NY Squash Legends: John Nimick & The Tournament of Champions

By Rob Dinerman
January, 2024

On January 3, 1924, the Metropolitan Squash Racquets Association (MSRA, now New York Squash) was founded as an unincorporated association by representatives of the University Club of New York, the Rockaway Hunting Club in Long Island and the Montclair Athletic Club in northern New Jersey, according to the 1933-34 MSRA Yearbook. Within the next two years, the Racquet & Tennis Club—which had hosted the first-ever intercollegiate match (in which Harvard defeated Yale 4-1) in February 1923—joined the association, as did the Harvard Club and the Princeton Club. Both back then and in current times, NY Squash’s primary function—as is true of all regional Associations throughout the United States—is to organize leagues, schedule regional and invitational tournaments among its member clubs, generally promote the sport and document and provide the results to the United States Squash Racquets Association (USSRA, now U.S. Squash).

Although these operational nuts-and-bolts are an important part of all regional Associations, each one is best known for events that, through a combination of tradition and reputation, become known as highlights of a given season. In the case of squash in New York, probably the most prominent of these is the annual holding of the Tournament of Champions every January on a four-glass-wall portable court in Grand Central Station. This tournament traces its squash lineage back to 1930, making it the oldest professional squash tournament in the world. The tournament—which underwent several name changes over the years—was held as a hardball event from its inception through the 1991 edition (when it was held downtown at the Winter Garden), following which Tournament Chair John Nimick switched it to a softball event beginning in 1992. It remained at the Winter Garden for each of the next two years before Nimick moved it to Grand Central Station in 1995.

After a stellar playing career—during which he won the Intercollegiate Individual championship as a Princeton senior in 1981 and ascended to as high as No. 2 on the World Pro Squash Association (WPSA) pro hardball tour, while achieving some excellent doubles results and representing the U.S. several times in the biennial World Team Championships as well—Nimick transitioned to a Tournament Promoter role in the early 1990’s. In deference to a massive renovation project encompassing the entire Grand Central Station complex that began soon after the 1995 tournament and lasted for several years, Nimick had to move the tournament to the Heights Casino Club in Brooklyn Heights in 1996, and the event wasn’t held at all in 1997 or 1998.

But in 1999, with the renovation complete, the Tournament of Champions (ToC)—augmented by the concomitantly-held Grand Open featuring as many as 18 skill-level competitive categories involving close to 300 amateur players—returned to Grand Central, and it has been held there every year since, other than an enforced one-year hiatus in 2021 due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Almost every ToC champion over the years—including the champions of the women’s tournament, which began in the early 2000’s—has also won either the World Open and/or the British Open—and some of the matches have been among the most memorable played in a given season.  

Ramy Ashour vs. James Willstrop: A Tournament of Champions Thriller

One of the latter—a semifinal between Ramy Ashour and James Willstrop in 2013—makes almost every squash aficionado’s list of the highest-quality matches ever played in this or any other arena. Willstrop's deadly execution (especially the late-in-the-swing wrist flicks on his forehand side) had enabled him to capture the 2010 ToC, was flawless through the first game and a half in taking a 1-0, 7-4 lead, while Ashour was a bit tinny and allowing Willstrop to dictate the play. But at 4-7 in the second game, Ashour nailed one of his trademark shots, a backhand overhead cross-drop, perfectly into the front-right nick, a spectacular stroke that jump-started a scintillating 7-1 game-ending run that lifted the entire match to a different level from that point onward.

There was a knife-like, slashing quality to Ashour's game, in terms of both his mobility and his stroke, which, combined with his cat-like grace and the creativity of an artist, can conjure up the kind of sheer brilliance that would have enabled him to dominate the action were it not for Willstrop’s equally praiseworthy production. The latter, though not as naturally gifted a mover as his younger Egyptian opponent, is nevertheless just as effective a retriever, and his uncanny ability to anticipate Ashour’s shot selection, perhaps abetted by the fact that this pair had met 19 times during the previous six years (including four times in the ToC), enabled him to not only get to many of Ashour’s would-be winners but often to counter-punch to telling effect as well.

The most fiercely-contested points of the night, fittingly, occurred in the last half-dozen points of the third and fourth games, both of which had to be resolved in tiebreakers. A late-game run by Ashour in the third earned him a 10-7 advantage, but Willstrop played three consecutive remarkable points, making some miraculous gets along the way and knotting the score at 10-all before Ashour caught a pair of consecutive nicks to salvage that game. He then managed to tortuously advance to 10-9, match ball, in the fourth, only to be stymied by a relentless Willstrop rally that netted him the three-straight points he needed to force a fifth game. At the end of some of the frantically-paced exchanges, one spectator would remark to the person next to him that “that was the best point of the night”—only to have the following point be even better!

The fifth game seesawed evenly along through the first half-dozen points, but by then both players had been performing at such a high level—especially in the heroic rallies each staged just as the match appeared to be turning irreparably against him—that one got the sense that, if either player would be able to wedge open a small lead, he would be home free. Ultimately it would prove to be Ashour who would conjure up the needed spurt, his five-point run from 3-all effectively sealing the outcome of the match, which actually ended somewhat anticlimactically when, with Ashour serving at 9-4, a spent Willstrop hit the return back at himself for a stroke call and then tinned a backhand drop shot. In his on-court interview just minutes after the final point, Ashour asserted that it had been “the most brutal match I think I have ever played.” It is almost certainly the case that Willstrop never played better in a match that he didn’t win.

Through most of the first three games of the final the following night between Ashour and 2009 ToC champion Greg Gaultier, Ashour appeared (understandably) depleted both physically and mentally from his incandescent semifinal performance, losing each of the first two games decisively and finding himself just two points from a straight-game defeat when the third seesawed to 10-all. Although Ashour had the word “Inspired” prominently emblazoned on the front of his shirt, his play was far from that through the first two games and most of the third as well. But at 10-all he came up with two winners to escape with that game, then from 6-3 in the fourth, he closed out the match (and the tournament) with an electrifying 17-1 surge. It was an emphatic ending to the ToC's 15th consecutive year at Grand Central Station, and a harbinger of the decade-plus that has followed, leading into the 2024 edition, when this tournament will be held for the 89th time since its founding in 1930.  

Rob Dinerman is a squash historian who was the Official Writer for the MSRA Yearbook from 1985-94 and has written nearly 20 books about squash, all of which are arrayed on the robdinerman.com home page. His next book, on the first 100 years of college squash (1923-2023), is scheduled to be released in February 2024.