Fate dropped me in Williamstown, Mass., over the weekend; a bit of forward planning allowed me to slink over to Williams College’s Carol Girard and Cynthia Stewart Simon Temple of Squashitude to watch the hometown Ephs—named for college founder Ephraim Williams - play the cocksure Bantams of Trinity College, Hartford. Every time Paul Assaiante’s Trinity team takes the court, there is the possibility that history will be made, meaning that his team’s NCAA-leading 185 consecutive match win streak will be broken. But I know a thing or two about Trinity and Williams, and I knew this wasn’t going to be much more that a light workout for the boys from Hartford.

Item: Look at the rosters. I’m glancing down the Williams varsity: St. Paul’s School; Episcopal Academy; Taft; Lawrenceville; Groton; the Brunswick School. Old School squash, baby. Now let’s look where Assaiante is recruitng his players: Mumbai (3 players); Bogota (2); Kingston, Jamaica; Lahore; Malmoe, Sweden; Penang, Jaipur. Sure, Paul has a few token prep dudes in there from Greenwich and Milton Academy, but it’s like that famous (borderline racist) comment made about the old Boston Celtics, just as the NBA was integrating African-American players into the lineups: How many blacks will Red Auerbach put on the floor at one time? Two at home, three on the road, and four when he’s behind.

My secret agenda in speaking with William Simon Jr., scion of Republican wealth—his father was the Nixon-Ford-era Treasury Secretary William Simon— related to my forthcoming trip to the Carol Girard and Cynthia Stewart Simon Squash Center at Williams College. The Center, dedicated in 1998, is said to rival Yale’s magnificent Nicholas Brady Squash Center for sheer squash opulence. Simon played number one at Williams in 1973, and is now a life trustee of the college.

Also, because my brain apparently never deletes a piece of random squash gossip, I remember Stanford coach Mark Talbott telling me years ago that he had consulted to Simon when the onetime candidate for California governor was thinking of building a court at his home in West L.A. As you will see below, that court never got built.

VF Daily: Where did you start playing squash?
Simon: I was the number one tennis player on the Williams freshman team, but I had never played squash before college. Clarence Chaffee, who was a very famous coach in his time, asked me, “So, Simon, are you coming out for squash?” I said, “What’s squash?” I thought it was a fruit or a vegetable.

I played, and I fell in love with the sport. It was love at first sight. It became my true love. And I still play. There is no workout like a squash workout.

Now we turn our attention to the other squash. Kingdom: Plantae: genus: Cucurbita. The vegetable.

Thanks to this blog, I have pretty quick access to the movers and shakers in the glamorous world of squash, the sport. It turns out I have a few squash gastronomes at my fingertips as well. My old pal Darra Goldstein knows a thing or two about squash. She is the founder of Gastronomica, a beautiful magazine that I find far too expensive to even contemplate reading. Kind of like Vanity Fair, actually. (Into sharks? Who isn’t? You need to think about buying her husband’s new book about sharks from super-cool Reaktion Press. I never go swimming without it!)

It was a doubles court. Who knew?

The decision to create an atomic chain reaction — for the first time, ever -- in a University of Chicago squash court resulted from its own chain reaction of events:

1. During World War II, American scientists were racing to create the physics behind the splitting of the atom, competing with Nazi Germany. But the work was dispersed all over the country. Corporate labs at Westinghouse and DuPont were on the case. The great universities — Berkeley, Caltech, Chicago, Princeton, MIT and many others — were on the case. But the work had to be centralized.

Key fact A: Nobody traveled by air; people traveled by train. In the center of the country, Chicago was the most accessible place in America.

Well, I asked for it.

I had been looking for a “celebrity”—at least someone with more name recognition than I— to play squash with, and blog about. I asked the squash-playing governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, and never heard back from him. Could it have been something I said? Chef Ming Tsai of public television and Blue Ginger (Wellesley, Mass.) fame did agree to play me. But then in quick succession, (1) I learned that he had played number one for Yale not so long ago, and (2) I met him, and he seemed pretty tall and ripped to me.

I know what you are thinking: Hi-ho the glamorous life of the squash blogger! The camaraderie; the elite fraternity. The Daily Kos-like conventions of keyboard warriors held each year at a members-only retreat on the leeward coast of Bermuda. Inevitably, you wish you were me.

But in fact, it’s quite lonely out here in the squash blogosphere. Let me offer you a preliminary tour:

The granddaddy of squash Web sites is squashtalk.com, run out of Acton, Massachusetts. (No, they weren’t run out of Massachusetts; they operate out of Acton, Massachusetts.) I associate Ron Beck’s nine-year-old site primarily with the college game, although right now I see a bunch of posts on events I don’t care about, e.g., the qualifying round for the Qatar Classic. For years, Ron was the only guy who wrote about squash online, and he scored many scoops, or at least what pass for scoops in the squash world. He broke the news of coach Mark Talbott’s defection from Yale to Stanford, and I think he was also the first to report Talbott’s successful poaching—sorry, recruiting—of Harvard’s top woman player several years ago.

I purport to remember a Reuters news dispatch from 1983, listing the sports most likely to cause a heart attack. Squash was number one.

The reasons are obvious. You generally book a squash court in 45- or 50-minute increments. Before the game, you are hanging around and talking with your opponent. You chuck out the previous players one second after their allotted time, walk onto the court, and start hitting the ball. After five minutes, the ball is warm enough to play, and you remember that conference call you’ve schedule for 1:30. Let’s play!

Playing squash is every bit as intense as hockey, fencing, or basketball, to name some super-high-intensity sports. Without a proper warm-up, your body zooms from zero to 75 m.p.h. in just a few minutes.

You’re panting; you’re pouring off sweat. You’re dead.

As threatened, here is the second part of my E.J. Kahn-like series on squash at The New Yorker. At this point, it’s customary for the clued-in writer to make some snide remarks about Kahn’s over-long series on grain as emblematic of the decline of the William Shawn-era magazine. I won’t be making those remarks 1. because Kahn’s son Joe is a friend of mine and 2. because Kahn was a squash player.

In David Foster Wallace’s famous essay on the porn industry, “Big Red Son,” he remarked that some stereotypes are true: the typical adult video producer “really is the ugly little man with a bad toupee and a pinky ring.” So if you choose to attend the black-tie U.S. Squash Hall of Fame Gala at the Hotel Pierre, where some tables cost $20,000, you really shouldn’t be surprised to find yourself surrounded by rich, white people who live in the nicer quadrants of Connecticut and New Jersey, and who tell insidey jokes about “Apawamis,” whatever that is.

One forgets just how small, and homogeneous, the American squash world is. Everyone went to private school (that’s where the squash courts are), everyone attended a private college (see above), and there’s no point in asking where their children go to school (previous point) or college (previous point). Inevitably, it will be somewhere decent, e.g. Hobart, in the Northeast. The men are generally fit and handsome, work in finance - the loss of Bear Stearns as a squash sponsor is a big deal in Squashworld - and are married to square-shouldered blondes with excellent posture.

I have seen a few of the country’s grand Squash Palaces, but I had always been told that I hadn’t seen anything until I saw Yale’s Nicholas Brady Squash Center. I thought Trinity College in Hartford had a pretty posh set-up; they’ve engineered a successful “squash-in-the-round” concept—a bit like an avant-garde theater set from the 1960’s—that lets you roam around the spectator galleries and watch several different matches at a time. But Yale has gone them one better.

This picture starts to tell the story of this thousand-word post: