“The person who beats Khan will be the person who out-Jahangir’s Jahangir!” proclaimed Ross Norman, when asked what it would take to beat the great Jahangir Khan at his height.
“Be fitter than him, be more accurate than him and be more aware on court than him. Because Khan’s game negates everything else. You can have all the flair in the world but Jahangir can negate that, he’ll neutralise everything you’ve got. That’s how Khan made it – he out-Hunted Hunt.”
This was in an interview in 1985, a year ahead of his run to the world championship final in Toulouse where he would face the indefatigable Jahangir.
With Jahangir so firmly entrenched as World No.1, the bookies of today would no doubt put out odds without the Pakistani and paying out just to reach the final. Norman was a clear No.2 back then and had not only come back from a disastrous leg injury, he had lifted his own game up several notches. The gap between the two and three spots was as wide as between the one and two spots.
Norman reckoned to have played Jahangir about 20 times – in fact over six months in 1985 he had played him in five finals: the US Open, the Canadian Open, the Swiss Masters, the World Championship and the World Team Championship. He lost on each occasion but still felt that the world champion could be – and would be beaten.
Yet, the Kiwi didn’t have any specific game plans. “I just wanted to make it as long as possible because I feel that the longer you stay on court with him the more chance you’ve got. The first guy that is ever going to beat Jahangir is going to do it in 150 minutes. It’s going to be a long, long hard match.
“The guy is only human – he did get tired. I didn’t have nightmares about him. I just had to raise my game and I didn’t seem to get stale and I cut out errors which used to creep into my game.”
His run in Toulouse saw him reach the final relatively fresh as Khan’s opponents wilted around him. Fitness, then, was going to prove crucial.
“I used to lob from the back, but with Jahangir he was great at pulling it out of the air and hitting straight into the nick or use the volley drop,” Norman recalls.
“I used to lob down the walls or drive if I was in trouble to get the length right, rather than boast. If you did that then it was pretty much over.”
Norman recalls Pakistani player, Gogi Alauddin, as “a master of the lob”, a shot he used to reach the final of one British Open final while not being particularly powerful.
The latter was also going to be pivotal for Norman if he was to become world champ. “But we really didn’t know back then what the right training programmes were,” he says.
“I kept it as close to squash as possible, so I did court routines and sprints and generally put in the hours. There was very little in the gym.
“An average day would be 12 sets of one minute to finish off the training session. Sometimes I would do 10 or 12 sets of 50 if I was going to a tournament in South Africa, which worked out at around two minutes 20 seconds for each set, touching the top of the tin and sprinting back.”
It was a basic routine, but one which suited the Kiwi.
“Today it is a lot more refined and I would have listened to the experts, but this kept me fit. You devise your own programme and run with it.”
Just like he did when he eventually toppled Khan and sent the headline writers into a frenzy.