16 ZAGMAG Issue 01, November 2009
skills. “He does things with a racquet that just make you want to play squash,” acknowledges Nicol. When Power was a young boy and the family was living in Montreal, his father would pull him out of school and they’d drive to Toronto to watch the top players who were coming through for tournaments. Thus did Jonathon watch and model and mimic - his preferred method of learning. He soaked up Australian Brett Martin and Kiwi Ross Norman and the Pakistani Jahangir Khan, but in the end developed a style all his own. The difference between a top club player and a Jonathon Power is hard to appreciate just by watching each of them hit. Oddly, framed by a court thirty-two feet long by twenty-one feet wide, really mediocre players can seem more dynamic than the pros. The dentists and accountants - guys with barely reconstructed tennis or racquetball swings who do scary things like turn and play the ball directly at their covering opponent saying “Coming around!” - are obviously working out there. They skid on their own sweat and sport raspberries on their naked butts in the shower room afterwards. The top pros, by contrast, hardly seem to be running at all - they just shark around the “T” in the middle of the court, drifting, finning, conserving energy. From some angles, they look like a couple of cleaverbearing chefs hustling around each other in a kitchen. The game looks simple at this level. The ball seems peppy and the court looks small and easily coverable. Tight, compact swings drive balls off the front wall and down the side walls, making a sound like flies being swatted. The chief virtue of the best squash shots is not speed but “length,” whereby the ball is hit so that the second bounce, if you let it come, lands near the junction of the floor and back wall - and from the gallery this looks perfectly innocuous because pros take the ball early, or when they don’t they can still usually dig it out from the back, and so the point goes on and on. No flashy smashes or halfvolleys or aces: just the slow, calculated working of the opponent out of position, setting up an eventual loose ball that can, with luck, be put away. Power has limited patience, so he’s not inclined to let points drag. And this is what’s most remarkable about him as a squash player. In a sport in which you’re not supposed to be able to win a point quickly, he can. “He has the remarkable ability to hit a shot more than one way,” says Mike Way. Many of Power’s strokes start off looking the same. Then, like a baseball pitcher, he directs the ball, with astonishing accuracy and touch, at the last second with a crack of the wrist. “What amazes me is when I watch him send the top players in the world in the wrong direction,” says Gene Turk. “That should never happen at that level. His short game is so good, players must feel they need to get a jump on the ball, so they make a commitment.” And the moment they commit, Power goes the other way. To avoid being cartoonishly wrongfooted, anyone playing Power must come to a complete stop, then start again when the ball is struck - an exhausting proposition over the course of a match. Unlike other top-twenty players, some of whom have crippling workout regimes, Power has never been very fit. But until recently he hasn’t needed to be because he himself reads his opponents like airplane fiction, and because, as British player Tim Garner puts it, “Normally, his opponent does four times as much running as he does.” Few squash players have ever been as
dominant as Power is when he’s on. Or have self-destructed as badly as Power has when he’s off. Often he has roared through to the semis of a tournament without dropping a game, only to sink quickly in the cream of the draw with brainlock. “When he gets into trouble, he has a tendency to do one of two things,” says Colin McQuillan, who covers squash for the London Times. “He gets petulant, or he stops.” In the 1998 Commonwealth Games final - probably, because of the live BBC-TV coverage, the most widely watched squash match in history - Power seemed to be cruising to victory when a couple of calls went against him. His opponent, Peter Nicol, started playing tougher and clawing his way back into the match. Power began to cave. At a game-break, fellow Canadian Graham Ryding went over to speak to his teammate, who sat at courtside looking uninterested. “Don’t be such a dick,” Ryding urged. “Don’t let him do this to you. You’re the number-one player in the world.” Briefly reinvigorated, Power played better in the next game. But then so did Nicol, to take the match. At one point Power threw his racquet at a wall in disgust, missing Nicol’s face by inches. He comes as a boxed set: the virtuoso and the drama queen. And in the remote corners of the squash-literate world, they love it all. Next to Jansher Khan, Power may have the biggest fan following on the circuit. He is routinely asked for his autograph in countries where the sport is appreciated, if not necessarily played, by the masses the Middle East, North Africa, and the Indian subcontinent. The selling of squash at the professional level seems to be predicated on the hope that if non-players could be seduced into watching this game, they’d be bitten. Hence, exhibitions and tournaments are often held on portable courts set up in some of the strangest, most exotic, most public places in all of sport. A downtown square in Brussels. Grand Central Station. The Palladium dance club. The lower concourse of the World Financial Center. And most spectacularly, the Giza plateau, where last year players fought to keep their concentration as camels moaned in the darkness beyond, Egyptians prayed toward Mecca on courtside rugs, the pyramids loomed through the front wall as the lights went down, and 5,500 fans went nuts in the stands for the local boy, Ahmed Barada. If he had been born in Cairo, or Karachi, there’s little doubt Power would already be a wealthy man. The young Egyptian, Barada, to whom Power has never lost, appears on TV there more frequently than the test pattern, bombs around Cairo in a Mercedes, has seen his face on an Egyptian commemorative stamp, has reportedly received hundreds of thousands of dollars in government bonuses for good performances at home, and is one of only a handful of people to have President Mubarak’s private phone number. (Barada is, in Power’s estimation, “just a little shit.”) Jansher Khan, as an employee of quasistate-run Pakistan International Airlines, draws a salary of about $1,000 (U.S.) a month - enough to support four families in Pakistan. (“You can’t be more boring than Jansher,” Power told me a year ago. “He’s no ambassador. He doesn’t really talk to anybody. He arrives at a tournament with his entourage and as soon as it’s over he wants to go home. He’s singlehandedly destroyed the game, I’d say.”) “If Jonathon moved to England he’d be a millionaire, no question,” says Tammie Sangster, the local rep for Head racquets. Prince, the racquet and apparel company
that sponsors Peter Nicol, has said it would jump to the pump if Power transplanted himself, like tennis player Greg Rusedski, to Britain - a bigger squash market. There would also be tax advantages to an offshore move. “Squash players are in an almost unique position to do it, since they’re legitimately out of the country for more than six months of the year,” Carter says. “Until now, he hasn’t really been earning enough money to justify [moving], but he will be if he keeps winning tournaments.” Power is already a kind of de facto international citizen. He rents a flat in Amsterdam where he hangs out during the European squash season - our winter season - because it’s a convenient halfway point between tournament sites and because “I can make more money there from exhibitions.” I once watched him trying to settle a hotel bill in Cairo in American currency. He thumbed through his wallet: Dutch guilders, pounds sterling, Canadian dollars, Egyptian pounds - no U.S. bucks. But Power appears to have no intention of grounding himself outside Canada for good. “I like Toronto,” he says, simply. Carter believes there is money to be made in North America - by exploiting the U.S. corporate market, doing exhibition matches, speaking engagements, clinics, and so forth. Whether there’s serious money here remains to be seen. The powerful American sports-marketing reflex has been unresponsive to squash. McDonald’s did come through with a smallish deal requiring that Power wear the golden arches on that red bandana for every professional match he plays, and a couple of equipment companies now give him free gear, but you won’t see Power announcing plans to go to Disneyland, or slaking his thirst with Gatorade, on TV. Big squash tournaments in North America tend to be underwritten by the likes of Rolex or Mercedes-Benz. Power seems a better fit with Airwalk or Jones Soda. Recently, Carter and Arnott sat down with John Nimick, head of the Professional Squash Association in Boston, and raised the question: How can we leverage Jonathon to grow the game while at the same time doing what’s best for Jon? Carter and Arnott could well make the argument - and no doubt they have - that Jonathon Power is the best thing to have happened to squash since a couple of British public-school boys (or so a prevailing theory holds) invented the modern game when they punctured the ball they were hitting against the school wall and dampened its bounce. Squash needs Power. It has tended to be a boom-and-bust game, enjoying robust health in the seventies and early eighties, then tumbling into a recessionary decade or so when key promoters left the sport, and, as Power puts it, “people got tired of seeing the same Pakistani guy winning year after year.” Indeed, you can count the dominant players of the last thirty-five years - Khan, Khan, Hunt, Barrington - on one hand. Squash is desperate for some juicy competition at the top. Now, in the Scot and the Canadian, it has it. The polite, straight, indefatigable little steam engine versus the charismatic shotmaker. Peter Nicol and Jonathon Power, stewards of a rivalry that seems destined to hold and deepen until one of them blows a knee or knocks the other’s block off. At this year’s U.S. Open at Boston’s genteel Harvard Club, Power roared through to the finals and ran into a confident Nicol, who was feeling he had finally solved Power’s game. In a glass court incongruously plunked down in the middle of a room where heads of state sometimes dine, Power was on (for him) his most excellent behaviour. Whether for the benefit of his
backers in the crowd - Carter, Arnott, John Power, untold would-be sponsors - or just to see what would happen if he bridled his id, he was practically a gentleman out there. Of course he couldn’t resist a few theatrics. After one questionable call, he straightened up, in mock anguish, with a sharp intake of breath, as if he’d taken a gutshot from the cavalryman on the mesa. The crowd was on Nicol’s side. “Stop whining!” someone snapped when Power queried another call, and the remark drew a little splash of applause. “I was hoping the Scotch boy would win,” one distinguished member told an acquaintance in the locker room after the match, “because the other boy was a pain in the ass.” Being the “bad boy of squash” is a little like being the bad boy of the philharmonic wind section. The refugees from the arenarock crowd are going to love you, but you can’t expect the long-time subscribers who came for The Nutcracker to roll over easily. In that Commonwealth Games final, Nicol beat Power in four games. The first three were epic. The fourth was over in twelve minutes. “The one thing that gets me about Jonathon is, I don’t think he has respect for anyone,” Nicol told me last fall. “I see him as being so close to the finished article, and yet so far away because of that. He could be fantastic for the sport, practically the saviour of the sport. But in the end he always fucks it up.” Last summer, I watched Power on court at the Toronto Athletic Club. He had come to do drills and to spar with Graham Ryding, the number two Canadian. He was coming off a disappointing showing in a major tournament, having been forced yet again to pull out with an injury. A little square ball machine sat in the front corner of the court puffing out squash balls to Power’s backhand, and Power put down drop shot after drop shot. “Two years ago there’s no way he’d have done this for thirty minutes,” his coach Mike Way said quietly, referring to the tedious drill. Power overheard this remark. “Two years ago, I wouldn’t have been in the club for thirty minutes,” he said. Power was considered pretty much uncoachable for much of his career. Buddha himself - teacher of those who cannot be taught - could not have taught him. “Do you think anybody off the court can tell you what you might be doing wrong?” Way asked Power once. “No,” Power replied. Way has described his past coaching style as “eggshell coaching” - volunteering suggestions only at opportune times, “waiting until the exact right moment and then planting the seed.” He has compared his charge to Andre Agassi, which would make Way the equivalent of Nick Bollettieri, Agassi’s long-time coach. “Nick made Agassi’s practice sessions shorter and shorter to keep the boredom factor down,” Way told me. But now Way was being more directive. Almost stern. And Power was paying attention to every word - as if he had suddenly clued in to what’s at stake. For years, Power was far and away the best Canadian player. Now, slowly, Graham Ryding is closing the gap between them. “Graham always worried Jonathon,” John Power told me last year. Jonathon is a better athlete, but in some ways Graham is a better squash player. Technically, Jonathon can compensate with strength and imagination.” Ryding knows Power’s game better than anyone. If Ryding has been good for Power, to push him, and Power has been good for Ryding, to pull him, Power and Ryding have been good for the five or six players who are drafting behind both of them and coming up fast. Peter Nicol is clearly improving. Having lost to Power six straight times, Nicol then