Aug

7

Victor Niederhoffer, 1943-2026, 1964 Intercollegiate Individual Champion, by Rob Dinerman

Niederhoffer is the only player, man or woman, to ever capture the Individuals without ever having played or even seen squash prior to entering college. He had, however, as a youngster growing up in Brooklyn excelled at tennis and in a number of the many “wall games” played at the Brighton Beach Baths, a sports complex located near the Niederhoffers’ home that featured more than 20 one-wall handball courts and was therefore known as a mecca for that sport. Although Harvard’s legendary coach Jack Barnaby usually didn’t directly oversee a player’s development until he became a sophomore — leaving the task of coaching freshmen to Harvard’s longtime freshman squash coach Corey Wynn — he made an exception in Niederhoffer’s case, spending at least 45 minutes in the court almost every day with his fast-developing prodigy, the rough edges of whose game and personality Barnaby gradually smoothed over, and whose learning and improvement curves were so steep that Barnaby later remarked that he “never had a boy who learned faster, assimilating everything I threw at him and coming back for more.”


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