The North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan is infamous today for being a forlorn battlefield littered with the remains of missiles, bombs and fallen soldiers.
It represents the senselessness of man-made violence and a people trapped on the wrong side of a self-authored history.
Down the valley of the glorious Khyber Pass, representing the last path to the mountainous regions of the Afghan border, there lies a village called Nawakille which for decades sequentially produced and sent forth Pakistan’s greatest gifts to the athletic world.
Sporting dynasties are best characterized by two crucial tenets – longevity and dominance . They possess an aura of invincibility that is anything but sporadic.
The longer the dominance, the greater the lure and this is exactly why the legend of the Khans remains the greatest untold story of a dynasty in the history of sport.
Most sports require a precarious blend of various athletic attributes. Conventional sports such as football value the conventional characteristics such as speed, stamina and endurance.
Marathon runners prize endurance and stamina; sprinters need power and speed. Rugby players need speed as well as strength – a combination which defines an athlete’s “ability to explode.”
A Formula One driver requires lightning fast reflexes while golfers rely on immense mental strength as well as muscle endurance.
Squash, much like tennis, requires all of the above.
It requires aerobic fitness to survive two hours of scampering around a closed court at a frenetic pace.
It requires an unparalleled anaerobic ability to sprint forward, backward and sideways for minutes and then do it all over again.
It requires specific muscle endurance to hit the same shot repeatedly at a three second interval up to 20 times. And it requires a quality reflex mechanism to play a small ball travelling at speeds close to 200 kilometers an hour.
The British Empire gave the sporting world enough that we hold dear. They gave us Golf in 1502; Cricket in 1787, Tennis in 1859, Hockey in 1860, Football in 1863 and Rugby in 1871 just to name a few.
And though the French theoretically "invented" the game of squash, it was the British who developed it, popularized it and spread it to the world. Brazil would do well to gift them a Jules Rimet trophy, Australia could give up a Cricket World Cup with a few Ashes trophies thrown in as bonus and perhaps Sampras or Federer could donate a few Wimbledons.
No nation could ever be more deserving.
The story of the Khans however, does not begin with its most well known - Jahangir. It ends with him.
To delve deeper into the past and trace his lineage we must go back a century when India and Pakistan were one and the British had built squash courts to entertain their officers while they served the empire.
To Be Continued.....
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