Azam Khan, 1925-2020, Four-Time British Open Champion by Rob Dinerman
Left to right: Diehl Mateer, Roshan Khan, Hashim Khan, Azam Khan
photo courtesy Gil Mateer
Dateline March 29, 2020
--- DSR is sad to report that Azam Khan, one of the few players to win
both the British Open and North American Open, the two most prestigious
tournaments in the softball and hardball games respectively, passed
away on March 28 at London’s Ealing Hospital. He was 95 years old and
died a week after being diagnosed with the Novel Coronavirus that has
become such a global crisis in recent months.
Azam’s father, Abdullah Khan, the chief steward at a club
in Pakistan where the British officers in charge of policing the
notorious Kyhber Pass would relax by playing squash and other racquet
sports, died in a car accident when Azam was still an infant. His
brother Hashim, 11 years older, became a father figure to Azam during
his formative years. In the early 1950’s, shortly after Hashim won the
first of his seven British Open titles (a record number at the time) in
1951, he invited Azam, who had mostly played tennis rather than squash
to that juncture, to train with him, and by 1953, Azam reached the
first of his seven British Open finals. He eventually took the family’s
mantle from Hashim and won four consecutive British Open titles from
1959-62. The first of those four ended in a 9-1, 0 and 0 final-round
rout of Roshan Khan (whose son, Jahangir, would win the British Open 10
straight years from 1982-91), and after the last of the four-straight,
Azam also won the 1962 North American Open.
Although Azam’s competitive squash career effectively ended when
he ruptured his Achilles tendon later that same year, he earned two
other major distinctions. The first was that he trained Jonah
Barrington and made him into a great squash player (and six-time
British Open champion during the late 1960’s and early 1970’s), and the
second was that he owned and operated the New Grampions Squash Club in
West London for 56 years (from 1958-2014) and was the squash pro there
until he was well in his 70’s. He was the last living representative of
what was a golden era for Pakistani squash players during the 1950’s
and 1960’s. Between them, Hashim, Azam, Roshan and Mohibullah Khan won
the British Open throughout the 13-year period from 1951-63, and for
nine straight of those years (1954-62), two of those Khans faced each
other in the finals. His passing therefore marks the end of one of the
most extraordinary extended family dynasties in the history of sports.
