You also have to fight as hard as you can while treating your opponent with respect and courtesy: The game is played in very close quarters, and it’s easy to hurt someone with a ball or racquet. They call soccer the beautiful game, but if I had to identify just one sport to show members of some alien species what the human race is all about, I’d nominate squash.

Over the last few years, I’ve played a lot, sometimes in local leagues with pretty strong players. But even if you’re the most avid tennis player, you wouldn’t exactly expect to find yourself facing Roger Federer one day. Still, wouldn’t you like to give that a try? To see what it’s really like, to learn what separates the pros from the rest of us? For two months in advance, I trained as hard as I could, playing at least five times a week, sometimes with Sat Seshadri, a professional from Bombay who now plays in New York.

Arriving at the gorgeous Charlotte Squash Club courts the day before, I felt a lot like the goofy new kid in high school. The professional players obviously knew each other, and were friends as well as competitors. It was a diverse group, with players from Mexico, Egypt, Pakistan, Guyana, Paraguay, Jamaica, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. There isn’t a lot of money in the sport: In Charlotte, the winner earned exactly $902.50. The professionals play, and are willing to travel constantly, because they love it—above all the intensity of the competition and the sense of camaraderie. Most of them have been playing since they were kids, and are hooked; it’s what they do.

In Charlotte, the players smiled and joked in the locker room, but they had a palpable sense of seriousness and commitment during practice, with established routines. I sat awkwardly in the corner with my two racquets, thinking that I really needed to get a sense of what the courts were like. A forlorn question hung in the air: Which of them might be willing to play with me? As it happened, one of the professionals was hitting on a court, all by himself, and I worked up the courage to ask him if he might want to play. (In my mind, I might have rehearsed how to pose the question: “Would you like to play with ME?” “Would YOU like to play with me?” “Would you LIKE to play with me?” “Would you like to PLAY with me?” In the end, I opted for hand gestures.)

He turned out to be Dane Sharp, a Canadian. The name might not be familiar, but he’s one of the ten best players in North America. In the world team championships, he played a competitive match against Egypt’s Ramy Ashour, the Michael Jordan of squash. Sharp isn’t quite squash’s Lebron James, but he’s fast as lightning, and strong, and the ball explodes off his racquet like a rocket. As it happens, he’s also a really nice guy.

After I introduced myself, and told him I knew who he was, he asked what I was doing there. Our conversation:

Me (brightly, and like a complete idiot): I’m here to play in the tournament. Dane: Which tournament? Me: This tournament. Dane (unsure he heard me correctly): Our tournament? Me (quietly): I’m the wild card.

Suitably informed, Sharp suggested that we try a little drill, apparently familiar among professional players. I asked him to explain it, and he seemed to say, “You hit a drv and then a bsst, and then I hit a drp and then a drv, and we do that over and over.”