Squash Magazine: Baset Ashfaq's Exit From Squash, page 3

The Trinity team with Coach Assaiante before taking on Yale in the National Championship match.

s a junior, Ashfaq endured three titanic encounters with Sanchez, battles a la Frazier v. Ali. In the dual match, he lost 9-7, 9-5, 6-9, 9-10, 9-2. It was a good match, but Maurico was just the better, more forceful player. Trinity won the dual match 5-4, but it was 5-3 going into the final two games of the Ashfaq v. Sanchez match, so there was less tension in the fifth.

Eight days later Trinity and Princeton were in a terrific, six-hour showdown, perhaps the greatest collegiate squash match in history. In two matches, Princeton came within a couple of points of clinching a fifth win and the dual-match victory. It went to 4-4. Then Sanchez, down 2-1, went up 5-0 in the fourth. Ashfaq bounced back to 5-2 and then Sanchez stepped on the pedal and cruised to 9-2 in an eleven-minute game. In the fifth, he dashed to a 5-0 lead again. Ashfaq had lost nine points in a row and had just scored two in the face of Sanchez's fourteen. It was a meltdown of epic proportions.

There is some disagreement over whether Ashfaq knew that the dual-match was at 4-4. Both Paul Assaiante, head coach, and his assistant, James Montano, recall telling him after the fourth game that they needed him to win. Ashfaq tells me that he misheard them and thought Trinity had already clinched at 5-3 and that only at the awards ceremony did he learn that it had been 4-4. When he won his match at the nationals his freshman year, everyone stormed the court (Trinity had won 9-0), so he thought the wild celebration was just for the end of the season. “I honestly thought it was the same,” he says. “I still wanted to win. I thought, 'It's Maurico's last game, his senior year and I don't want to be beaten twice on his home court.'”

Either way, he made one of the most storied comebacks in college squash history. Down 0-5 in the fifth, he won three points in eighty seconds, then four more. The match got becalmed at 7-5, with errors, lets and more lets. Serving, Ashfaq smacked a rail that clung to the wall. At match point, he hit only crosscourts and passed Sanchez on a well-angled volley.

A week later he took his second straight intercollegiate title. Again, it was Maurico Sanchez in the finals. Again, it went to five games: 9-6, 9-10, 9-4, 5-9, 9-3.

his past season, he went undefeated, taking his career record to 55-2, which is pretty good for a No. 1 player. His toughest match was against Princeton's freshman, Todd Harrity, in the dual match: 4-11, 11-9, 4-11, 11-7, 11-9. When he faced Harrity a week later, he put him away with a whoompingly brutal three games.

With the team winning the nationals at Yale, Ashfaq was headed towards a seventh national collegiate title, which only one other person has ever reached. In discussing the best collegiate player ever, you might drill down into the data. How many titles did he win? Did he play No. 1 on the No. 1 team—a target on the target of everyone else? What was his record in dual matches? Did he lead? Did he come through in the clutch?

To many observers, Kenton Jernigan is the greatest of all time. Yes, Jernigan went 42-0 in dual matches, which is the best percentage ever for a guy playing No. 1 all four years. But his Harvard teams were so much better than everyone else (the closest dual match they had was 7-2) that the pressure was not nearly as fierce as it was for Trinity: in Ashfaq's career he led them through three 5-4 nailbiters, including the famous one he saved last February.

This made it all the more tragic when he came off the court at Payne Whitney.

shfaq is unfailingly polite. He has a luminescent smile. The first time he meets any adult, he calls them “Mr.” or “Mrs.” When he was introduced to Preston Quick, who graduated from Trinity just ten years ago, he said, “Nice to meet you, Mr. Quick.” He is a heroic sleeper and can rack over a dozen hours at a clip. He loves ice cream. He'll have it on pancakes for breakfast. He is forgetful. He loses his sweats. He loses his glasses (he wears contacts on the court).

He is definitely not the most talented player on the Trinity team. He was not gifted with great genetics. He's just too tall and too big. He has had injuries: as a freshman he had shin splints and then a week before the team nationals sprained his right ankle and wore a boot all week. He hurt his wrist a year later. He also endured a socially difficult disease. It was an unusual skin condition called non-segmental vitiligo. A few years ago parts of his knees, hands and eyes started to lose their pigmentation. The pale pink patches spread so that both his kneecaps were almost completely pink and his eyesockets gave him a slightly raccoon-ish look. His father has it too.

He is the hardest worker on a squad bursting with training addicts. He practiced for hours. He was a co-captain, along with Supreet Singh, and talked every morning on the telephone with Assaiante, plotting and discussing the team. He has a 3.5 average, majoring in economics. He is probably the most well-known person on Trinity's campus.

o one saw it coming. “In life the dots connect,” Assaiante said. “What happened, I just didn't see coming. The dots didn't connect. It was just an abhorrent moment of loss of composure. I just didn't see any way that that would happen and when it was on top of us, we were just in the middle of damage control. I love this boy.”

The story went viral. Once the video of the match reached ESPN, it went onto YouTube and reached millions instantly in a way that poor behavior in the past never did. People commented. People commented on the comments on people's comments. It reached local news broadcasts, newspapers, radio. It snowballed. At one point Trinity was receiving a hundred emails an hour about it. In the first sixty hours after the incident, Assaiante got more than five hundred emails from people he didn't know. Three weeks later he was still getting twenty-five a day. Assaiante and Dave Talbott went onto ESPN. USA Today ran stories. It was national news.

For about five hours on the Friday night after the incident, there were just four items on the ESPN crawl at the bottom of the screen: one about Tiger Woods, another about Lindsay Vonn, a third about the USA hockey team and a fourth simply saying “Baset Chaudhry withdraws from singles championship.” That was it. He had become such a household name that ESPN assumed its viewers knew who he was.

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