By James Zug
Photos by Dick Druckman
| |
| 
Baset Ashfaq (L) and Yale's Kenny Chan |
pon clinching a 11-6, 11-6, 11-4 win in his match against Yale, Baset Ashfaq stooped down and for three or four seconds yelled at Kenny Chan. He left the court, without shaking Chan’s hand, and hugged some teammates and his parents. It was the clinching fifth match in the finals of the nationals. The senior co-captain had just secured Trinity’s twelfth straight national title and 224th consecutive win.
Seeing Chan exiting the court behind him, Ashfaq turned and bumped him back into the court. Immediately, his teammates and supporters, led by Simba Muhwati, a 2009 graduate, jumped in between him and Chan. The celebration quickly moved away from the court’s door and Chan soon exited.
The whole incident lasted about fifteen seconds, including the elapsed time of hugging and celebrating.
It almost ruined Ashfaq’s life.
aset Ashfaq Chaudhry was the most celebrated recruit in the history of American intercollegiate squash. He was misunderstood from the start. His surname is Ashfaq; Chaudhry is a ceremonial clan name and never used. Yet, in the American way, no one ever asked him what he preferred his name to be for the historical record and Chaudhry was incorrectly added.
Ashfaq grew up in Lahore. His father is a merchant: he has imported chemicals for the textile industry and now runs plastic factories. Ashfaq played squash at the Punjab Sports Complex. When he was eighteen, Ashfaq won the 2003 Asian junior championships and then played No. 4 on the Pakistani boys team that won the 2004 world junior team championship. In January 2005 he captured the British Junior Open to claim the Drysdale Cup, squash’s oldest junior title. He finished high school just before the British Junior Open triumph, and upon his return to Pakistan he started playing the pro tour. For a year and a half he gave it a go, traveling to India, Malaysia and Egypt for tournaments. He was taking university-level courses and living at home. In June 2006 he was ranked sixty-first in the world.
No Drysdale Cup winner had ever played American collegiate squash, except Anil Nayar at Harvard in the 1960s. (Marcus Cowie, the Trinity star of the 1990s, had been up 2-1 in the finals against Ahmed Faizy in 1996 before losing in five.) Ashfaq was considered beyond American collegiate squash—too talented, too old (he is now twenty-four) and, frankly, too Pakistani (not a single top-rated Pakistani had ever played college squash in America, even before 9/11). But he was tiring of the tour. One incident stuck in his craw. He was in Cairo trying to get a taxi at rush hour with Amr Shabana. No one knew him in the streets. Here Shabana was, the greatest Egyptian squash player in three generations and yet he couldn’t catch a cab.
The team aspect of intercollegiate squash is almost always foreign to the overseas players when they arrive at college campuses. But Ashfaq had an instinctive appreciation of what was important at Trinity. The first time he came to Paul Assaiante’s office, when he flew in from Pakistan, the telephone rang. It was his father. They talked for a couple of minutes in Urdu. As Ashfaq stood at Assaiante’s desk, he saw a bowl in which lay the Trinity national title rings, and he mindlessly fiddled with the shiny baubles.
Then he stopped, and put his hand on the phone’s mouthpiece.
“What are these, coach?” he asked.
“Those are the eight national championship rings,” Assaiante replied. “We make one after winning the national team title.”
“Order four more.”
Next |
| |
|
