New York Athletic Club

The Times recently taught those of us who didn’t already know that playing squash can help one’s chances of getting into an Ivy League school. (FYI: Rowing and Latin are similarly good options!) And in this week’s New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten writes an amusing Talk of the Town about this week’s Bear Stearns Tournament of Champions, which will be held in a glass box in Grand Central Terminal.

Last Wednesday, two Egyptians—Mohamed Reda and Badr Aziz—played at the New York Athletic Club to qualify for the tournament. Watching them race around the court was a rapt woman who is hosting the two visiting players, in addition to another Egyptian pair, in her home in Bronxville, a spectacularly wealthy square-mile in Westchester. (The squash pro at a Bronxville club, who is also Egyptian, had arranged with the athletic quad to stay with the local woman, who, along with her son, has apparently grown quite attached to the guests.)

Before their big game, Reda and Aziz slept in, according to the piece, and munched on a breakfast prepared by their host’s housekeeper. A little while later, they went into the village for lunch, where they encountered what was presumably the players’ first encounter with the area’s more skittish residents. As the foreign squash pros walked back home behind a young boy, they noticed him looking back at them nervously. “He ran into the bushes,” Aziz recalled to Mr. Paumgarten, laughing. “Strange Arabs! Terrorists! Ha!”