World No.2 at 23, bedridden a year later. When an insurance company presented him with £250,000 to walk away forever, Peter Marshall chose the one thing he couldn’t live without.
There are decisions in sport that define a legacy: the volley drop at 9-all, the tactical shift mid-match, the choice to retire or return. And then there is the decision Peter Marshall made in the mid-1990s - a decision that had nothing to do with strokes or rallies, and everything to do with who he believed himself to be.
The offer was simple. Brutal, even. If he agreed never to play squash again - never to compete, never to test his limits - he would receive a payout worth around £250,000.
A fortune then and today.
“I think from memory it was something like £250,000,” he recalls, almost off-handedly, as if revisiting a piece of trivia. “But for me, that was one of the easiest decisions I’ve ever had to make.”
This was not a man negotiating the finer points of his pension. This was the world No.2, stalking Jansher Khan’s shadow and preparing to storm the gates. And then his body quit on him.
Chronic fatigue syndrome did what no opponent could do: it reduced him from a world-beater to someone who could barely walk to the end of the street.
It was an illness without clarity, without prognosis, without a timeline. Recovery might take months or years. It might never come. And the insurance clause — signed before he ever imagined needing it — offered him a way out. A dignified retreat. A soft landing for a shattered dream.
All he had to do was give up squash.
But if squash is how you understand yourself, what does it mean to let it go?
“My identity was being a squash player,” he says. “Someone who worked hard. Someone who was super fit. That’s how I thought of myself.”
To sign the form would have been to extinguish the last flicker of hope - the idea that one day, somehow, he might return. It wasn’t just a financial calculation; it was an existential one. What price does a person put on meaning?
So he walked away from the money and chose the harder option: two years out of the sport, two years of uncertainty, and the faint outline of a comeback that even he wasn’t sure he believed in.
Insurance companies traffic in risk. Elite athletes traffic in delusion.
Looking back, he smiles at the absurdity of how “easy” it felt.
“You might have some money, but you’ve stopped your dream,” he says. “You’ve given up everything.”
Squash never paid him what he was worth. But it gave him something money couldn’t: a way back to himself.
To dive deeper into the Peter Marshall story, watch the latest epsiode of the Squash Player Magazine Podcast.
