Squash Champion Seeks Sublet, Frequently

He has also crashed at his older brother Hisham’s apartments, first at 59th and 10th and now at 23rd and Sixth. (Hisham is a teaching pro at CityView Racquet Club in Long Island City.)

Ashour’s approach to squash, as well as lodging, is hardly ordinary. Unlike many other elite squash players, Ashour, 30, does not have an entourage. He has not had a coach for more than six years. He has no trainer, nutritionist or psychologist. He plays at odd hours, arranging sessions with other pros or hitting solo.

Ashour has won 39 tour titles, including three world championships. Three times he has captured the Tournament of Champions, the flagship event hosted in Grand Central Terminal in New York. He plays his first-round match in this year’s Tournament of Champions on Friday evening.

Jonah Barrington, one of the sport’s greats, rates Ashour as an equal of Jahangir Khan and Jansher Khan, the two legendary Pakistanis who dominated the men’s tour in the 1980s and 1990s.

During one stretch a few years ago, Ashour went undefeated for fifteen months. In the 110 tour events he has played in his 13-year pro career, he has a winning percentage, according to SquashInfo.com, of 82.2 — by far the best of any player in the last quarter-century.

Ashour has a feline aura. He moves smoothly, always nimble and balanced, on his toes, bouncing like a small child wanting to go outside. Unlike most squash players, he does not grip his racket with the traditional cocked V in his wrist. Instead, the racket dangles from his hand, straight down, like a maestro pointing a baton. Then he flicks at the ball with an abnormally short swing. Using his incredible wrist strength, Ashour propels the ball at a pace other players generate only from a full, looping swing.

This is important in a fast-twitch, small-court sport like squash. Ashour’s strokes speed up the game, giving him an infinitesimal edge.

Even his deception is deceiving. Other famously unreadable players — like Jonathon Power of Canada — would produce different shots with the same swing. But Ashour is somehow able to hit the same shot with different swings.

“It is quirky and unorthodox,” said Joey Barrington, the lead commentator on SquashTV and Jonah Barrington’s son. “You just have no idea what is about to happen. I played him three times when he was young and it was mind-blowingly disconcerting. Balls were flying past my head. I couldn’t believe how deceptive he was and how outrageously high a pace he played at. He put me under such pressure.”

Mohamed ElShorbagy, the current men’s world champion, said: “It is not what he does differently, because pretty much he does everything differently. For me, he is one of the greatest of the game. I did lose two world championship finals to him, but I lost to the best of the best and I am not ashamed of that.”

Ashour has a playful, effervescent personality. He sends out enigmatic koans to his 33,000 Twitter followers. His postmatch comments can run long. Prompted by a single question, he might wax philosophical for 15 minutes.

He started playing competitively when he was 6. He twice captured the world junior title. His first was in Islamabad, in 2004, at age 16.

Two years before that title, he had ruptured a knee ligament. After trying rehabilitation therapy and wearing a brace, he had surgery in Cologne, Germany, six months before the competition in Islamabad.

“I remember Ramy, after the ACL surgery, would come onto the court and sit in a chair and hit dropshots,” said Ali Farag, the world No. 3 who grew up playing at the same Cairo club, Heliopolis, where Ashour did. “Then he won the World Juniors. He was an icon for all of us.”

Ashour said the rehab taught him to be good with his hands. “I knew when I had a loose shot I had to win it,” he said. “I can’t hit an OK shot and run around. Injuries have been so valuable. They taught me patience, how to deal with struggling. They taught me to take chances, to be more alert, to be more self-conscious.”

Recently, Ashour has suffered numerous injuries, notably a rare hamstring problem that he has sought help for in England, Germany, Qatar and the United States. Because of the hamstring injury, Ashour did not play competitively from May to November in 2014. In his first event back, he captured the World Championship. Then he had meniscus surgery and did not play again for five more months.

In the past three years, he has retired midmatch because of injuries six times and has won four tournament titles. In September, after a four-month layoff because of a liver infection, he returned to sweep through the China Open in Shanghai.

Joey Barrington has nicknamed him the Maverick, because everything he does on and off the court is unorthodox.

“I am staying positive,” Ashour said. “But I didn’t realize that staying positive was so hard. I thought it was just a sentence: ‘Be positive.’ It is not easy to be positive. People say, ‘Wake up with a smile.’ I have to have a plan for me to wake up with a smile. We are not prophets. I hate this idea that everything has to be perfect.

“Changing yourself is tough. I am a perfectionist. People say all the time that I smile a lot. Why do I smile? Because it makes life easier.”

Ashour said that if he does well in the Tournament of Champions, he might finally settle down and commit to a one-year lease on an apartment. He is eying one in Queens.

The New York Times