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.