Capital New York

If you passed through Grand Central Terminal this week, you probably heard a thwack … thwack … thwack-thwack-thwack echoing from Vanderbilt Hall. And if you followed the noise up the ramp from the central terminal area, you would have come upon a giant blue-and-green glass cube.

Outside the cube would have been grandstands filled with tidily dressed professionals and clusters of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and British expats. Inside, you would have seen two lean and sweaty athletes chasing after a tiny rubber ball with racquets.

This week, as it has been every winter for the past 15 years, Grand Central was host to what is currently called the J.P. Morgan Tournament of Champions (the "ToC" to squash aficionados), one of nine main events that make up the heart of the Professional Squash Association’s men’s world tour. A fledgling women’s draw was added this year, and when all was said and done 32 men and 16 women took turns facing off in the cube, with two—Englishman Nick Matthew and Dutch-Australian Natalie Grinham—ultimately emerging as the champions in last night’s finals.

In the world of racquet sports, if tennis is a waltz—with long, graceful strides and swooping strokes—then squash is a tango, full of rapid-fire stops and starts made with flourishes of fancy footwork at extremely close quarters. (To extend the analogy, racquetball would be line-dancing—fun if you’ve never danced before.)

Squash is a sport with a broad international appeal, and little American depth in the pro ranks. There were three Americans in this year’s ToC, one man and two women, all eliminated in the early rounds. The stars of the game are predominantly Egyptian and English, with a few Malaysians, Pakistanis, Australians, and continental Europeans thrown in. This year’s breakout player was a diminutive, incredibly speedy Colombian named Miguel Angel Rodriguez, who came out of the qualifying rounds to upset one Egyptian master and nearly beat another.

Part of the sport’s appeal is that it makes ordinary players feel skillful (simply striking the ball can be enormously satisfying) and exceptional players look like gods. Matthew and his opponent in the finals, fellow Yorkshireman James Willstrop, ran around the court relentlessly for over an hour, retrieving balls any mortal would have given up on and hitting shots that belonged in advanced geometry textbooks. Over and over, the 500 or so spectators who were there for the final actually, audibly, gasped.

Fan interest in the U.S. consists mainly of recreational players from the Mitt Romney demographic who play at private clubs clustered in the northeast. Tickets to the later rounds of the ToC can cost as much as those to a Broadway show, but because of the way the court is configured, passersby can stand next to the front wall and get arguably the best view in the house (and definitely the closest) for free.

The group at the front wall makes up the tournament’s most diverse viewership. On semifinals night three scruffy-looking Canadians (“We came all the way from Vancouver to see this!”) jockeyed for position with a cluster of Indian men in suits who said they had occupied the same spot every year for the past decade. Behind them a couple maintained a running commentary in what sounded like Turkish. Behind them a gap-toothed homeless woman asked, “Is it an Englishman or an Egyptian winning this time?”

After the conclusion of that night’s play, Donna Urquhart lingered outside the giant glass cube, looking every bit the 25-year-old small-town Aussie girl, half a world away from home, and delighted to be there. The 15th-ranked player on the women’s tour, she had lost the previous night in a bitterly contested match to the tournament’s eventual runner-up, 20-year-old Indian Dipika Pallikal. But that was yesterday.

“Dipika’s really one of my best mates on the tour,” she said now. “We’re rooming together here in New York.”

Urquhart went on to explain that she had grown up in a bygone era when squash was a major sport in Australia. (Over the past decade many of the courts have closed.) “I started playing when I was six or seven. My mum was the champion of our town. There were probably only two or three other players, but still I was impressed!”

The following day, as the onlookers from the grandstand headed back to their office jobs, Urquhart would be jetting off to the Cleveland Classic, a major women’s tournament with total prize money of $50,000—nearly twice the payday of the ToC. With almost all of the top women’s players there, she’d have to work her way through the qualifying rounds.

“I’m going to play Misaki Kobayashi from Japan,” she said. “She’s been playing really well.”