NY Squash Legend: Victor Niederhoffer, Storied American Player of the 60’s and 70’s
And Steely Rival to International Legend Sharif Khan

By Rob Dinerman
March, 2024

A five-time winner of the U. S. Nationals and one of only seven American-born players to capture the most coveted crown of hardball squash, the North American Open, Victor Niederhoffer is very near the top of the list of squash’s most significant figures and intriguing personalities. His rivalry with Sharif Khan during the mid-1970’s defined that crucial era in the sport’s evolution and played a determinate role in the formation and rise to prominence of the professional hardball tour that had such an impressive run in the following decade.

Part of what made Niederhoffer’s ascent to the top echelon of the sport so compelling is the degree to which his background and self-presentation differed from the norm during the era in which he competed. Unlike the large majority of America’s best college and amateur players—almost all of whom by the time they entered college had learned the game either in junior programs at exclusive private clubs or while attending prestigious New England prep schools (and in many cases from fathers who themselves had been active squash players)—Niederhoffer, the son of a Brooklyn cop, had never played squash prior to entering Harvard in September 1960. His sole previous exposure to wall games had been to those that were played at the Brighton Beach Baths, a sports complex located near the Niederhoffer's home near Coney Island. This complex featured more than 20 one-wall handball courts and was known as the mecca for that sport.

Although Harvard’s legendary coach Jack Barnaby usually focused all of his attention on the varsity players while his assistant coach Corey Wynn attended to the freshmen, he made an exception in Niederhoffer’s case. Barnaby realized right away that he had a potential champion on his hands, and he spent at least 45 minutes on the court almost every day with his fast-developing prodigy. Over time, the rough edges of Niederhoffer's game and personality were smoothed out and Barnaby later remarked that he “never had a boy who learned faster, assimilating everything I threw at him and coming back for more.”

Niederhoffer won the U. S. National Junior title during his sophomore year and played No. 1 throughout his three-year varsity college career (during each year of which Harvard won the Ivy League crown). He won the 1964 Intercollegiate Individual championship (after reaching the final one year earlier as a junior) with a three-game final-round win over Amherst star Tom Poor. After losing to Steve Vehslage in the final round of the 1965 U. S. Nationals, Niederhoffer won the tournament the following year at the University Club of New York , becoming in the process the first player ever to beat the Howe brothers Ralph and Sam (both of whom had been early-1960’s U. S. Nationals winners) in successive matches. 

Niederhoffer’s semifinal with Ralph Howe was undoubtedly the most memorable match of the tournament, a contentious, grinding five-game marathon in which the warm weather and packed gallery created such humid conditions as to cause slipping sneakers, skidding balls and severe cramps on the part of both players. The gripping drama had aspects of a morality play for some and elements of Darwin’s fabled doctrine of natural selection for others.  By the time the back-and-forth fifth game had reached its mid-point, Niederhoffer was suffering from cramps in both feet, while Howe’s calf had tightened up, as did his thigh muscles near the end. He was virtually completely immobilized by the time the match ended when Niederhoffer was able to catch a nick on his second serve to win that game 15-12. 

In the next-day final with Sam Howe, they split the opening pair of games, after which Sam Howe led 13-11 in both the third and fourth, only to lose the last four points in each instance when he called no-set after getting caught at 13-all. Just before the 13-all point in the third game, Niederhoffer quite audibly mused, “What should I do?” He then answered the rhetorical question he had posed by unleashing a smashing serve that aced Howe to get to game ball, which he promptly converted with a forehand drive. Then at 13-all in the fourth, he hit two successive backhand drop shots that landed for winners to close it out, causing his mother, a one-time ladies paddle-tennis champion at Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach Bath Club, to delightedly squeal, “My boy did it!”

At that stage the 23-year-old Niederhoffer seemed positioned to win a number of additional U. S. Nationals titles during the several remaining years of the 1960’s. But in 1967 the U. S. Nationals was held in Chicago, where Niederhoffer was based at the time while earning a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. The club that was serving as the tournament’s headquarters had allowed him to practice there but had rejected his application for membership, and Niederhoffer, convinced that the club was discriminating against him because he was Jewish, boycotted the tournament, saying he wasn’t going to put on a show for the club’s members if they wouldn’t allow him to join. He missed not only that year’s U. S. Nationals (which Sam Howe, Niederhoffer’s 1966 final-round opponent, won), but the four that followed as well, although he did play in several U. S. National Doubles during that time frame, winning the 1968 edition of that event with Victor Elmaleh in a weekend in which all four of their matches went to a fifth game, including the final against Ralph Howe and Diehl Mateer. 

Back in New York and Back on Top

During the 1971-72 season Niederhoffer, who had moved back to New York by then, finally returned to full tournament competition, reaching the final of that season’s North American Open and winning the U. S. Nationals for the first of four consecutive times from 1972-75, beating Steve Moysey, Bob Hetherington, Gordon Anderson and Peter Briggs respectively in those finals, while also winning the U. S. National Doubles in 1973 with Jim Zug and in 1974 with Colin Adair. The last of his five U. S. Nationals titles, like the first one nine years earlier in 1966, was hosted by the Metropolitan Squash Racquets Association (later renamed New York Squash), and Niederhoffer (who won his five matches without losing a single game) entered the event still riding the momentum of having won the North American Open with a memorable four-game final-round victory over the six-time defending champion Sharif Khan.

The Sharif Khan Rivalry

During the 22-year period from 1960-81 inclusive, a member of the extended Khan clan won this title every year other than 1967 (when Ralph Howe won it) and Niederhoffer’s triumph in 1975, when Niederhoffer’s wicked genius and relentless determination rose superior to a series of physical ailments, Mexico’s lung-searing altitude and the Khan aura of invincibility. This latter point was particularly telling, for Sharif’s lengthy domination  had by that time traumatized his colleagues to a degree that decimated their pre-match confidence and facilitated Sharif’s victories. Niederhoffer refused to bow to the snowballing effects of this phenomenon, and his perseverance through a series of long attritional late-match exchanges found its full reward on that sultry afternoon.  

Realizing that squash could only take the next big step forward if there was a professional tour, Niederhoffer turned pro at the outset of the 1975-76 season, during which he and Sharif Khan clashed in the final round of all five major tournaments on the still-fledgling World Professional Squash Association (WPSA) pro circuit, namely the Boston Open, the Teaneck Invitational, the North American Open, Montreal and the WPSA Championship. Although Sharif won all five of those finals—including the North American Open, held in New York, in which Niederhoffer played the final badly hampered by a sprained ankle incurred in his semifinal win over Clive Caldwell that gave an eerie aspect to the anticlimactic 20-minute 15- 3, 7 and 5 walkthrough that ensued—Niederhoffer did have one remaining shining moment on his hometown New York turf against Sharif when the pair met in the final round of the inaugural Boodles Gin Open at the brand-new Uptown Racquet Club in November 1976. Leading two games to one, Niederhoffer rode a rash of increasingly anxious Khan tins to a one-sided fourth-game victory prior to grudgingly (18-17 in the fourth) ceding the last of the Niederhoffer-Khan matches, also at the Boodles event, the following season.

Their extended series (which began more than a decade earlier in the 1967 North American Open with an 18-17 fifth-game Niederhoffer quarterfinal win) represented a classic contrast of both personal background and playing style. Sharif, the eldest scion of squash’s most celebrated legend Hashim Khan, had by the early 1970’s clearly established himself as both the top player and most charismatic figure in the North American game. He exuded a mixture of confidence, elegance and dignity that, along with his flamboyant playing style, both charmed the spectators (whether in the gallery during his matches or at the cocktail parties after them) and overwhelmed his opponents. The natural gifts that Sharif so clearly enjoyed appeared on cursory inspection to be badly lacking in Niederhoffer, which made his noteworthy list of accomplishments somewhat difficult to fathom.

Indeed, while Sharif seemed in every aspect totally in his element on a squash court, Niederhoffer appeared distinctly out of place on one, a situation that was most graphically symbolized by the frequently mismatched sneakers which became his trademark. Although Niederhoffer’s heavy-footed movement seemed a sorry substitute for Sharif’s effortless grace, his sharp eyes, exceptional hand-speed and deft touch made him far more fit for the game than the casual observer suspected. So too did his steely competitive instincts, which belied his un-heroic aspect and often reduced the Sharif-Niederhoffer confrontations to a battle of warring wills.

Niederhoffer’s retirement at the end of the 1977-78 season brought to a close the riveting rivalry between two champions who, for all their differences, were kindred spirits, bound as they were by their fierce determination and the celebrity they were forced to share. The expansion of the WPSA schedule to more than 20 tournaments spread throughout the continent during the 1980-81 tour, with further increases to follow and some of the top tournaments held not only in clubs but on multi-glass-wall portable courts in the Sheraton Centre’s Grand Ballroom in Toronto and Town Hall, a theater just off Broadway in New York, occurred as a direct result of the excitement that was generated by the prolonged set of matches between Sharif Khan and Victor Niederhoffer.

Off Court Successes on Wall Street and the National Bestsellers List

In addition to his squash exploits—which made him literally a first-ballot U. S. Squash Hall of Famer, having been one of 15 inductees in the Hall’s inaugural class in 2000—Niederhoffer also gained a great deal of notoriety on Wall Street as an investor, trader, hedge-fund manager and author. The best-known of the several books he wrote, The Education Of A Speculator, published in 1996, became a national bestseller and was praised by George Soros for the “original mind and eclectic approach” with which Niederhoffer “takes the reader from Brighton Beach to Wall Street, visiting all stops of interest along the way.” Both on and off the court, Victor Niederhoffer, who turned 80 in December 2023, blazed his own unique trail, leaving behind a legacy that has relevance even today, more than 45 years after he played his last professional squash match.

Rob Dinerman is a squash historian who was the Official Writer for the MSRA Yearbook from 1985-94 and has written nearly 20 books about squash, all of which are arrayed on the robdinerman.com home page. His next book, on the first 100 years of college squash (1923-2023), is scheduled to be released in February 2024.