The Egyptians.(The Talk of the Town)(squash competition)

A good professional squash match is like a divorce. It brings out the worst in everybody. It requires intercession. As the rancor mounts on court, the combatants aren't supposed to talk to each other. Instead, when a grievance arises--a plea for a let, usually--they must appeal to a referee, who rules on whether one player has impeded the other. Squash is not a no-fault state.

So it seemed, anyway, last Wednesday evening, as Mohamed Reda and Badr Aziz, Egyptians and friends, played a long, tense qualifying match at the New York Athletic Club to determine which of them would advance to the Bear Stearns Tournament of Champions, being held this week in a glass court in Grand Central Terminal. Fewer than a dozen spectators watched an amiable game quickly escalate into an occasion for bickering, body checks, and racquet abuse. Between points, the players paced the court, swiping dry their sweaty right hands high on the back glass (squash is a germy game), avoiding eye contact with each other but glaring through the palm-smudged glass at the referee--an Egyptian, too. A point would commence, and, after prolonged stretches of nimble cat-and-mousing, one player would bump into the other and it would begin again.

REDA: Please, let! , REF: No let. , REDA/AZIZ: [Squabbling in Arabic]. , REF: Don't speak to him, Badr. Speak to me instead. I'm just telling the both of you: Stop pushing! Any more contact, you will lose conduct strokes. No more warnings.

"It's like watching your parents fight," whispered one spectator, who had come with her ten-year-old son, an avid player. Her anxieties derived, bassackwardly, from the fact that both players, along with two others from Egypt, were bunking at her home in Bronxville, in Westchester. The pro at the Bronxville club, an Egyptian, had arranged for them to stay there. She and her son had grown close to them. The son had declared that he wanted them to stay forever, and the mother, a little like Susan Sarandon in "Bull Durham," had started attending all their matches.

Egyptians hold the top two world rankings in squash, and five of the top twenty. The winner of the match between Reda (age eighteen, ranking No. 60--and No. 1 under-19) and Aziz (age twenty-seven, ranking No. 102) would become, either ...