NY Squash Legend: Harry Saint, Commercial Squash Club Builder Extraordinaire
Creator of the ‘70s & ‘80s boom that made squash accessible to the general public

By Rob Dinerman
May, 2024

One of the most prolific builders of commercial squash clubs in New York or anywhere else in the United States, Harry Saint was perhaps the single most significant figure in the enormous growth that squash experienced during its heyday throughout the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. He is deservedly known as a brilliant entrepreneur who single-handedly changed the course of U.S. squash history by opening up three public squash clubs in Manhattan at a time when nothing on that scale had ever been attempted. It was, at least in part, as a result of his vision that the game, which previously had been limited to exclusive (and in many cases men-only) private clubs --- and hence inaccessible to all but the well-off few --- was able to move out of that confined space and become a public and visible part of the American sports scene.

Although Saint’s first club, the Fifth Avenue Racquet Club, a seven-court facility just west of Fifth Avenue on 37th Street at the edge of the garment district, opened in early 1974, it was when the Uptown Racquet Club --- a five-story structure located in the heart of the upper east side on 86th Street near Lexington Avenue that featured 12 squash courts and included a restaurant and eventually a sporting-goods store --- opened in October 1976 that commercial squash began to grow exponentially and flourish. The fact that passers-by on the sidewalk could look through a large first-floor window and actually see the game being played on the glass-back-wall exhibition court resulted in an extraordinary number of people who had never played --- or even heard of --- squash walking into the facility and instantly signing up as members, a phenomenon that was greatly increased by the fact that Stu Goldstein, one of the best and most dynamic players on the fledgling pro squash tour, could often be seen playing practice games on that court.

Barely a month after Uptown opened, it hosted a pro tournament, sponsored by Boodles British Gin, that drew the best professional players both that year and throughout the ensuing decade. That inaugural event resulted in a final between Sharif Khan, the reigning pro champion throughout the previous half-decade, and New Yorker Victor Niederhoffer, whose riveting four-game victory got the tournament off to a rousing start. Within a few years the tournament added competitive flights for players of all levels in what became the biggest squash extravaganza of the entire season, attracting entrants from all over the country and also from Canada and Mexico. The attendees overloaded the catwalks above the courts on Uptown’s third and fifth floors and crammed into every inch of available space in the gallery that had been set up behind the stadium court on the first floor where the pro matches were contested. The tournament --- which at its peak had more than 600 total participants spread out over a dozen competitive categories --- became such a success that by the early 1980’s Boodles expanded its sponsorship to include major events in Washington and San Francisco. This momentum contributed significantly to the growth of the World Pro Squash Association (WPSA) pro tour by running multi-level tournaments that Saint introduced and popularized.

In the years that followed Uptown’s arrival, Saint would open another commercial squash club (a three-court facility in the midtown-Manhattan Doral Inn Hotel) under the aegis of Town Squash Incorporated (the company he created), but Uptown, due to its size, location and grandeur, remained without question the flagship club, earning in the process a well-deserved reputation for being the mecca of squash in New York, the “in’ place to be for anyone who considered himself/herself a true aficionado of the game. During the entirety of that heady time for the sport, Saint --- one of whose sons, Tim, won the John Skillman Award “given annually to a senior men’s squash player who has demonstrated outstanding sportsmanship during his entire college career while maintaining a high level of play” in 2002 --- was himself a paragon of good citizenship, serving multiple terms as President of New York Squash and as a member of the U.S. Squash Board of Directors, all the while remaining an avid recreational player. In recognition of these multi-front qualities, the WPSA chose him for its Man of the Year Award in 1981, declaring in an accompanying statement that, “No one has been more responsible for the growth of commercial sponsorship in squash than this year’s recipient.”

Saint eventually sold the squash clubs and devoted his time and energy to writing a novel, Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (Athenaum) under the pen name H.F. Saint that became a huge bestseller (“The prose is so elegantly knowing,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in the New York Times) and was made into a movie in 1992 starring Chevy Chase and produced by Warner Bros. By the late 1990’s, he had moved to London and married his third wife, Nancy Gengler, who for years was one of Uptown’s most popular teaching pros and the 1976 Intercollegiate Individuals champion. By that time the commercial squash boom in New York to which Saint had contributed so much had run its course as these commercial clubs, under increasing pressure from aerobics, yoga, treadmills, spinning and Stairmasters, inexorably hemorrhaged courts. At its apex, there were 68 commercial squash courts in New York, but by the time Uptown closed its doors in 2016, there were under a dozen. Only time will tell if the recent opening of several publicly accessible commercial and non-profit clubs in New York and the inclusion of squash in the Olympics mark the beginning of a credible and lasting expansion --- a repeat, as it were, of what happened 50 years ago, this time with greater longevity --- or if it proves to be a transitory and quixotic salvo. Either way, what happened during those vibrant years when the sport seemed to be on a dizzying ascent --- not just booming but exploding like a meteor across the racquet-sports spectrum --- is remembered with an incredible amount of fondness and nostalgia by those who were fortunate enough to experience it first-hand, and so is Harry Saint for the defining role he played throughout that exhilarating time frame.

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.