Long ago I decided squash was not for me. In my mind it was an exclusive sport fancied by prep school boys and men with portfolios. Never mind that a million Americans and 15 million people worldwide now play squash. I knew little about it and just assumed it was a grim indoor substitute for tennis.

This fall I complained to Chris Widney, a cycling companion and the head squash pro at the Printing House Fitness and Racquet Club in the West Village, how bored I get exercising indoors all winter. He suggested I try squash. I explained my stance on the sport. Mr. Widney, a playwright with a flair for the dramatic, said: "Descartes separated the mind and body. Squash brings them back together, kicking and screaming."

When I appeared unconvinced, he took another tack. "Squash is much more physically brutal than tennis," said Mr. Widney, who played both at Fordham University. "After a long point you're a wheezing mess. You can barely lift your arm. And unlike tennis, you never get to rest. You're in continuous anaerobic debt for an hour."

Now he had me. A longtime endurance sports fiend, I couldn't bear to miss out on any form of athletic suffering. I agreed not only to give it a try but also to play in his forthcoming tournament, the Winter Squash Frenzy.

Had I any sense, I would have played twice a week for a month before the competition. Instead, a week before the contest, I arrived at the Printing House club for my first lesson. Once I was inside the confines of the squash court, a brightly lighted 21-by-32-foot white room, Mr. Widney thrust a graphite racquet in my hand, spent about 60 seconds on stroke mechanics and said, "Go hit."

I had expected a bit more instruction, like an explanation of the rules. But Mr. Widney wanted me to hit and run and not get bogged down in the game's X's and O's. "I like to get beginners to chase a ball like a little kid," he later told me. "It forces them back to their primal instincts."

As he headed for the small door in the clear Plexiglas back wall, he said, "I only have one thing to tell you: Keep your eye on the ball."

So much for overcoaching.

Actually, the basics are quite simple. A point begins when the server, standing in one of the service boxes two-thirds of the way down the court, hits the ball to the front wall to rebound into the opposite side of the four-wall court.

Once the ball is in play, you can hit it directly to the front wall, or off either of the side walls or back wall en route to the front wall, as long as it lands above the 17-inch-high piece of tin that runs along the bottom of the front wall.

You gain a point when your shot eludes your opponent. The first player to reach nine points wins. (By comparison, racquetball, which is played on a similar court, uses a racquet with a larger head and a bouncier ball.)

Rallying with another tyro, the first thing I noticed was how little the hollow black ball bounced after it hit the floor. Squash got its name from the ball, which squashes flat when it meets the wall. The sport demands that you sprint, lunge and hit often at the same time.

Having once played a lot of tennis, I had the hand-eye coordination to strike the ball competently, but I was dazzled by the ball ricocheting around the room like a bee on amphetamines.

For the next two hours, I played sparring partner to the D-level contenders that Mr. Widney tossed me in against. (There are four skill levels in squash, from D up to A.) A solid squash player possesses technique, finesse and the ability to anticipate which way the ball will rebound off the wall. Lacking virtually all of these, I did the only thing I could: I raced around the room as if my shorts were on fire. Everyone I played thrashed me, but I couldn't get over how good it felt to whack the ball without worrying about it "going long," the bane of my existence when I played tennis.

But by the end of the night I felt as if my legs had been through a gauntlet. Spotting me gingerly walking up the stairs on the way out, Mr. Widney shouted, "I hope you don't have to sit down tomorrow because you're going to have squash butt!" He turned to Anita Parrondo, a massage therapist at the club, and told her to give me her card.

Two days later I was back, stiff but undaunted.

"Squash is a classic New York game," Mr. Widney said. "It's all about two people fighting over one small piece of real estate."

The goal of the game, he said, is to take control of the "T" in the middle of the court, two-thirds of the way from the front wall. From that spot, where the lines forming the two service boxes meet in a T, you can get to any one place on the court with the fewest steps.

Mr. Widney showed me the four basic shots: the rail, a drive that hugs either side wall; the boast, a shot that hits a side wall before striking the front wall; the cross-court drive, and the drop, a soft shot that dribbles off the front wall like a glass of spilled milk.

Then he gave me a few tips on how to move efficiently around the court, perhaps the worst feature of my crude game.

"In squash," he said, "anticipation and deception are huge."

I said, "I thought you said fitness was huge."

"It is," he said, "especially if you can't anticipate or deceive. Now, go play."

This lesson lasted perhaps 10 minutes.

By the start of the tournament I had played three times. My first opponent, a 5-foot-3-inch female editor who had recently had major knee surgery, treated me like an unsolicited manuscript. In the consolation game I faced a rangy graphic designer. Not only did he beat me in three straight games (we played best out of five), I only won six points total.

I was demoted to the novice division, an invention of Mr. Widney's to give beginners more tournament experience. A lithe dancer who performs as a matador at the Metropolitan Opera slew me in 20 minutes. In the novice consolation finals, my fourth and last match, I squared off against a tall television writer. He wore Clark Kent-style glasses but lacked a superhero's build. In the field of 88 we had established ourselves as the 2 worst.

We're still negotiating the television rights to the match, but I can say this: I won the first two games, 9-5 and 9-7. He stormed back to win the third, 9-2. In the fourth game my superior fitness held sway, and I jumped to an 8-3 lead. But he closed the gap to 8-7 before I recaptured the serve and closed out the match. Victory was mine!

My work done, I relaxed into the role of spectator. Mr. Widney had explained that beer figured prominently in the tradition of the game, which began in the late 1700's in an English prison for debtors and drunkards. I dutifully downed two cups of Brooklyn Lager from the iced keg that sat on the viewing area above the court and watched two scrappy players in the B division semifinal flail away for nearly two hours. Their war of attrition included elements of roller hockey and chess as played by psychopaths. "Grunge squash," whispered a smirking Mr. Widney. "Whoever's standing at the end, wins."

In addition to being a lesson in humility for me and a huge source of amusement for my old friend Mr. Widney, the tournament showed me what I needed to know. That was his plan all along. After the match, Mr. Widney, who was scheduled for shoulder surgery the next day, introduced me to one of the club's other pros, Brett Newton, and said, "Now you are ready to learn."

A few days later I found myself warming up with Mr. Newton, a 31-year-old Australian who'd once been the 18th-ranked player in the world. After several minutes he looked disdainfully at my loopy topspin tennis forehand and told me to attack the ball as if I were skipping a stone across a pond, giving it underspin. Suddenly, my straight drives began exploding off the wall.

For my backhand stroke he had me visualize drawing a saber from its scabbard. Again the change in the ball's trajectory was dramatic. We drilled virtually nonstop, with Mr. Newton hitting everything straight to me. "Keep your gun cocked, mate," he barked, reminding me to run with my racquet back. "No topspin! Let it rip!"

After 30 minutes sweat poured off me, and I was gasping for breath. At the end of the lesson I wobbled to the shower as if I'd been running stadium stairs. "Best workout you can have in an hour," he said. "People who discover this sensation -- I call it the post-squash glow -- get addicted to it."

Now I had strokes! During the next few days, I was surprised by how often I'd thought about squash. The game I thought worthy only of my contempt had snared me: on the martial aspect of battling a rival in a confined space, on the frenetic yet rhythmic dance of two players jockeying for position, on the intense concentration required to track a small black ball around white walls even as your lungs scream for oxygen.

Hammering the hollow ball is a simple tonic that can purge all that ails you. What had begun as a simple alternative to dreary gym workouts was starting to feel dangerously like another sports addiction.