![]() ![]() He is not the scion of some wealthy industrialist, who grew up in the shade of a single private club. On court, wearing his trademark red bandana, Power calls to mind the young Christopher Walken in the Russian-roulette scene in The Deer Hunter, where Walken sits zombified in the Saigon gambling den with a gun to his own head, somehow absolutely certain the bullet has the other guy’s name on it. He is quite a big man – six feet, 175 – and he seems, eerily, to get bigger the moment he steps on a squash court, the way some actors look bigger on stage. Jonathan Power defeats all the stereotypes so completely you’d be tempted to conclude he was dropped into the game by some lesser god just to shake it up, the way John McEnroe landed in tennis in the seventies like a hound on the kitchen table. Deferential to their coaches – for squash is almost a tradesman’s pursuit, best learned at the hip of an experienced mentor who can groove you in. Supremely fit – for squash is a game of heavy aerobic demands. (“Let.” “No let.” “Appeal.” “Sustained.”) High focused – for squash, which has been likened to speed chess, is a game of infinite combinations and angles and moves and countermoves and perpetual calculation of risk. ![]() Gentlemanly – for squash’s British traditions stress fair play, and historically, exchanges between players and referees would not have sounded out of place in the Old Bailey. Small in stature – for squash is a punishing game, and only lightweights can withstand the pounding on the joints over time. The model is probably someone very like the current world number on, Peter Nicol of Scotland. People who actually play squash (a fairly small number), or watch it (an even smaller number), have a model in their mind of how top squash players look and act, what they stand for and where they live. Or just dorks who spend the summers of their youth bouncing balls off the garage and never outgrew the fascination. WHEN most people think of squash – if they think of it at all – it’s as a pastime enjoyed by toffee-nosed Ivy League seniors, captains of industry, TV psychiatrists. The rep for the company happened to be in the stands watching, and the net morning, he called to say he would not be doing business with Jonathon Power, like, ever. There had almost been a racquet agreement, but that fell through after Power left the court audibly slagging the racquet that had let him down. McDonald’s had approached him about doing some promotions, but no deals had been finished. What kind of sponsorship deals did he have, Carter wanted to know. He’d plied his trade in sixty countries, logging hundreds of thousands of air miles, but had never bothered to get on a frequent-flyer program. Like those eccentric math geniuses who tackle complex theorems all day but have trouble boiling an egg, Power did one thing awesomely well but was almost comically deficient in the routine demands of a professional life. “Here was a kid who had had no real advisers for his whole career, and the guy is number three in the world, and prior to six weeks ago he’d beaten the number one six times in a row,” observed Carter. When he walked into the office of Graham Carter, a top Toronto money manager, a year ago, Power projected an oddly contradictory image: the worldly naïf. Or at least not any other elite professional athlete. Four years later, Power became the first North American ever to beat the long-reigning Khan, and created the tantalizing possibility that he might one day tame his demons and become world champion.īut mostly the story circulates because it captures Jonathon Power in amber. ![]() Team members today tell that story with bemusement, partly because they know how things turned out. A few feet away, limbering up on the mat, the world champion, Jansher Khan of Pakistan, watched this little bit of vaudeville. A cigarette pack fell out of one jacket pocket and a lighter fell out of the other. Power bent over to try to touch his toes. “What do you want me to do?” he asked Turk. He stood, heavy-lidded, in a tearaway basketball tracksuit. Power was there in body but his head was far, far away. Coach Gene Turk tracked Power down at his hotel, where he was still sleeping, and brought him to the stretching area, where other players were warming up. But when the team bus arrived at the courts, Jonathon Power, the nineteen-year-old prodigy from Toronto, wasn’t on it. ![]() In November of 1993, at the world team squash championships in Karachi, Pakistan, Canada drew Scotland in the first playoff round. Can squash have an enfant terrible? Oh yeah. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |