Jahangir Khan 555 by Rod Gilmour

Author:Rod Gilmour
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pitch Publishing
Published: 2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

The million dollar squash player

HIDDY Jahan is on a roll. Looking fit and mischievous, the Pakistani, who plays golf virtually every day and still coaches at the Bath & Racquets Club, in London, into his late sixties, is reminiscing about the Jonah Barrington effect.

‘Jahangir made the money that the current players are struggling to make now. Jahangir signed all kinds of deals with brands. We all got good deals, with bonuses. But, as a pro, we all owe it to Jonah Barrington.’

Born to an Irish father, Major Charles Barrington, and Welsh mother in 1941, Barrington, a keen sportsman, was schooled in County Meath, Ireland through his early years before becoming a rebellious student at Cheltenham College.

At university (Trinity College, Dublin) he studied law, but had a fondness for Guinness.

As Rex Bellamy, the formidable former rackets sports writer at The Times, chronicled in Squash – A History, Barrington was accused of being ‘infrequently sober’. Having failed his examinations and picked up a £10 conviction for petty larceny after being arrested for taking a wheelbarrow down the Earls Court Road, in London, he didn’t have much to show from his university days.

He found his way into an array of jobs in the next few years: milkman, carpet cleaner, groundsman and painter, to name but a few, and by 1964 was out of a job. That is until a chance encounter on a squash court, where a friend of his brother’s played him in Cornwall. Afterwards, he was told of an opening at the Squash Rackets Association in an administrative role.

Doors were opened and he played in the 1965 British amateur championships, athough he was an early casualty. By the end of the season, he threw himself into the sport. Coached by Jahangir’s uncle, Nasrullah, Barrington learned the hard way with a strict training regime.

His game was further honed a few months later in London by Azam Khan at the New Grampians Club, housed beneath an art deco building in Shepherd’s Bush. Coaching sessions, where the late racing driver James Hunt and comedian Tommy Steele would play, still cost the princely sum of £15 for 40 minutes well into the Noughties.

It remained a time warp of a venue, with Khan trophies nestled into every nook and cranny of the basement club until being forced to close in 2014, when Azam sold up due to rising rental costs.

Barrington barely scored points in training matches with Azam at Grampians. Gradually, though, the pyrotechnics in Barrington’s shot-making were scrapped for model efficiency. Volleying was replaced by methodical play off the back wall and down the sidelines. He inaugurated the ‘squeeze’, relentlessly exploiting and hugging the walls for tactical advantages. During his coaching days, woe betide anyone who went for ‘cheap’ shots.

He never saw himself as overly talented above his rivals, but he was fascinated by the psychological side of the sport and how to get one over the opponent, without necessarily hitting the ball.

On Barrington’s Irish side of the family, there had been a stream

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