"What's squash?" someone once asked over brunch at my eating club. "It's like tennis, but richer and whiter," someone else replied. Yeah, that's pretty much it. But I would add the detail, "people named Khan."

An article in the New York Times, part of its obsessive catering to the anxiety-wracked parents of the almost college-aged, reveals squash to be not the abstract pursuit of extracurricular excellence we all thought it was, but rather something more worldly. The Times explains:

Squash, an indoor racket sport long associated with private clubs and old-boy networks, is so esoteric that it barely qualifies as a back door. In terms of the number of actual spots on college rosters, it might be more of a pet door.

Squash tends to be played by people who live in places like Greenwich, Conn., and not -- to use an exquisitely Times-y euphemism -- "young people from the inner city." In other words, the cultivation of a relatively esoteric sport like squash becomes a way the affluent can leverage their affluence into improving their child's shot at getting into an Ivy.

This is because squash, while a definite "pro" on an admissions app, requires things only available to a certain minority -- leisure time, equipment and access to courts, club membership or boarding school attendance, or even a certain degree of cultural capital.

As one parent puts it:

Parents, Mr. Sher said, like the idea "that not everybody can play it, not everyone can afford it - it's almost like it's a more upscale product."

So what is squash? Is it a quasi-nefarious way for "rich, white people" to circumvent the otherwise meritocratic standards of modern college admissions, or just an esteemed niche sport caught up in the craziness and ruthless market pressures of same modern college admissions?

Sam Jackson, didn't you go to Exeter? Weigh in on this.

After the jump -- the article in full, nothing actually, because the Times has informed us that posting the article was a violation of copyright.