Published on SquashDailyReport – Read the full article
]…]
There several crossroads moments that Farag successfully navigated at the outset of his career.
Brother’s Love
The first occurred during his early teens when, discouraged by the several consecutive losses he had suffered at the hands of junior players who had abandoned their studies to focus solely on squash, Farag was on the verge of giving up the sport for good, until his older brother, Wael, stepped in.
“He told me, ‘No, please give me a chance, I’m going to work with you, and you’re going to be good,’ ” Farag later recounted.
Wael Farag himself had had his last chance at the world junior title ended in the round of 32, a loss that briefly devastated the Farag brothers before metamorphosing into an additional layer of motivation. After coming in second to fellow Egyptian contemporary Amr Khaled Khalifa at the World Junior Championships in August 2010, Ali Farag entered the British Junior Open the following January, and this time he came out on top, avenging his loss to Khalifa with a three-game victory in the finals.
A perfect Capstone
To that point, Farag still hadn’t had any wish to leave Egypt for college, even though his parents had urged him to consider attending Harvard.
But less than a month after his triumph at the British Junior Open, the Egyptian Revolution changed his thinking and he applied and was accepted that spring at Harvard, where he won two Intercollegiate Individual crowns (in 2012 and 2014), the last of which represented a perfect capstone to a season in which the Crimson, under legendary Coach Mike Way, culminated a wire-to-wire undefeated season with a 9-0 shut-out over defending champion Trinity College in the final round of that year’s national team championship.
Farag was selected as the 2014 recipient of both the Skillman Award — the highest individual honor in men’s college squash, “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” — and (during the graduation ceremony) the William J. Bingham Award as Harvard’s outstanding male senior athlete.
Farag thereby became only the third squash player in the Award’s 71-year history (also Anil Nayar in ’69 and Adrian Ezra in ’94) to be honored with this distinction.
“His legacy is going to go down in history,” Coach Way said upon learning of this honor. “He’s played a brand of squash here that no one has ever seen in our sport.
“He’s definitely going to live on for the guys who have played alongside him, and also for us as the coaches. As long as we’re in the driver’s seat, we will refer to Ali and how no one respects the game as much as he does — respecting referees, opponents, coaches — that’s part of his legacy as well.”
PSA Tour? Thanks but no thanks..
Ironically, despite the extraordinary success that Farag had enjoyed both in junior squash and as a collegian, at the time he capped off his intercollegiate career by winning his second Individuals (defeating his former junior-squash rival Amr Khalifa in the finals), he had not been thinking in terms of continuing his squash career and competing on the PSA tour.
A serious student, he had earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering and planned to return to Egypt and embark on a career in that field. But Coach Way and Farag’s then-girlfriend Nour El Tayeb (whom he married in 2016), herself a top-tier player on the PSA women’s tour, encouraged him to give the pro circuit a shot, citing his successful advance one month earlier through a tough qualifying bracket into the main draw of the prestigious Tournament of Champions event — and the rest is history.
Leap of Faith
What followed was an exhilarating sprint — especially during a winter/spring of 2019 surge during which he won his first-ever Tournament of Champions and World Open titles and was a British Open finalist –— that enabled Farag to ascend to No. 1 on the PSA rankings, where he has remained throughout almost all of the half-dozen years that have followed.
In addition to the aforementioned 12 combined World Open/British Open/Tournament of Champions/U.S. Open championships, Farag has been a U.S. Open finalist in 2022 and 2023, a British Open finalist in 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2024, and, as noted, a World Open finalist in 2025; served multiple terms as PSA President; received a number of awards, most notably “Male Player of the Year For Sportsmanship ‘Spirit of Squash’ ” four times during the five-year period from 2017-21; and played No. 1 on Egyptian teams that have won the biennial World Team Championships the last four times that the event has been held.
Indeed, Farag won the clinching match of the 2024 edition of this event against his longtime rival Mohamed El Shorbagy (representing England) in the World Teams final, in the immediate aftermath of which (i.e. within seconds after hitting the final winner) he scaled the back wall Spiderman-like — representing a seven-foot leap of faith — and was embraced by his jubilant teammates after landing on the floor outside the court.
The Golden Couple, making History
In 2017, he and El Tayeb became the first married couple to win the same major sports title on the same day when she won the women’s U. S. Open, a feat they would have duplicated in 2019 had El Tayeb been able to win the fifth game of her final-round match against Nouran Gohar.
Studies AND the Tour?
Although for many years it had been thought that anyone who attended college was thereby giving up any realistic chance of success on the PSA tour due to having foregone those four years of PSA experience, Farag’s outstanding achievements permanently punctured that myth and set the stage for the considerable success that Ivy League graduates Amanda Sobhy (Harvard ’15), Olivia Fiechter Weaver (Princeton ’18), Gina Kennedy (Harvard ’19) and Aly Abou Eleinen (Penn ’22) have realized as well.
“I couldn’t imagine a better Ambassador for our Sport”
Farag won his 46th and last PSA title as recently as last month, when he captured the Grasshopper Cup in Switzerland with a four-game final-round victory over Diego Elias.
He will be remembered not only as clearly one of the greatest players in the history of men’s squash, but also (witness the host of awards he has received) for his truly outstanding sportsmanship and citizenship.
Perhaps his Harvard classmate/teammate Tommy Mullaney best summarized Farag’s overall impact and squash persona when he stated,
“Ali was the guy who — for all his success and accolades — simultaneously had the grace and humility to go out of his way to sit with visiting friends and family to explain the game so that they felt welcome at matches. I couldn’t imagine a better ambassador for the sport.”
