de facto capital and
hosts several prestigious tournaments. But Sobhy has yet to win one of these
and has made a fi nal only once. She fi nds it hard to produce her best squash
in Cairo, a problem that seems rooted, to some extent, in her complicated
relationship with her father. ‘‘I am Khaled Sobhy’s daughter there,’’ she says.
‘‘I’m kind of a little branch entity of him, which I don’t really like.’’ Playing in
Cairo also highlights her complex identity as an athlete: She’s an American
superstar, but she’s also the daughter of an Egyptian, trying to break the
Egyptian grip over her sport. She concedes that it can be disorienting. ‘‘I
don’t know who I am when I am there,’’ she says.IN HIS 1926 BOOK, ‘‘The Game of Squash Rack-
ets,’’ Charles Arnold, a prominent coach and
player at the time, observed with typical British
understatement that ‘‘the ball is a very vexed
question in squash.’’ Although the sport was
invented in England nearly a century earlier,
the British had not yet settled on a standard
ball. Players in the United States, meanwhile,
were using a diff erent ball entirely; it was fi rmer
and livelier than the ones the British were using. The
upshot was that Americans ended up playing a game called hardball on a
court that was 18.5-feet wide, while the British and others played what came
to be known as softball, using a 21-foot-wide court.
Hardball and softball coexisted for decades. American players made
occasional forays onto the softball tour, losing quite badly most of the time.
By contrast, softballers seemed to have little diffi culty picking up hardball.
In the mid-1980s, Pakistan’s Jahangir Khan, the No. 1 ranked men’s softball
player, entered 15 hardball tournaments and won 13 of them. By the early
1990s, there was a growing consensus in the United States that softball
wasn’t just more physically demanding but also required more skill. This,
coupled with the hope — still unrealized — that squash would become an
Olympic sport, led to hardball’s demise.
In the years following the transition to softball, a couple of American
players fared well: Latasha Khan got to No. 18 in the world in 2000 and
Julian Illingworth to No. 24 in 2012. Most, though, struggled to master the
intricacies of softball. What laid the groundwork for the coming-of-age
that American squash is currently in the midst of was an infl ux of foreign
players and coaches. In the mid-1990s, Trinity College in Connecticut began
recruiting from places like England and India. Paul Assaiante, Trinity’s coach
then and now, says there was resentment among people who believed that
roster spots should be reserved for Americans. ‘‘We got beat up,’’ he recalls.
But the imports paid off : From 1999 to 2012, the Trinity men’s squash
team won 13 consecutive intercollegiate championships and 252 straight
matches, the longest undefeated streak in college sports history. To keep
up with Trinity, other schools started bringing in players from overseas.
Assaiante, who also served as the United States national coach for many
years, says that what was good for Trinity was ultimately good for American
squash: The foreign recruits forced Americans to improve their play. ‘‘We
blew up the country club,’’ Assaiante says with a laugh.
Even so, squash was still seen as a useful sport for athletes with Ivy League
aspirations, and well-to-do American parents were willing to spend what-
ever it took to turn their children into prospects. This created a lucrative
market for foreign coaches, among them quite a few who had been top
players. Pro squash is not especially remunerative — the winner’s purse at
the Windy City Open was $35,720, which is considered a good payday — and