Excerpt from The Sheriff of Squash: The Life and Times of Sharif Khan
ROB
The summer of 1980 was a momentous time for professional squash in
North America, as an official tour, which had been discussed ever since
the Globe & Mail article three years earlier, was finally scheduled
for the upcoming 1980-81 season, due largely to the promotional efforts
of WPSA President Caldwell, who from the outset of his Presidency two
years earlier had made it a stated priority to establish a viable
professional tour as the “Window Of The Sport”, and Bob French, a
Canadian-born Xerox salesman who had been dabbling in the promotion of
squash for several years. Remarkably, as a result of their unrelenting
efforts there were 20 singles (and two doubles) tournaments on the
1980-81 schedule, a combination of returning events along with nearly a
dozen new sites in places like Toledo, Atlantic City, Cleveland,
Kitchener (a suburb of Toronto), Washington, San Francisco, Detroit,
Minnesota and even Guatemala City. An impressive WPSA Pro Tour Program,
prominently including a full-page ad in which Slazenger promoted the
Sharif Khan racquet (an endorsement that had been arranged by the
well-known sports marketing firm IMG in the late-1970’s and that lasted
into the early-1990’s), was disseminated at every WPSA tour site,
containing player profiles, historical information and lengthy feature
pieces as part of an emphatic message that professional squash had
officially arrived in North America.
This major expansion, which included the establishment of
an office in downtown Toronto and the hiring of several staff members
to run it, was due to a confluence of additional intertwined events,
among them the growing number of contending players, the degree to
which squash as a whole was flourishing during this
late-1970’s/early-1980’s time frame, the rapidly increasing number of
commercial clubs, five of which would be hosting new sites that season,
the presence of the monthly publication Squash News (which began in
January 1978) and the willingness of several squash-related businesses
(including Spalding, a manufacturer of squash racquets and equipment,
Merco-Seamco, maker of the official ball of the tour, and the Bata
Corporation, which produced squash clothing and accessories) to become
involved as official sponsors of the tour. Chief among the reasons
spurring the formation of this tour as well was the popularity of and
admiration for Sharif Khan, who throughout the mid-and late-1970’s had
constantly played in every tournament and exhibition match he could,
even those with low purses, on the theory that the more he appeared,
the more he could promote and raise the profile of the game. Just as
Barrington is rightly credited with having brought the international
game from the amateur to the professional level with his own career,
his administrative work and his tireless promotion, including the
Circus and other tours which attracted corporate sponsors to the game,
so Sharif filled a similar vital role in elevating the North American
hardball game to the professional entity it became during the
early-1980’s.
Interestingly, although to a large extent the
arrival of a legitimate tour was a by-product of and hence a tribute to
Sharif’s tireless decade-long promotional efforts, and although he
agreed to serve as a member of the newly-forming WPSA Tour Committee,
he viewed these developments with a mixture of both anticipation and
also trepidation. The whole scenario was rife with conflicts of
interest --- as one of several significant examples, the
newly-installed WPSA Tour Commissioner French had operated as President
Caldwell’s agent for the previous few years --- and Sharif was aware
that a number of his money-making opportunities, like the paid
exhibition matches that he sometimes arranged with the Tournament
Chairs to play at a host club in the day or two prior to the start of a
pro event, might be imperiled by the ground rules established by the
new governing body.
The inaugural 1980-81 tour itself (of which Hashim was
named its Honorary Chairman) was immensely eventful and exciting, with
five different tournament winners (Tom Page, Stu Goldstein, Sharif,
Michael Desaulniers and Clive Caldwell) having emerged even before
Christmas, beginning right with the opening event at the Ringe Courts,
where Page rocked the squash world with consecutive wins over Aziz
Khan, Sanchez, Sharif and Caldwell to record his first and only WPSA
career ranking-tournament singles title. At the next stop in Rochester,
he let a triple-match-point get away and lost, 18-17 in the fifth, in
the semis to Sanchez. In the draw’s top half, a rejuvenated Goldstein
won consecutive five-game matches vs. Desaulniers and Sharif, then
out-played Sanchez 3-0 in the final. Sharif then won three straight
tournaments --- in Kitchener, Cleveland and Montreal --- lost a
simultaneous-match-ball Boston Open quarterfinal to Mark Alger (who
would win the U. S. Nationals a few months later) on a bad tin on the
final exchange, but then took three of the next four events.
However, when the tour resumed shortly after the Christmas
holiday break, Desaulniers erupted on a red-hot streak that lasted for
several months, including throughout what appeared to be a permanently
defining stretch of the season and of the state going forward of the
WPSA pecking order as a whole that occurred during the first 16 days of
February on consecutive weekends in the mid-west. Having previously
dealt in tactical weaponry and psychological warfare during his
recent-years rivalry with Niederhoffer, the issue for Sharif in
attempting to cope with the Desaulniers challenge at this stage of
their respective careers was more one of physical survival. Michael’s
blinding speed, hyperactive personality and relentless attacking style
enabled him to create an energy zone that caused meltdowns in his
opposition. Playing an entire match at his pace was akin to playing
basketball against a full-court press or perhaps tending goal against a
two-man power play in hockey. Though Sharif himself for most of his
career had thrived on picking up the pace, it must be remembered that
Desaulniers was 23 when he turned pro in the spring of 1980, while
Sharif, even by his own at-the-time undocumented admission, was right
on the cusp of his 35th birthday as the decade of the 1980’s began.
If this chronological disparity brought understandable
stamina and firepower advantages to the young Canadian superstar, its
true influence upon the character of their burgeoning rivalry lies more
significantly in the deeper issues it raised between the two athletes
and for the viewing squash audience. For in the inevitability of the
impending and fast-approaching Desaulniers takeover, Sharif was forced
at last to deal head-on with the terror that lurks behind the dream of
becoming an elite professional athlete, the terror that accompanies the
frightening unknowns which the end brings. In a way, it is the fate of
the champion athlete, like that of the heroic warrior, to receive
rewards and applause simultaneously with the means of their own
destruction. What both must eventually confront is the other, darker
side of the Faustian bargain; an accelerating awareness that he must
live out all the rest of his days knowing that he can never recapture
the exhilaration of those fleeting years of intensified youth. It is a
powerful augury of the larger mortality that eventually claims us all.
And throughout the winter of 1981 Desaulniers mercilessly hammered this
painful point home to his valiant adversary with a ruthless finality
that no one before him had ever been able to match.
During the first half of February, the pair met in the
finals of three tournaments in as many weekends --- Minnesota, Toronto
and Detroit --- with Desaulniers winning first in a fifth-game overtime
(18-16), then in a regulation fifth game (15-10) and finally 15-10 in
the fourth, his margin of victory slightly expanding with each
successful salvo. The middle of these was the most important, both for
bringing Desaulniers his first (and only) WPSA Championship and for the
exact statistical deadlock that existed in the rankings coming into the
tournament. Desaulniers would thus leave Sharif’s home city in
possession of both this major title and the No. 1 ranking position,
which Sharif, incredibly, had held uninterrupted ever since the end of
the 1968-69 season, a period of almost 12 years!
Desaulniers, who would consolidate his lead both the
following week in Detroit and one month later in San Francisco, was on
his way to the first of two Player Of The Year Awards. But Sharif, even
though slightly past his prime by then, was one of the few who grasped
the fact that the same full throttle that impelled Michael’s game could
also be made to imperil it, in the form of tinny patches and impetuous
shot selection against a slower pace. He played with such furious
intensity that he sometimes burned himself out, in contrast to Sharif,
who possessed a unique ability to ramp up the pace while still being
relaxed enough to “regulate” his aggressiveness and avoid exhausting
his energy supply. Several other players, most notably the methodical,
rock-solid veteran Caldwell, also spotted this vulnerability on
Desaulniers’s part, which that spring contributed to a brief slump and
enabled Sharif with a strong spring-time surge to come away with yet
another North American Open title as well as the top season-end
ranking, both for the final time. The seeds for Sharif’s 12th Open
crown in 13 years may have been sown the prior weekend at the inaugural
Washington DC Boodles Gin Open, held at the brand-new Capitol Hill
Squash Club, where WPSA tour rookie Mark Talbott pulled off the most
noteworthy performance of the season with a quartet of wins over,
sequentially, Caldwell, Goldstein, Desaulniers and Sharif to win the
tournament.
Clearly rattled by his unexpected semifinal loss in
Washington, Desaulniers was knocked off, in straight sets no less, in
the quarterfinals of the North American Open at the Toronto Squash Club
by Sharif’s immensely talented younger brother Aziz, who then capped
off the best day of his career by out-lasting Goldstein in five games
in the semis (the fifth straight five-game loss that Goldstein
sustained in this tournament), creating a brother-vs.-brother final
which Sharif (who had defeated Anderson in the bottom-half semi)
dominated from start to finish. It was his sixth straight triumph in
this premier tournament in hardball squash, over his sixth different
final-round opponent during that span (Niederhoffer in ’76, Hunt in
’77, Caldwell in ’78, Anderson in ’79, Desaulniers in ’80 and Aziz in
’81), a graphic tribute in its own right to the magnitude of Sharif’s
accomplishment.
As it happens, Aziz’s wife at the time, Debbie Van
Kiekebelt, a gold-medalist in the pentathlon at both the 1971 Pan
American Games and the 1972 Olympic Games who was named Canadian Woman
Athlete Of The Year for 1972 and later became Canada’s first female
sports broadcaster, had been hired to announce the final along with a
squash aficionado. The broadcast became a bit awkward as the score grew
in Sharif’s favor and towards the end she became increasingly critical
of Sharif’s forcefully aggressive play against her husband.
Prior to the start of play that weekend the Tournament
Committee, chaired by long-time squash aficionado Dave Hetherington,
contacted the Estate of Ned Bigelow, a legendary American squash
benefactor who had donated a silver cigar box as the permanent trophy
when this event began in 1954, to ask it’s permission to “retire” the
trophy and present it to Sharif if he won to commemorate his having
earned a dozen titles. The Committee offered to purchase another
permanent trophy to replace the one that it would be giving to Sharif.
There was some controversy --- a few USSRA “purists” who disliked the
Khan family, disliked the pros and felt that squash should remain as
lily-white and amateur-oriented as possible, argued that Mr. Bigelow
“would be turning in his grave” and lobbied as strenuously as possible
to prevent this gesture from being authorized, even warning without any
basis that Sharif would sell the cigar box for profit if it were
entrusted to him --- but ultimately permission was granted by the
Estate and the cigar box continues to have an honored place in Sharif’s
suburban-Toronto home.
SHARIF
Back in my stride, January ’76, I down Niederhoffer 3
games to nil right in his home town in New York City. Then 1977
through 1981 a North American victory and title each year, even though
the hounds are always at the door and this aging body is feeling the
ravages of time ticking much more than my opponents are allowed to
see. Every year it’s a new challenger, the ‘new kid on the
block’. Surely this will be the end of Sharif’s glory
days, but I do not concede easily. In late ’76 as the New Year
approaches, I am only too aware of the formidable opponent on the
horizon in Australia’s Geoff Hunt. Hunt has been making cannon
fodder of all and sundry on the North American scene. Champion of
the international softball game, he is superbly fit and has a range of
racquet and mobility skills to match. His aim is to beat us at
hardball and etch the superiority of the international game into his
belt as winner of the North American Open. This is constantly on my
mind in late ’76 and I go to Denver and some of the south western
states to train like I haven’t trained since the Barrington
Circus. My strategy is ‘fitness is king’. I am like Ali
training in Pennsylvania in his prime, everything is geared to the
January bout in Philadelphia.
Having reached the finals, I am tired but pleasantly
surprised that I am up two games to one in the fourth and I have a
commanding lead in what can be the match winner. “Send him back to
Australia with one photo finish shot” that’s my mantra.“Send him back
to Australia with the hardball up his ass!” that’s my disparaging
mental frame.”Let him remember this shot for now and for all time” I am
riding my victory over the finish line even before it’s won. But that
three wall nick just wouldn’t materialize. Each time I played the
shot Hunt was right there to pick it up…impossible I thought. Can
you imagine my stubbornness to keep playing that shot as his score grew
perilously close to a tie…..then ‘possible’ game and if then a fifth
game to follow.. all bets are off. Have you ever seen a perfect
tennis shot, a perfect golf hole in one, a perfect race run? That
beautiful ball hit the three walls, the nick and rolled finally out of
play along the floor for 15-13 and my win. At no time have
I ever been so mesmerized by my own shot, nor have I ever been so
puerile and thick-headed to stick with it.
Of course many other matches are memorable in that
six-year sequence, during which I was matched with great and hungry
opponents in Michael Desaulniers from Montreal, my arch-nemesis Clive
Caldwell of Toronto and the wonderful and affable Gord Anderson, also
of Toronto. But besides the Hunt match, the other that leaves
such a lasting impression is 1981, versus brother Aziz Khan. To say
this was history would be an understatement but, as siblings, don’t we
all have history, good and bad, often well intentioned and sometimes
mean spirited. In any case, after plowing
through the draw that North American tournament of 1981, it was clear
that in the final match brother would be meeting brother on the field
of battle. Add to that, home town advantage for both of us, the
anticipation of my twelfth title in thirteen years and arrangements
made to retire the historical Bigelow trophy to me if I won, this final
match had a great deal riding on it. Names won’t be named and I
doubt any involvement on the part of my brotherly opponent, but two
calls came in suggesting that I consider a certain outcome in his
favor. The argument was that this may be his big chance to
prove himself at this level, and that I had won enough of these titles
to retire this one with satisfaction.
“Can’t do that, I’ll lose graciously (well, somewhat graciously) if I
lose, but he has to be ready to take it for himself because I’m not
ready to concede yet. That’s the way Hashim played it, that’s the
way Mohibullah played it and that’s the way I’ll play it.” These
titanic battles always end bittersweet, I came out the victor, sweet
for me; whilst beating my brother, or my cousin, or my father felt much
less satisfying.
