Azam Khan (squash)

Any Azam Khan (squash) biography begins in Nawakille, a small village of mud walled houses on the edge of Peshawar in what was then British India. Azam was born there around 1926 into a Pashtun family whose men found work at the sports clubs built for British officers stationed on the North West Frontier ^[1][3]. His father, Abdullah Khan, served as head steward at the Peshawar Club, where squash courts had been laid down for the garrison, and the children of club employees grew up retrieving balls and watching the officers play ^[3].

His elder brother Hashim Khan learned the game on those open air courts and became its finest player. Azam took a different route. As a young man he worked as a tennis professional in Peshawar, and by his own account he did not play squash seriously until he was in his mid twenties ^[1][2]. The two paths only converged after the partition of India in 1947, when the new state of Pakistan began looking for sporting champions to represent it abroad.

Hashim's victory at the 1951 British Open, achieved at an age when most players had retired, changed the family's fortunes and drew Azam into the game. Hashim needed a practice partner who could withstand his pace, and he persuaded his younger brother to convert from tennis ^[1][3]. Azam's racket skills transferred quickly, and within a remarkably short time he was competing at the highest level.

Azam travelled to Britain in the early 1950s and made an immediate impression on the amateur and professional circuit. By 1954 he had reached the final of the British Open, where he faced his own brother ^[1][3]. The tournament, played each year in London, was then the effective world championship of squash, and for a decade its final became something close to a family gathering: Hashim, Azam, their relative Roshan Khan, and later their nephew Mohibullah Khan contested it among themselves ^[3].

For several years Azam finished second best to Hashim, losing to him in multiple finals during the mid and late 1950s ^[1][2]. Observers debated whether the younger brother, whose retrieving, deception, and drop shots were widely admired, was holding something back out of deference to the elder. Whatever the truth of that speculation, which both men handled with tact, the record shows Azam as runner up while Hashim collected seven titles between 1951 and 1958 ^[3].

During these years Azam settled in London, where he could train, teach, and compete year round. He became a fixture of the English professional scene, winning professional championship events and building a reputation as a player of unusual patience and control ^[1]. Those who ask who was Azam Khan (squash) usually meet him first through this period, the loyal second of the Khan dynasty waiting for his moment.

The moment arrived in 1959. With Hashim past fifty and no longer dominant, Azam won the British Open at last, and he did not let go of it. He took the title again in 1960, 1961, and 1962, four consecutive championships that placed him among the greatest players the game had produced ^[1][2][3]. His victims in those finals included Roshan Khan, the 1957 champion, and his nephew Mohibullah Khan, whom he beat repeatedly in title matches ^[3].

Contemporaries stressed how complete his game had become. He moved economically, hit with precise length, and could end rallies with a drop shot struck from almost any position. Jonah Barrington, the Irish champion who dominated the game later in the 1960s and trained under Azam in London, rated him among the finest players ever to step on a court, and repeated that judgment throughout his life ^[1][7].

Azam Khan (squash) achievements extend beyond the four Open titles. He won the British Professional Championship and a string of other tournaments during his peak seasons, and he did all of it having started the game at an age when most champions are already established ^[1][3]. In 1962 he ruptured an Achilles tendon, an injury that healed slowly and stripped him of the movement his style depended on ^[1][2].

Azam married and raised a family, dividing his life between Pakistan and London as his career demanded. He was known among fellow professionals as a quiet, courteous man who avoided publicity and rarely spoke about his own standing in the game ^[1][2].

In 1962, the same year as his tendon injury, his fourteen year old son died suddenly in Pakistan ^[1][2]. The loss devastated him. Friends and family later said that squash, which had been the center of his working life, lost its meaning for him in the aftermath. Although he was still champion and only in his mid thirties in competitive terms, he chose not to defend his British Open title and withdrew from tournament play ^[1][3].

The combination of grief and injury made the retirement permanent. He never mounted a comeback, and the title passed to his nephew Mohibullah Khan in 1963, keeping the championship within the family ^[3]. Azam remained in London, where he had already put down roots, and turned to the other side of the professional's trade: teaching.

From the early 1960s Azam ran the New Grampians Squash Club in Shepherd's Bush, west London, a modest establishment that became one of the most respected training addresses in the sport ^[1][2]. He managed the club for decades, sweeping its courts, stringing rackets, and giving lessons to members who often had no idea that the soft spoken proprietor had once ruled the world game.

Serious players knew. Barrington famously sought him out there and credited the sessions with transforming his game, and generations of British and visiting professionals took lessons on his courts ^[1][7]. Well into middle age Azam could still extend, and sometimes embarrass, ranked players in practice, a fact that fed the enduring argument about how good he might have been with a full career ^[1].

He lived quietly in London through his later decades, following the triumphs of the wider Khan clan, including Jahangir Khan, son of his old rival Roshan, who won ten British Opens in the 1980s ^[3][5]. In March 2020, during the first weeks of the coronavirus pandemic in Britain, Azam contracted the virus. He died in a London hospital on 28 March 2020 at the age of 95, one of the earliest prominent sporting figures lost to the disease ^[1][2][5][6].

Among Azam Khan (squash) facts, the barest ones carry the argument: four straight British Open titles, won by a man who took up the game in his mid twenties and left it before his prime had fully run its course ^[1][3]. Historians of the sport, including James Zug in his standard history, place him at the heart of the Khan dynasty that ruled squash from 1951 into the 1960s and shaped the Pakistani supremacy that followed through Qamar Zaman, Jahangir Khan, and Jansher Khan ^[3].

His second legacy is pedagogical. Through the New Grampians club he influenced British squash for a generation, most visibly through Barrington, whose two British Opens and professional ethic owed much to Azam's coaching ^[1][7]. Obituaries in the British, American, and Pakistani press in 2020 dwelt on this double identity, the champion who became a teacher, and on the poignancy of a career cut short by grief rather than defeat ^[1][2][5][6].

Within the game his name still functions as a benchmark. When players and writers debate the greatest of the early professional era, Azam is routinely placed alongside, and by some judges above, his celebrated brother ^[1][7]. That a man so reluctant to promote himself should hold such a position says something about the weight of the evidence he left on court.