At the forefront of the coverage of events in Egypt last week was this fact: the departure of Hosni Mubarak meant the loss of our most famous squash-playing head of state.

A keen squash player, he got on court almost every day at the Air Force base, across the street from his presidential palace. (He wouldn’t just stroll out and wait at the light to cross, though—there was a tunnel connecting the two complexes.) He was a pretty good player. Last Friday, as we watched the news from Tahrir Square, Khaled Sobhy told me some Mubarak stories. A a top-ranked Egyptian in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sobhy was one of the many national team members called in to spar with the president.

Mubarak sometimes came to the pro tournaments at the pyramids, driving across the desert to Giza in a motorcade that left a trailing cloud of dust.

A joke that went around Cairo the last year or two went like this: Mubarak calls up the sheikh of Al-Azhar, the highest Sunni Muslim cleric in Egypt, to ask if there are squash courts in heaven. The sheikh asks for a couple of days to consult the Almighty. Two days later, he calls Mubarak back. “There’s good news and bad news,” he says.

“Give me the good news,”  Mubarak barks.

“Well,” says the sheikh, “there are lots of squash courts in heaven.”

“And the bad news?” asks the president.

“You’ve a match scheduled there in two weeks.”

This morning Mubarak’s squash game came up on Philadelphia radio. Arlen Specter called into 610WIP to talk with Angelo Cataldi about the Phillies (if as Henry James wrote, the two most beautiful words in the Engligh language were “summer afternoon,” the most precious words annually might be “pitchers and catchers report”—which they did today).

After the usual chit-chat about the Phil’s rotation, Cataldi asked the former senator about Mubarak, and Specter said a couple of amazing things. He mentioned that they first met in 1982 in Washington and that Specter said, “I hear you play squash, let’s have a game “and Mubarak told him, “yes, and if I beat you, you give me an extra $100 million.”

Turns out they didn’t get around to playing that time. In fact Specter said that he actually never got to play squash with Mubarak, that he’d call him when he was in Egypt but it never happened. We know Dick Rumsfeld played squash with Mubarak (and boasted, incorrectly, about beating him) but never Specter. The reason why Mubarak avoided the match, Specter speculated this morning, was that he was Jewish.

(For the squash joke, see:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/egyptians-prepare-for-lif…“> http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/egyptians-prepare-for-lif…)

(For the Rumsfeld story, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/washington/24rumsfeld.html)