When Clubland Invades Grand Central
Squash's oldest professional tournament turns 95
It’s perhaps the clubbiest annual sporting event of the year and it happened under the noses of New Yorkers at Grand Central Terminal – with hardly any press coverage – earlier this year.
The Tournament of Champions, or TOC, is what squash fanatics dreams are made of. In Vanderbilt Hall, annually, a glass court, a viewing gallery, and barricades appear like clockwork and Clubland comes out fully bedecked in their regalia.
It is, after all, the oldest tournament on the professional squash tour, and in its ninety-fifth year with the first match being played in 1930. Thirty-two of the world’s best male and female squash players battle it out over the course of more than a week toward the end of January, in the frightful cold that descends upon Midtown Manhattan after the hustle and warmth of the holidays.
2025 marks the twenty-eighth iteration of the tournament in its current incarnation, at Grand Central’s Vanderbilt Hall, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Professional Squash Association, just around the corner from its induction into the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
Like most things squash, it’s nigh impossible to walk into one of these and not meet at least a few people you know. And if you don’t know them, you almost always know their clubs, clearly marked out in what appears to be a veritable procession of Clubland, from New York Athletic Club, the notably quiet Racket and Tennis (known by their nickname, R&T), New Haven Lawn Club, and others throughout Tri-State Clubland.
The 2025 Tournament of Champions, photograph by Ishaan Jajodia
Your ticket to the TOC covers a two-hour session: a men’s match and a women’s match, both played best of five, eleven points each. The squash is always fantastic: it is the world’s top thirty-two players on the men’s and women’s tour.
This year I had the great pleasure of seeing Gregoire Marche, a clearly injured but powerful Baptiste Masotti and two of a handful of French professional squash players on the tour battle it out. This was followed by the women’s matches with the Belgian Nele Gilis-Coll (married to the conspicuously absent Kiwi pro squash player Paul Coll) going in for an intense and physically exhausting sixty-minute long three-game spectacle against seventeen-year-old Egyptian phenom Amina Orfi, who, despite not being old enough to have any libations at the bar afterwards, pummelled Nele toward her backhand relentlessly and with the steady assurance that for the Egyptians the ball can never bounce twice.
The TOC is the New York squash event to watch out for every year, and if you haven’t had a chance to head down to Grand Central for a quick peep, make sure to mark your calendar for next year’s. And keep an eye out for the clubs (and hopefully, Clubland) regalia.
