Squash makes some racquet

Head-to-head solo sports produce gladiator-grade drama when the pairing is right. This semifinal match in US Open Squash has the makings of an epic tilt.

The Boston event is also a showcase for a sport honed at Britain's Harrow School around 1860 and now showing potential for growth in America far beyond its East Coast enclaves.

World No. 1 Amr Shabana, an Egyptian with a furrowed brow, faces down the lanky, long-haired Ramy Ashour, world No. 9. Ashour, a fellow countryman, is a fast riser – a force at age 19.

The players compete in a glass-cube court on stage at a Back Bay events center. Shabana stays fluid. One shot snaps from his racket like a marble from a sling. The next gently drops the ball just above the "tin" across the bottom of the front wall. But Ashour seems to teleport to every corner, peeling the ball off the walls.

In the final game Ashour is down 2-10 – play is to 11 – and he claws back to 10-all.

"He's sending a message," whispers spectator Jim Zug, a longtime squash player and author of the authoritative 2003 book "Squash: A History of the Game." "Ramy has been digging and digging," says Mr. Zug. Now the young star refuses to roll over.

Finally, Shabana puts him away, then snaps his own racket with a flourish.

This very international game needs some high-drama "rock stars" to succeed in America as a spectator or participatory sport, Zug and others say, ideally one from the United States.

But US squash has made major inroads in the past five years, its advocates insist, and cracks are appearing in its old elitist veneer. A handful of Western colleges – including Pac-10 conference schools – have formed teams; Stanford added squash great Mark Talbott as coach in 2004 and fielded its first women's varsity team this season.

"It's definitely no longer an East coast-only sport," says Jeanne Blasberg, chair of the US Squash Racquets Association, the sport's governing body. "Some of the big hotbeds are Houston [and other] big international communities. There's squash in L.A. and San Diego, in Denver, Chicago. There's a huge squash community in Seattle."

Ms. Blasberg's organization recently announced it will shift its headquarters from Bala Cynwyd, Pa., to New York City to improve its networking potential, tapping the city's cultural diversity. Its membership grew by 7 percent in 2005 and will jump an estimated 20 percent this year.

Based on equipment sales and court construction, some 300,000 people now play squash in the US, Blasberg estimates.

About 12 years ago, the US game shifted from "hardball" to "softball," beginning with prep schools and universities, she explains, in a bid to conform to the game that the rest of the world plays.

The "soft" ball is considerably smaller and less lively than the ball used in racquetball, but livelier than the old hard ball, which still has some core proponents.

The game's relative difficulty, along with its prep-school origins, contributes to its quirky appeal. (In much of the world, Zug notes, it's very much a "working-class" game.)

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