Newly
Discovered WPSA Film Disproves Commonly Accepted Belief About The
Length Of Jahangir Khan’s Legendary Winning
Streak by Rob Dinerman Dateline January 5th
---- The recently resurfaced 33-minute video chronicling the 1984-85
World Professional Squash Association (WPSA) hardball tour, in addition
to providing an enormously entertaining and thought-provoking viewing
experience on multiple levels, is significant as well for the manner in
which it clearly refutes the almost universally accepted perception
throughout the squash community that Jahangir Khan went undefeated
between his 1981 British Open final-round loss to Geoff Hunt in April
of that year and his October 1986 World Open final-round loss to Ross
Norman five and a half years later. Produced by former WPSA Executive
Director Bob French and sponsored by Xerox Canada, one of that tour’s
leading sponsors, the film was discovered this past autumn by David
Carr of McWIL Squash Courts, who sent it to early-1980’s WPSA President
Clive Caldwell, who then arranged to convert the original film to a
video format that allowed it to be viewed online.
As a long-time WPSA tour player who also had the privilege of serving
as the official writer for the WPSA for more than a decade, I was
thrilled to watch the wonderfully-presented footage of matches from
that season, and even more so to again witness the elegance of Mario
Sanchez, the dignity and sleekness of Jahangir Khan, the lethal stroke
production of Ned Edwards, Todd Binns and John Nimick, the classic
swing preparation of Caldwell, the extraordinary athleticism of the
late Tom Page and the gentle, soft-spoken manner (belying his IRON
competitive will) of Mark Talbott, all on full display. One of the most
memorable and detailed sequences of the video was the manner in which
it depicted the highlight of Talbott’s career, when, after losing
decisively to Khan throughout the previous season, he scored a
breakthrough win against him, 18-16 in the fifth, in November 1984 in
the final of that year’s Boston Open at the Cyclorama, just a few
blocks from where Khan had overwhelmed Talbott, 15-8, 8 and 5, at the
University Club of Boston in the ’83 final. The film shows Khan tinning
a backhand boast on the last point and enduring the (for
him) extremely rare experience of being on the losing end of the
handshake, as the normally undemonstrative Talbott exultantly throws
his arms in the air and walks into a prolonged embrace with his father
just outside the doorway of the court.
Coincidentally, just a day or two after watching the WPSA video, I
received an email from a prominent squash figure who wrote to ask me a
few questions about Khan’s “five-year unbeaten streak.” It made me
immediately flash back to that sequence and caused me to wonder (both
to myself and in my rather forceful emailed response) how anyone could
say that Khan had gone undefeated from 1981-86 when I had just seen the
film of his loss to Talbott in November 1984, a full 23 months before
Norman defeated him. Nor was the Talbott match in Boston the only, or
first, loss that Khan sustained in WPSA competition either --- seven
months earlier, in April 1984, Sanchez had pinned a three games to love
number on him in the semifinals of the Canadian Pro championships at
the Skyline Club in suburban Toronto. These losses did not come when
Khan was just learning the hardball game or in his first few WPSA
tournaments. On the contrary, they both occurred right in the middle of
his dominant hardball (and softball) stretch: at the time of his loss
to Talbott at the Cyclorama, Khan was the reigning Boston Open, WPSA
Championships and North American Open champion.
I am not sure why when tennis star Rafael Nadal won a record 81
straight matches on clay in 2006-2007 while losing several matches on
grass and on hard courts during that time, the tennis literature
correctly identifies his winning skein as being limited to clay-court
tournaments, yet when Jahangir Khan went undefeated in softball from
April 1981 to October 1986 while losing several hardball matches during
that period, the squash literature (as well as a notation in the
Guinness Book Of Records) IN-correctly fails to identify his winning
streak as being limited to softball tournaments and instead declares
that he never lost a match for five and a half years with no qualifier
attached. The simple statistical reality is that Khan’s undefeated run
lasted five and a half years IN SOFTBALL but only three years overall,
i.e., from the Hunt match in April 1981 to the Sanchez match in April
1984.
It wasn’t like Khan was just dabbling in
hardball or playing a few WPSA events as a lark. Anyone watching the
video, in which he is quoted several times, can see how hard (and well)
he played and how serious and dedicated a commitment he made to the
WPSA hardball tour, on which he competed in well over a dozen WPSA
sanctioned ranking tournaments during three mid-1980’s seasons,
compiling records of 23-1 in 1983-84, 15-1 in 1984-85 and 14-0 in
1985-86, and capturing most of the tour’s major titles and a large
portion of its prize money. In the process of so doing, he twice
received the WPSA Player Of The Year Award, transformed the competitive
landscape, went a dominant 10-1 (all in finals) against the redoubtable
Talbott and fully made good on his stated mission to “unify the title”
by becoming the undisputed best player in the world in both squash
disciplines. Indeed, in May 1985, Khan took on --- and conquered ---
perhaps the most ambitious challenge in the history of squash. That
year the British Open and North American Open, the two most prestigious
championships in softball and hardball squash respectively, were held
in so compressed a time frame that the morning after Khan’s
four-game British Open final-round win over Chris Dittmar, he had to
board a Concorde jet and fly to New York, landing just in time for his
first-round match that night.
Four days later,
Khan, after rallying from two-games-to-one down against Page in the
quarterfinals and dispatching Edwards in the semis, straight-gamed
Steve Bowditch (a 3-2 semifinal winner over Talbott) to earn his second
North American Open crown in as many attempts, thereby rising superior
to fatigue, letdown, jet lag and the best that both professional
circuits had to offer. Khan has always said about the extraordinary
“double” he accomplished that the Page match, an air-sucking,
rubber-burning punch-out that many spectators have insisted was the
highest-level squash they had ever witnessed, was by far the
hardest-earned of his 10 victories during that hectic and
history-making fortnight. By any measurement, Khan was a dominant
player during his fairly brief but incandescent time on the WPSA
hardball tour, but that was not true to as pronounced a degree as was
the case on the softball tour. He was pushed several times to five
games in his hardball matches and, as the video (which also alluded to
the Sanchez loss) proves, he lost several times to top-tier WPSA
players in the late stages of important tournaments. Interestingly,
Khan always easily won his hardball matches against the softball
players (Bowditch, Dittmar and Hiddy Jahan among them) who played on
the WPSA tour, who were likely psyched out by what he had done to them
in softball, but when he went up against top WPSA players in WPSA
events, there were several times when he had as much, or more, than he
could handle. The Sanchez and Talbott results were very much
under-reported and, worse, under-respected at the time, to a degree
that, as noted, has caused them to have been widely ignored in modern
documentation of squash’s history, almost as if they had never
happened. This essay is an attempt to rectify those oversights, whether
they have been intentional or accidental, and to set the record
straight.
Neither Khan’s British Open/North
American double nor his 10-straight British Open titles (from 1982-91)
will ever be approached, let alone equaled, and few would dispute his
standing as the greatest squash player of all time, a status that is
ENHANCED, rather than lessened, by what he achieved in hardball
competition. A few blemishes on an otherwise spotless slate over so
prolonged a time frame in no way diminishes either Khan’s shining
legacy or the vision and courage he showed in successfully seeking
supremacy in both forms of the sport. Every aspect of his competitive
record is worthy of a degree of respect that borders on reverence. It
is also worthy of being presented with a level of accuracy that has
been lacking over the years, both in fact and in the public perception.
Hopefully going forward the empirical truth --- that Jahangir Khan went
undefeated for three years overall in professional squash and for five
and a half years in softball competition – will displace the myth that
has been allowed to take hold for far too long.
