Squash Magazine: Baset Ashfaq's Exit From Squash, page 4

Baset Ashfaq with his family who flew in from Pakistan to see him play—for the first time in his college career.

hy did Ashfaq explode? We had a long conversation after the incident and he didn't know for sure.

It was his last team match and he loved the team and was much more focused on winning a national team title than an individual one. If it had not been the clinching match, perhaps there would have been less emotion.

He was playing in front of his father, mother and two younger sisters. They had flown over that week (they had never been to the States before) and for the first time in his collegiate career they were watching him. His father had been a strong influence on him. Perhaps this put him on edge.

Moreover, all the taunting and yelling that he heard that afternoon, he was slightly unhappy that his family was having to listen to it. Over the years, fans had been chanting of “USA, USA,” and “Go back and bomb Osama Bin Laden” and “Terrorist” and “Al Qaeda.” They had booed when he asked for a let. This was standard fare at collegiate matches these days (such harassing in Hanover at the Dartmouth v. Harvard match made headlines this winter). He had heard all that at matches before but he hadn't heard anything like that with his mother and sisters and father present.

No doubt some of it came from the fact that he was exhausted by the expectations: being the No. 1 of the No. 1 fifty times is tough. He was aware of the history that awaited him. Another tight match won—it was cathartic and he wanted to yell.

He yelled also because he doesn't like squash. In that gentle way of many parents, his father encouraged him to play squash—cricket was his first love—and unlike the majority of the elite collegiate players in the past decade, he is not planning to play professional squash on the PSA tour. He is going to New York to work at Barclays Bank. In fact, he tells me that he might not pick up a racquet at all again—”they are locked up now,” he says. He might eventually join a club in New York, but squash is something that he will leave behind once his college career is finished.

Chan also provoked him. I watched their match in the Trinity v. Yale dual match in January at Payne Whitney. It was nothing out of the ordinary. Ashfaq chopped him up 11-2, 12-10, 11-5. But when Chan got off court, he commented loudly, “That guy's got the biggest ass I've ever since.” Then three or four players overhead Chan claiming that if he had won the third game, the match would have been his. People came up after to Ashfaq, asking him, “were you tired in the third? Was it a struggle?” It was so absurd, Ashfaq dismissed it.

Baset Stretches

At the nationals, there was more silliness. In the second game at the nationals, with the score at 2-2, Chan briefly taunted Ashfaq after winning a point, coming up to his face and yelling. Throughout the match, when Ashfaq would tin, he would sometimes audibly moan, “No,” and Chan would then reply, “Yes.” “It was disrespectful,” Ashfaq told me. “No one had ever disrespected me like that, ever. Maurico, Sid, Harrity—these were tough matches, but they always played with class.”

Yet, what Ashfaq did after the match was bad sportsmanship and he made the right decision in stepping down from the intercollegiates. “It was very disappointing,” he says. “I am not going to try to defend my actions. It was such a pity it ended that way and I am truly sorry. It was the heat of the moment.”

But the oversized reaction says a lot—about the people who verbally sprayed him with obscenities after the match, about the hundreds of people who condemned him in chat rooms and blogs and comment spaces. Would we have felt this way if this had been a couple of preppy St. Grottlesex boys? Was this insane reaction derived in part subconsciously, because he was non-white, from a country where the U.S. is fighting a war?

Flagrantly bad sportsmanship occurred elsewhere this season: there was some serious pushing and shoving—perhaps a punch thrown?—in one of the Yale v. Harvard matches at their dual match. Two Ivy coaches got into each other's grills and yelled at another dual match. And collegiate athletics is a blood sport. Ten days after the Ashfaq incident, a Baylor basketball player punched a Texas Tech player in the face and broke a nose. And they were women.

Is this a surprise? Today all sorts of athletes and fans behave much worse than Ashfaq did and they do it on television and in front of audiences of thousands. That doesn't make it acceptable, just more understandable.

Interestingly, it doesn't have to be this way. The College Squash Association doesn't have a usable discipline system like they do in intercollegiate tennis, where warnings, points, game and match penalties are regularly assessed. Many observers, Yale's coach Dave Talbott in particular, long lamented the fact that the sportsmanship was so awful in the mid-1990s that the CSA had to resort to having referees for matches. Previous to that, when the players had to police themselves, by and large they behaved well. Now they pour vitriol on the refs (their teammates and opponent's teammates, unless it is the nationals when there are adult refs), fling racquets, moan and curse. Perhaps the CSA should adopt what they do in tennis and have a roving umpire at dual matches who can do what coaches and players are not comfortable doing and actually apply penalties to poorly behaved players (or fans)?

n the meantime, a man's life has irrevocably changed. He lost his chance at squash history. His fifteen seconds of bad behavior is now imprinted in the minds of millions; with the Internet, fifteen-minutes of infamy is now permanent. He has received hate email. For a while he was worried about getting suspended or expelled from school.

Afterwards, he did the right thing. Minutes after the incident at the trophy ceremony, he apologized to the Yale team, Chan and the crowd. He then shook hands with the entire Eli squad, including Chan. The next day he decided to email a letter to all sixty-three CSA men's team coaches which was forwarded to every one of their players: “For the last four years I have worked so very hard to be a perfect representative of the college game. I have won 6 championships, been a scholar athlete and have always tried to keep my contribution to our game positive. Yesterday in the heat of the moment with some of the contributing factors I lost my composure, and sadly it is being played out in a multitude of venues. Baset and Assaiante

This is heartbreaking for me, as I have never seen myself in that light, and I am saddened to have to see over and over. I am a college student just like you. I am human and I hope to learn from this experience so that I can be a better man in the future. When you think of me as I leave college please try to remember my body of work and not just the last 15 seconds.” And he voluntarily stepped down from the intercollegiates, allowing Colin West to win a title that probably would have been his.

Now perhaps the greatest player in intercollegiate history is walking away from the game without the applause he deserved. Again and again, Paul Assaiante said that this was a teachable moment. It has been for Baset Ashfaq. The question is whether it has been for the rest of intercollegiate squash.
Trinity Team 12