Geneology Of The Khan Family Dynasty
by Rob Dinerman
October
23, 2001
PART I: Hashim the Pioneer
IMPOVERISHED IN PESHAWAR
The province of Peshawar, in Pakistan's northwest frontier, is the last
area one traverses before passing into Afghanistan, and now a focal
point for Afghani refugees fleeing the Taliban-led nation. It is on
several levels a rocky region, ruggedly mountainous and home to the
Pathan tribe, a fiercely independent race of herdsmen, farmers and
warriors known for their keen eyesight and steady hands, and reputed to
be among the finest marksmen in the world.
It was this tribe that ferociously and successfully defended the Khyber
Pass - prized as a gateway to India and its lucrative markets - from
British attempts to control it, this tribe that provided the spirit
that allowed used old muskets and obsolete equipment to repulse a
vastly superior Russian army, and this tribe that spawned probably the
greatest extended-family dynasty in the history of competitive sport.
This latter phenomenon traces its roots to 1916, or thereabouts, when
the wife of Abdullah Khan, Head Steward of the Club (a favorite outpost
for British officers stationed to guard the nearby Khyber Pass), gave
birth to their first son, Hashim by name, in the tiny village of
Nawakille. The Peshawar Club offered a wide range of sports for the
officers' amusement (from lawn tennis, Abdullah's favorite game, to
hard racquets to billiards) but the roofless squash courts commandeered
the youngster Hashim's primary attention when he was just eight years
old, for it was there, perched on the back wall while the officers
played, that he could make a few rupees returning errant shots.
THE BALLBOY
When the oppressive sun became too onerous for the officers to bear, or
when the onset of evening drew them back to the club-house for dinner,
the courts would empty out and Hashim, playing barefoot on cement
floors often in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees F, would knock a
broken or over-used squash ball around. Who would Hashim play? As he
said in his autobiography, it was "Hashim versus Hashim."
His father Adbullah met an untimely death in an auto accident when
Hashim was only 11, but by then Hashim's dedication to squash was so
firmly embedded that he quit school one year later to pursue his dream
of becoming a squash professional.
Eventually, in 1942, he was given a coaching position at the Air Force
Officers' Mess and in 1944, at age 28, he participated in (and won) the
first All-of-India Championship in Bombay. He successfully defended
this title each of the next two years but sports were then suspended
for several years due to the widespread fighting caused by the creation
of a new state, Pakistan, out of those areas of India that were
predominantly Moslem.
THE WORLD STAGE FOR PAKISTAN
The partitioning of India and establishment of Pakistan were complete
by the turn of the decade (with Hashim being appointed squash pro at
the Royal Pakistani Air Force and winning the first Pakistani
Championship in '49), and when Abdul Bari, playing for India, advanced
to the final of the British Open in 1950, some Pakistani government
officials decided that Pakistan should also be represented in this
Wimbledon of squash. Pakistan was a new and poor country, and it fell
to a private citizen to fund the trip to England. Though nearing his
35th birthday, Hashim was selected to play in the 1951 British Open,
which he won in a one-sided 9-5, 9-0, 9-0 final against four -time
winner and Egyptian great, Mahmoud El Karim, whom he also decisively
beat in the '52 British Open final en route to six straight Open titles
and seven overall, the last of these occurring in '58, when Hashim was
an unbelievable 41 years old.
LOTS OF SILVERWARE
In addition to his septet of British Opens, Hashim won the US Open
(later renamed the North American Open and now again called the US
Open) in '56, '57 and '63 --- at age 48! --- as well as three Canadian
Open and five British Pro championships. All this from a man who didn't
enter his first major championship until just months before his 35th
birthday, when most top-flight players in this most grueling of sports
have long since passed their prime. Yet for all the superlatives that
deservedly describe the exploits and longevity of this soft-spoken and
seemingly ageless protagonist, Hashim's greatest legacy arguably lies
not in his own competitive record but rather the role he would come to
play as patriarch of the Khan clan and progenitor of the Khan dynasty.
PART II: Azam, Roshan, Mo
BROTHER AZAM, COUSIN ROSHAN, NEPHEW MO
The first family member to follow Hashim into the top-echelon ranks was
his younger (by ten years) brother Azam, a tennis enthusiast like their
late father, whom Hashim recruited during the summer of 1952, when they
practiced every day under the broiling Peshawar sun. Azam progressed so
quickly under his older sibling's tutelage that he became Hashim's
co-finalist in the 1953 British Open. Though Azam came up one step
short both in that match and in a pair of subsequent five-game British
open finals, he would go on to a sparkling career highlighted by a pair
of Canadian Open crowns, four consecutive British Opens during the
period from 1958-61, and the North American Open in the spring of 1962,
just months before a ruptured Achilles tendon effectively ended Azam's
career.
Azam's injury, fortunately for the continuity of the Khan domination,
came at a time when Hashim's eldest nephew and second family recruit
was ready to complete his evolution from talented prodigy to toughened
champion. During Hashim's younger years on the outdoor courts at
Peshawar, one of his closest friends was a contemporary named
Safirullah, son of the head squash coach at the British Club and, like
Hashim, an aspiring player. Safirullah would eventually become a
British Open semi-finalist (in 1953), but perhaps his greatest
contribution to the Khan dynasty lay in his marriage to one of Hashim's
sisters, for this union produced a pair of male offspring, Mohibullah
and Gul Khan, who would become important figures in the competitive
realm.
Gul for many years held a top-ten ranking in the North American
rankings while the effervescent and lightning-quick Mo would become,
ultimately, one of only five men (all Khans, namely Hashim, Azam and
Mohibullah, plus Roshan and Jahangir, of whom more anon) to win both
the British and North American Opens. After making his inaugural
British Open appearance in 1956 at age 17, the crowd-pleasing
Mohibullah was runner-up to his uncle Azam three times during the
latter's subsequent four-year reign. Therefore, by the time Azam's
Achilles snapped in the autumn of 1962, Mo was fully prepared to step
into the void and win the British Open, which he did in dramatic
fashion several weeks later in mid-December, rallying from a
multiple-match-point 8-1 fourth-game final-round predicament against
Abdullah Taleb to rescue that game 10-8 and roaring through the
decisive fifth 9-6 to garner his first and only British Open title.
Shortly thereafter, Mo met President Kennedy in a ceremony at the White
House that accompanied an exhibition at the Pentagon. This meeting was
fateful---in a famous story many times related by Mo, he secured the
President's assistance in coming to America to become the squash pro at
the Harvard Club of Boston (a position he held for the rest of his
life, which abruptly ended, in fact, in 1995 at age 54 when he suddenly
collapsed and died right in the club after giving a lesson that ended
mere moments before) and spent most of the subsequent year playing and
teaching squash's North American (i.e. hardball) game. This he
speedingly mastered to the point of being runner-up to his uncle Hashim
in the 1963 North American Open, whose 1964, 1965, '1966, and 1968
editions (as well as five straight North American Pro events from
1965-69) Mohibullah would subsequently capture.
Though this change of both environment and emphasis would exact a price
in the form of Mo's straight-set semi-final loss to Michael Oddy in the
1963 British Open, it was undoubtedly a smart career move for this
volatile extrovert, whose exceptional shotmaking skills were perfectly
tailored to the North American game. While the formidable records of
both Hashim and Azam were predicated on solid error-free play and
relentless retrieving, Mohibullah evinced a crowd-pleasing flair for
the spectacular reminiscent not of his pair of famous uncles but rather
of his second cousin Roshan, husband of Safirullah's sister and an
extremely stylish shotmaker who as both player and parent would hold an
absolutely crucial position in the championship genealogy of the Khan
dynasty.
In addition to breaking Hashim's six-year hold on the British Open and
winning the event in 1957, Roshan won two Canadian Opens and took the
U. S. Open three times during the four-year stretch from 1958-61, even
though he was one of the few squash-champion Khans who never left
Pakistan, and hence had little opportunity to familiarize himself with
the hardball game.
Although Roshan was less fit than Hashim, Azam, and Mo (his three
competitive contemporaries, with this foursome filling the slots in the
semis of the 1959 British Open) and although his suspect conditioning
level was further sapped by a nagging knee injury incurred in 1957, he
was renowned for his smoothness and racquet artistry, and there were
many respected observers of that era who contend that Roshan at his
best played the North American game at the highest level of all during
his brief but incandescent prime.
This incandescence Roshan would pass on to his talented sons, the
star-crossed Torsam and the superstar Jahangir, on whom we will focus
later in this chronicle. The brevity of Roshan's career, on the other
hand, was a less welcome feature whose genesis is a source of some
bitterness for Roshan and some unease within the family spectrum.
Roshan's competitive excellence, in retrospect, should have been clear
by 1949, when as a precocious teenager he became runner-up to Hashim at
the inaugural Pakistan open, which Roshan then proceeded to win for
three straight years from 1951-53. Yet throughout the early 1950's, he
languished in Peshawar while others were granted trips to England and
other prestigious competitive opportunities frequently denied him.
A series of tournaments and exhibitions arranged mainly to showcase
Roshan's skills repeatedly fell through, causing an embittered and
discouraged Roshan to accuse the others of "ducking" him and to
seriously consider quitting squash. Even when that trio of consecutive
Pakistani titles finally guaranteed him an invitation to the British
Open in 1954, Roshan never quite escaped from the "outsider" status he
had by then internalized. This distance was no doubt part environmental
(he came from the relatively urbane Rawalpendi rather than the exacting
Peshawar), part familial (he was a family member only by marriage), and
part a natural and universal outgrowth of interacting personalities.
Though Roshan drew his own unhappy inferences from the way Hashim,
Azam, and Mohibullah Khan tended to practice exclusively with each
other, for example, and rarely if ever with him prior to a big
tournament, it seems less likely that this trio was "practicing to beat
me," as Roshan once complained, than that these brothers and their
free-spirited nephew simply felt more at ease in each other's company
on and off the court than they did with others, including Roshan. it
seems plausible to interpret this entire phenomenon as being borne more
of misunderstanding than enmity, a misunderstanding whose roots are
probably deeply ingrained in the depths of Pathan culture.
So too is the probable basis of another phenomenon engendered during
that late 50's era, namely the "elder relative" code that some felt
"allowed" Hashim to defeat Azam, and Hashim and Azam to defeat
Mohibullah, for a few years beyond the point when the aging process and
laws of natural selection might have otherwise ordained. In
scrutinizing the draw sheets of that period, one does come across a
number of instances --- as when Hashim "out- lasted" the much-younger
Azam 9-7 in the fifth of the 1955 British Open final, or when Azam
"rallied" from 1-2 down against Mo in the finals of the British Opens
of both 1960 and 1961 --- in which one could possibly divine the
workings of such a principle.
Yet to this writer, at least, it seems both untrue and ungenerous to
reach this interpretation, at least in its overt form. Respect for
one's elders has always been a powerful tenet of the Pathan culture and
an important unifying element in community interaction; what therefore
seems most plausible is that this theme was operating, though on a
subconscious level, in those memorable squash matches among family
members as they vied for the sport's most treasured trophies.
PART III: Sharif and Jahangir
Mohibullah Khan's mid-sixties' domination of the North American game
was abruptly terminated by the arrival onto the competitive scenario of
Sharif Khan, the eldest of Hashim's 12 children, who bore the double
burden of being both the first of Hashim's seven boys and of having to
deal with the pressure of being sent at age 11 to England's Millfield
Prep School, 12,000 miles from his native Nawakille, and with no
knowledge of the language or multi-front challenges that awaited him.
Sharif eventually grew into this formidable environment, becoming both
a fine student and a standout squash player, as evidenced by his
victories in both the Drysdale Cup (considered then as now the
unofficial World Junior Championship) and the Somerset County Men's A
title, which Sharif won at age 13, thereby earning for himself and his
classmates a day off from school in celebration.
Sharif's main celebratory achievements, of course, would come more than
a decade later, and on North American soil, where he won the North
American Open (NAO) a record 12 times in the 13-year period from
1969-81 (with 15 straight NAO finals from 1968-82) and added nine WPSA
Championship titles, both of which far eclipse the totals reached by
Sharif's closest statistical pursuers.
Sharif's final North American crown, in 1981, came at the last-round
expense of his younger brother Aziz, who along with another brother
Liaqat (whose name was Americanized to Charlie) held a WPSA top-ten
ranking throughout the late 1970's and early 1980's. A fourth brother,
Gulmast, always possessed sharp racquetwork, and with the improvement
in recent years of his conditioning level he has thrived in age-group
North American softball competition, reaching in fact the final of the
World Masters 45 -and-over competition in Portland Oregon in the summer
of 1999, where he met brother Charlie.
Probably due more to fortuitous happenstance than meticulous
orchestration, it was just as Sharif's long supremacy atop the North
American game was coming to a close that across the Atlantic another
product of the Khan family, and quite possibly the greatest of them
all, was rising to the fore. Jahangir Khan was Roshan's youngest son
and, early on, a sickly child who needed several hernia operations and
lived in the shadow of his charismatic older brother Torsam. Roshan,
who remained in Pakistan after his playing days were over, brought up
his own two sons and also became a surrogate father to Rehmatullah and
Amanullah, whom Roshan's older brother Nasrullah left behind when
Nasrullah moved to London, where he is credited with coaching Jonah
Barrington to the six British Opens Barrington won.
All four of Roshan's young charges developed swiftly (in Jahangir's
case after he outgrew his boyhood maladies) and by autumn of 179 Torsam
had attained the # 13 world ranking and been elected to the ISPA
Presidency. That November, at age 27 and seemingly in the flower of
health, Torsam suffered a fatal heart attack during a tournament match,
sending a devastated 15-yr-old Jahangir into a period of extended
mourning. When the shattered youngster had somewhat recovered, his
father Roshan (whose own older brother Nasrullah had passed away two
years earlier) decided to entrust his further development to the hands
of Jahangir's 29-year-old cousin Rehmatullah (better known as Rehmat),
who graciously agreed to sacrifice his own career and took Jahangir
into his home in London.
If the unequalled greatness Jahangir would ultimately attain was
presaged right at birth.by his name (Jahangir being the Urdu expression
for "Conqueror of the entire World"), then it must be said that a
number of other factors were brought to bear as well in the evolution
of this darkly handsome paragon. Rehmat's coaching --- the result of
both his father Nasrullah's coaching of Barrington and some coaching
Rehmat had received in return from a grateful Jonah---was
unquestionably a critical and often under- rated element, as was the
friendly nurturant home environment that Rehmat and his English wife
Josie provided for Jahangir, who trained at the Wembley Squash Centre,
where Rehmat was the head professional.
Barrington's influence on the methods Rehmat applied to Jahangir's
development were especially evident in the areas of conditioning and
off-court training, a well-known Australian custom heretofore eschewed
by the Pakistani players, who had always relied on simply playing
squash to reach their top form. Rehmat's ability to meld these
different approaches gave Jahangir the stamina base his father Roshan
had always lacked complemented by the Roshan-like racquet skills he
inherited, which praiseworthy parlay was powerfully fuelled by an
overwhelming motivation derived of the memories of both his deceased
brother (to whose memory Jahangir dedicated his entire career) and the
lingering frustrations of his father's partially thwarted aspirations,
which Jahangir swore he would redeem.
The results of this marvelous medley of motifs were, in a word,
awesome. During the decade from 1982-91, Jahangir won all ten British
Opens (eclipsing Geoff Hunt's record of eight and shattering the mark
of six, held by three men, for consecutive titles); played in a pair
each of Canadian and North American Opens, winning all four of these
major hardball titles; went five- plus years without losing a single
match; and in 1985 matched Hashim's 1957 feat of winning both the North
American and British Opens in the same season.
In fact, Jahangir's "double" in the spring of 1985 was all the more
astonishing for occurring in a virtually irreducible time frame; less
than 24 hours after thrashing Chris Dittmar in the British Open final,
Jahangir was on court in midtown Manhattan for his first-round North
American Open match (against as it happens, Hashim's second son
Gulmast,) having Concorded across the Atlantic during the brief
interim, in what has to have been the single most ambitious project in
the history of squash.
Within one extraordinary six-day stretch in early May, Jahangir
symbolized his double domination of squash by winning both finals, a
transcontinental accomplishment that required him to rise superior not
only on his highly talented opponents but also to such obstacles as
fatigue, letdown, jet lag, and the adjustment problems implicit in so
speedy a switch between these highly differing games.
PART IV: Towards the Future
Although Jahangir finally relinquished his ten-year British Open grip
to Jansher Khan (also a Khan and from Nawakille, though not related to
the family we have been discussing), it was due to a back injury that
required his withdrawal rather than an on-court defeat, though by this
time the extraordinary conditioning effort expended by the last and
greatest of the Khan family standard-bearers had made him increasingly
vulnerable to this kind of attritional condition.
By this early 1990's juncture, the remarkable warriors of this extended
clan had between them won a total of 23 British Opens, 11 Canadian
Opens, 22 North American Opens and 19 WPSA Championships. Through
several family generations and extending over nearly half a century,
they had banded together, passed the mantle with exquisite timing and
produced a run of major championships that, barring an absolute
miracle, will never even be approached, much less equalled.
Unfortunately, by this time as well, the next generation, almost all of
whom had been born in America, had become so Americanized that the
squash grind that their forbears had embraced so passionately did not
seem nearly as appealing to them.
Mo's oldest son, Sakhi, did manage to win the '96 WPSA Teaching Pro
event, and became the pro at the Cambridge Racquet Club near MIT
(setting up a website, Khansquash.com, that sells a racquet line with
the family name), but throughout the past decade no one has really
arisen to carry on the family tradition in PSA competition.
Similarly Pakistan as a whole, no doubt spoiled by the success enjoyed
by Jahangir and later by Jansher Khan (whose total of six British Opens
and nine World titles nearly matches Jahangir's tallies of 10 and 6
respectively), completely abdicated their long-standing commitment to
encourage junior development, with the almost unbelievable result that,
once Jansher's run ended in the late 1990's, there wasn't a single
Pakistani ranked in the top 50 of the PSA standings!
Jahangir, who had seen this situation looming and been
uncharacteristically critical of the Pakistani squash federation as it
became imminent, was recently named Sports Minister in an attempt to
right matters and develop some world-class talent. His efforts in this
regard have already borne recent fruit with the good progress in the
2001 Qatar Open of Shahid Zaman (son of the great Pakistani shotmaker
Qamar), who defeated World #6 Australian star Paul Price in the first
round, and his run in the 2001 World Challenge in Melbourne
Zaman's younger brother Mansoor is also starting to emerge as a notable
talent, as is Azam's grand-daughter Carla Khan, 22, whose ranking is
starting to rise on the WISPA women's professional tour, which Moslem
women had been discouraged from competing on until recently. These
recent developments are an encouraging sign, but nothing that happens
henceforth will be able to emulate the family run begun by Hashim in
the late 1940's and extending all the way through the ending of
Jahangir's playing reign in the early 1990's. Bonded by the gritty
roots of their Pathan past, that Khan dynasty prospered and perpetuated
itself with a degree of excellence and continuity that deserve to be
admiringly remembered as one of the most extraordinary extended
achievements in the history of professional sports.