Word: squash
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...free years, Ben-Shachar spent one and a half abroad, based in London (during the remaining time, he earned money to initiate his squash career). "In England, my goal was to improve as quickly as I could," he says. "I thought the best way to do it would be to play the best player that I could find...
...point. The world champion began to notice Ben-Shachar, and would play with him once in a while. Meanwhile, Ben-Shachar continued training six hours a day and "improved very quickly." After a few months, he and the world champion were regular training partners, and Ben-Shachar's world squash ranking climbed to number...
...success of Ben-Shachar's training partner was not the only interesting element of their alliance. The world champion was a Pakistani Muslim, Ben-Shachar an Israeli Jew. "We had many interesting discussions about this," Ben-Shachar remembers. Through tournaments, he also met and befriended the Jordanian squash champion. "And then wasn't now," he points out. "Now there is peace, but then it was a little more difficult...
...Shachar recalls one particularly poignant experience when politics--the hostile relationship Israel has with many Arab countries and their allies--became eminently personal. During the junior world championships, the Israeli squash team was slated to play the Malaysian team. But the Malaysian government had other plans...
When he arrived at Harvard, Ben-Shachar's greatest passion was still his sport. In high school and the years that followed, "everything revolved around squash." Ben-Shachar attributes his pre-college academic success not to genuine intellectual passion, but to his sense that doing well in school "was the right thing to do." He studied hard, he says, because this "was a value I was brought up with...but my true passion was not in academics." During what Ben-Shachar describes as the "four best years of [his] life," he became enslaved to his intellectual curiosity...