It's the talk of the Brooks Brothers fitting rooms: The Super Bowl of squash is coming to Boston.
About a year ago, US Squash, the governing body of the world's most elite sport - backgammon with rackets, I call it - moved the US Open tournament from Boston down to New York. "It was primarily a business decision," explains board chairman Jeanne Blasberg. "There were promoters in New York who offered a much better financial package." That euchred Brookline promoter John Nimick, the guy who built the temporary squash court inside Symphony Hall a couple of years ago. He suddenly had no action in New England, Ground Zero for the game.
Now Nimick has cooked up the Players Cup, a five-city squash tour that winds up here March 4-7. (There is a website: playerscupsquash.com.) To qualify for the Boston tournament, pro players have to rack up points in other North American cities like Portland, Ore., and Richmond, for the privilege of coming to Boston. The draw? The largest squash payday in history: $25,000 to the winner. Tournament sponsors in Saudi Arabia and Qatar had offered the previous high purses of around $19,000.
Should you attend? Forewarned is forearmed: Squash is not a great spectator sport. It's like a clay-court tennis tournament, with endless rallies. You might think of bringing a book, specifically Ian McEwan's "Saturday," with its chapter-long fictional squash scene that is 20 times more interesting than any game I've ever watched. Squash also has the "Pete Sampras problem" that bedeviled pro tennis in the 1990s: The stars are boring automatons. The roly-poly Pakistani Khan family, the fanatical Harvard-star-turned-hedge-fund-manager Victor Niederhoffer, and the outlaw antics of do-rag-clad Canadian star Jonathon Power are no more.
Poppycock, says Nimick, who insists that the world's top two players, Egyptians Ramy Ashour and Amr Shabana, guarantee sizzling box office. (Another marketing problem for US audiences: The highest-ranking American player, former Yale star Julian Illingworth, is No. 38 in the world.)
"Wait until you see Ramy play Shabana," Nimick says. "It's like a cobra and a mongoose, it's all about offense. It's a wonderful new era for the game."
He has plenty of regalia from the real denizens of Area 51: the Stealth aircraft test squadrons; the "Red Hats," who used to fly Soviet MiGs in combat exercises against American fighters; the Electronic Warfare Directorate, and so on. There is a patch featuring a menacing, dark panther with bright yellow claws that has a local provenance: "Panther Den is a Special Access Program (SAP) based at Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts," Paglen writes. "Managed by the Big Safari project office, Panther Den is charged with overseeing classified information warfare projects."
"Even if I did have details on this program, which I don't, I wouldn't be able to talk about it," says Hanscom public affairs officer Kevin Gilmartin, who asked: "A shoulder patch? Why would people be walking around with a shoulder patch for a secret project?"
"That's a good question," says Paglen. "But it's not like they wear these insignia out in public. They can wear them on base, at the bowling alley, for instance. It's like being in a secret society when you're a child. The fun part was advertising that you had a secret society."
All you kids at Boston Latin and the Latin Academy - you may have a future in secret projects! Almost every patch has a Latin phrase at the bottom, e.g. Semper en Obscurus, or "Always in the Dark," the motto of the Air Force's Special Projects Office. Here is my favorite, which Paglen claims is the motto of the Air Force's Rapid Capabilities Office: Opus Dei Cum Pecunia Alienum Efficemus, or "Doing God's Work with Other People's Money."
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
