Stu Goldstein, Top Player and Historic Khan Stopping 1978 WPSA Champion 

By Rob Dinerman
September, 2024

Stuart Goldstein, universally known as Stu, was the most persistent of Sharif Khan's pursuers during the latter's extended period of domination (from 1969-81) of hardball squash in North America, and the best player in the New York metropolitan area for a half-decade encompassing the late 1970's and early 1980's. When Goldstein won the 1978 World Pro Squash Association (WPSA) Championship at the Commodore Club in Minnesota—defeating Gordon Anderson and Rainer Ratinac in the semi-final and final rounds in February of that year—it ended a span of 15 consecutive years (from 1963-77) throughout which a member of the extended Khan clan had won this tournament. In his final with Ratinac, Goldstein won a pivotal 15-13 second game before finishing off the match with a 15-8 third game that made him the first New Yorker to win this prestigious championship in the 32 years that had passed since Lester Cummings accomplished the feat back in 1946. Throughout Goldstein’s outstanding career, he combined immaculate stroke production with extraordinary agility and conditioning to fully earn a spot along with fellow top-tier WPSA protagonists Victor Niederhoffer, Clive Caldwell, Mario Sanchez, Michael Desaulniers, Anderson and Ratinac as the foremost contenders to the crown that Sharif wore so proudly for so long.  

A local table-tennis champion and top-10 junior tennis player as a teenager growing up in Long Island, Goldstein first started playing squash during his college years at Stony Brook University and was a first-team All-American during his senior 1972-73 season. Shortly after his graduation, he signed on as the head pro at the Fifth Avenue Racquet Club, the first of the commercial clubs that a bright, mid-30’s entrepreneur named Harry Saint was building in New York City. When the Uptown Racquet Club opened a few years later in Autumn 1976 and became Saint’s flagship club, Goldstein moved over there, where he remained for the rest of his tenure.

The Uptown Club swiftly became the mecca for squash in New York, not only because of its number of courts (10 hardball and two softball) and prime location (right in the heart of Manhattan’s upper east side), but also due to Goldstein’s flashy game and swift ascent up the WPSA rankings. Uptown’s first-floor exhibition court had a glass back wall (a rarity back then), and an extraordinary number of passers-by—many of whom had never previously even heard of squash—upon looking through the club’s large first-floor window, would be so captivated by the sight of Goldstein buzzing around the court and unleashing his exceptional array of shots during a practice game that they would enter the club and sign up for a membership right on the spot.

The proliferation of commercial squash clubs, especially in cities like New York and Philadelphia, was a large contributing factor in the tremendous growth that the game as a whole experienced throughout that late-1970’s/1980’s time frame, and the Uptown Racquet Club is universally viewed as a main cause of that phenomenon. So was the establishment and rapid expansion of the WPSA pro hardball tour, which grew from a handful of small-money events in the late 1970’s to a full-fledged entity that by the 1980-81 season had 20 singles tournaments (and several doubles tournaments as well) spaced from coast to coast throughout the U.S., as well as in a number of Canadian cities, especially Montreal and Toronto. One of that tour’s main events was the mid-November Boodles British Gin Open at Uptown, where the gallery was always completely packed for Goldstein’s matches and where he reached the finals in both 1977 and 1978.

Although Goldstein lost to Sharif in both of those matches, he did defeat The Champ en route to winning the '77 Boodles Round-Robin and WPSA tour stops in New York and Montreal in '78 and in Rochester in '80, when Goldstein’s sequential wins over Desaulniers, Sharif (both in five) and Sanchez may have represented the finest overall performance of his entire career. He also was runner-up to Sharif on numerous occasions, the most noteworthy of these being the '77 and '79 WPSA Championship (with his 1978 win sandwiched in between), the '77 Slazenger Philadelphia event, the '77 and '78 Boodles British Gin Open (as noted), the '78 Cleaves MSRA Open and the '79 and '80 Boodles Squash World Cup. During that turbulent and exciting era when the WPSA tour was enjoying its greatest period of growth and expansion, only Anderson was able to post more victories over the indomitable and charismatic Pakistani champion than did Goldstein—and during that time frame as well, Goldstein’s emergence as Sharif’s most intractable pursuer even drew the attention of Sports Illustrated, which had a substantial article, entitled “The Kid Is A Contendah,” about his rapid rise through the ranks.

If anything, Goldstein may have been guilty of expending TOO much effort in his dedicated push for the No. 1 ranking, relentlessly forcing his smallish and slender frame through punishing daily work-outs both on the squash court and on the track that may have brought on a sequence of injuries, particularly to his back, that required him to withdraw from a number of tournaments and cost him an opportunity to move more quickly up the rankings. Those mishaps and the overall burn-out effects of his full-bore pursuit of Sharif's seemingly endless position of pre-eminence may also have contributed to the brevity of Goldstein's career, which ended at the conclusion of the 1981-82 season—following which he embarked on what has been an extremely successful real-estate career—when he was only 31 years old and seemingly with several productive seasons still ahead of him.  

It is a bittersweet aspect of the legacy that he and contemporaries Anderson and Caldwell created that all three were fated to have their prime years intersect with the dominant period of the older but ageless Sharif, who all too often loomed up to deny them the major titles that they otherwise would have been winning. This phenomenon is similar to what occurred in the NBA throughout the 1990's, when some of the best basketball players on some of the best teams in the history of the game—from Karl Malone and John Stockton of the Utah Jazz, to Phoenix star forward Charles Barkley to New York center Patrick Ewing to Indiana sharpshooter Reggie Miller to Seattle's outstanding point guard Gary Payton—all found their career-long quests for an NBA championship ring dishearteningly and repeatedly obstructed (often in the final round of the NBA play-offs) by the greatness of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, Goldstein's ledger of career tournament wins includes not only the host of WPSA sanctioned-tournament titles we have already chronicled but also the Met Pro championship in '75, '79 and '81, and that he became an excellent softball-squash player as well, winning the 1980 Hyder Cup and playing a prominent role on the U. S. team that placed seventh (an all-time U.S. high at the time) in the World Team Championships in Sweden in 1981. Stu Goldstein crammed a remarkable list of achievements into a relatively compressed time frame while becoming one of the most prominent of the legendary protagonists who put the WPSA tour on the map during its meteoric rise in the world of racquet sports.

Rob Dinerman was Stu Goldstein’s colleague on the WPSA Tour and served as the Official Writer for the annual WPSA Tour Program, in which capacity he chronicled many of Goldstein’s achievements. He has written 16 books about squash, all of which are arrayed on the home page of the robdinerman.com website.