FEBRUARY 2015
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JAMES ZUG PROFILES NICOL DAVID
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James Zug profiles Nicol David as she breaks the all-time record for the number of months at world No.1 Photos by Steve Line
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I. BIKING INTO THE NIGHT
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ust before six o’clock on a late December evening, Nicol David walked into SquashCity. It is her home club in Amsterdam, where she has lived for a dozen years. There was little fanfare. Some of the staff knew, some didn’t. A few members came up and gave her hugs of congratulations. One friend got a photo taken of Nicol and his family. No poster, sign or print-out about what had happened. The club instead looked like a saloon in hill-country Texas rather than a European fitness club. It sported decorations from the annual holiday party two nights earlier, with triangular American flags criss-crossing the ceiling and an unplugged mechanical bull resting near the bar. “I’m still sore,” said one of the bartenders, who admitted she had ridden the bull during the party. David, in jeans and a sweater, flashed her famously wide, radiant smile and ordered a beer. She should have been asleep. About twenty-one hours earlier, she had won her eighth world title, recovering from a 1-2 deficit and saving four match balls in the fourth game. “I was running on instinct,” she said, as she swung her purse, hanging over her shoulder and neck, back to her hip. “I said after the third game that I would not give up. I would get to every ball.” Her opponent was Raneem El Welily, the best of the Egyptian cohort who, along with England's Laura Massaro, has been challenging David’s reign at number one. It was at El Welily’s home club in Cairo, an overflow crowd, the finals of the world championship. After the match, they both burst into tears, David openly weeping and letting out a primal scream as she collapsed on the floor. “It was my greatest win of my career. It was so emotional.” Twenty minutes later, she called her parents in Malaysia. “My heart still hasn’t stopped pounding,” her mother Ann Marie told her. Running high on emotion and adrenaline, David stayed up all night at the hotel, talking with her support team and friends, having a
beer and checking her phone. “It had literally exploded,” she told me. “I had hundreds of messages, texts, emails, Facebook, voice mails.” David, distractable and intuitively social, puts her phone down during a tournament, so an avalanche of digital messages washes over her after a final. She eventually got her pajamas on and climbed into bed, only to realize that her 6:30am shuttle to the airport was about to leave. She packed, joined Paul Selby and Tommy Berden in the shuttle and caught her flight home, sleeping a bit over the Mediterranean. In Amsterdam, she landed, took the train into town, went to her apartment and unpacked and then biked over to the club. She looked fresh and relaxed. An old Amsterdam friend was coming to meet her for sushi, but was late—dog walking. The friend, originally from Argentina, eventually arrived and joined our conversation, which veered back to the previous night in Cairo. David soon apologized. “I’m sorry, all this talk about squash.” SquashCity, which had been packed with people late in the afternoon, not a seat at the bar, all the thirteen courts full, was now empty; David asked the bartender if the reason it was so quiet was that they were closing early. No, it was just a Sunday night with the holidays coming. At 8pm, when the club closed for real, we left. The sun had set hours ago—it was the solstice and the encompassing gloom of a northern European mid-winter night was hard to shake. David smiled and put on a jacket and a hat, tucking her hair out of the way. The one thing every squash player who has lived in Amsterdam will say about Nicol David is that they loved the best player in history blithely cycling along its streets and canals, just another ponytailed woman on her way somewhere. So ordinary, so Dutch. I got to see the same image. She and her friend unlocked their bikes. A brief word to confirm the route, and they rode off into the night. Within a few seconds, the new
world champion was gone. his month, February 2015, Nicol David broke the all-time squash record for the number of months at world No.1, surpassing Susan Devoy’s mark of 105. David has won more majors than any other player, including eight world titles (tied with Jansher Khan for the most ever) and five British Opens. She had netted more pro tournaments (seventy-eight) than anyone in history save Khan. She has a maculate record: she does lose. She doesn’t have the sixteen years in which Heather McKay never gave up a game or the five and a half years that Jahangir Khan went undefeated. Since taking an ice-cold stone-lock on the world No.1 in August 2006, she has lost seventeen matches—an average of two a season. She
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“I was running on instinct. I said after the third game that I would not give up. I would get to every ball.” has produced a fifty-six match win streak (it lasted seventeen months) and also a couple of brutal losses. Normally, she is able to change tactics and switch game plans if things aren’t going well. Most of the defeats occur because she’s distracted by off-court matters or that she relies on her speed and sheer athleticism to get herself out of danger and it doesn’t work. The only time she’s truly been beaten, when she’s been playing well and still unable to push back her opponent was in 2007 at the British Open. Rachael Grinham went down 0-2 but came back, lobbing constantly to keep David in the back corners. In the fourth, David jumped to 4-0 and then let Grinham back in. Still, she was up 8-7 (old scoring). On match point she tinned a volley drop shot, with Grinham far out of position. Grinham went on to win the game in overtime and then laid down the hammer on the fifth game, crushing David 9-1. The match took eighty-seven minutes but the last game was just seven of that. It remains the only time that David has blown a match ball in a major event and the only time she’s
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106 had such a lopsided fifth game loss. “Fitness was a crucial issue there,” said Liz Irving, David’s coach. “She just got tired, Rachael wore her down.” She has other grinding, tough losses. In the quarters of the British Open in Manchester two years later, Madeline Perry stormed back after dropping the first two games and took it 11-9 in the fifth. But in the modern era, with the greatest number of challenges, on and off the court, David has set the benchmark of consistent excellence. If anything, the losses reveal the true depth of her competition, that today there are as many great players as any in the history of squash. When she serves, she bounces the ball down with the racquet and catches the rebound with her free hand. Smack, thump, catch; smack, thump, catch. Then she bounces it straight down a half dozen times, while her left hand rests on her left hip, as if she is squaring her body getting it pointed in the right direction. She serves with a fluid, high-arcing swing, always the same serve. When she is returning serve, she first bends over, straight legged. Then she unwinds her arm, so her racquet is out wide and in position to initiate a swing. It looks like a traffic cop holding a stop sign. Her outside foot inevitably goes en point, the heel rising in a sort of pirouette. She looks like a sculpture. Ready for combat, she resembles at these moments strikingly similar to another David, to Michelangelo’s masterpiece. She leaves her racquet leaning against the wall next to the door, methodically placing it there in between games. (In Cairo, the between-games court sweeper kept putting it outside the court.) The ritual is like a tiny message: this is my treasured tool of the trade. I will be back to use it again.
EIGHT WORLD TITLES
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In the past decade Nicol David has won eight world championship tournaments on four continents, but none were as difficult and emotionally draining as her last one in Cairo in December. Her team celebrated her victory: (l-r) Rob Sutton, David’s new public relations manager; Liz Irving, her coach; the happy world champion; Frank Cabooter, her Amsterdam-based psychologist; and Ronald Fauvel, her Kuala Lumpur-based physiologist. With her win, David also ensured that she would break Susan Devoy’s twenty-two year reign as holder of the all-time record for months at world No.1.
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II THE LITTLE ANCHOVY
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he reason why Nicol David, rather than some woman from Adelaide, Australia, has become the greatest woman squash player in history is that in July 1992 in Barcelona, Kuala Lumpur won the bid to host the XVI Commonwealth Games in 1998, beating Adelaide 40-25 in the final voting. It was a stunning decision: the Games hadn’t been held in a developing country since Jamaica in 1966 and it would be the first ever time in Asia. Malaysia splurged on the Games. They spent over two billion ringgit (about $600 million) on staging and hosting, well more than any previous country. One of the seventeen sports on the 1998 Games docket was a new one: squash. To ensure the host country performed well in the Games, the National Sports Council of Malaysia suddenly took a keen interest in what had previously been an obscure, mostly expatriate activity. In Penang, Ee Phoeh Hoon, a local squash official, was sent out to scout what players already existed. At the Bukit Dumbar Squash Center, she spotted an eight year-old girl who seemed to have incredible talent. It was Nicol David. For a couple of years her mother, a Chinese Malaysia school teacher and her father, an Indian Malaysia engineer, had been bringing their two older daughters to Bukit Dumbar, a public squash club that their friend had built near their home in Green Lane. Little Nicol had just tagged along. The two older sisters appeared, at first glance, to be the future squash stars: Lianne, thirteen, and Cheryl, ten. (Lianne now is married with two children, Cheryl played for Malaysia and reached the finals of the Asian U19 championships, where she lost to Nicol 9-5, 9-1, 9-1; she just gave birth to her first child last month.) “I recall I heard of Nicol when she was in the junior development program in Pen-
ang,” said Major Singaraveloo Maniam, who was the director of coaching for the Malaysian Squash Federation from 1987 to 2002. “I met her sisters before her. We looked at the whole family, but Nicol was the quickest around the court. Very nippy and fast. She was such a tiny tot but she covered the court so efficiently. We called her ‘ikan bilis’—a little anchovy.” David had been blessed with a slender frame and great hand-eye coordination. Her uncle Derrick David had been a field hockey prodigy. Her father, Desmond, was an avid sprinter and field hockey player and had been the goalkeeper for Penang when they won the Malaysian Cup in soccer in 1974. When she was eleven, she got her first serious coach. Richard Glanfield. An Englishman, Glanfield had been in the first wave of coaches brought into Malaysia in 1993 after the Commonwealth Games bid success. It was a coincidence he was there. A young journeyman teaching pro, Glanfield was on a moving walkway at Heathrow Airport when he saw a Scottish pro going in the other direction. They waved and the other pro flipped Glanfield the squash magazine he was looking at. On the flight, Glanfield saw an ad in the back for coaches in Malaysia. He landed in Barcelona, bumped into Ong Ben Hee, the Malaysian prodigy, and handed him a
ran and didn’t give up. I went up to her and said, ‘I’m going to be your coach. I’ve got just a few ideas so far. We can work on them after we get started.’ Nicol said, ‘Tell me them.’ She begged and begged. Against my better judgment, I agreed. She was like a computer. It usually takes three months to learn a skill. I showed her something about her forehand, she was hitting the ball too overhand, not coming underneath. She went out in the semis and used this new technique and won.” From the start, David won a lot. She went to Scotland at age eleven and won the GU12 and she captured the Hong Kong U13. In January 1996 she won the British Junior Open GU14, the first of five straight victories at the BJO. A milestone in Sheffield was the 1999 BJO GU17 finals when she came back after losing the first game to beat a much bigger and more experienced Jenny Duncalf. At thirteen she reached the quarters of the world juniors in 1997; it was the first time she had played a tournament on a glass court. At the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, just fifteen, she lost in the second round but later that year, she captured the Asian Games title. A big turning point was in July 1999. Her team had held her back from playing too many pro events, not wanting her to get burned out. So it was usually just events in Malaysia. Not yet seventeen, David reached the finals of the KL Open, one of the oldest and most prestigious events on the world pro tour. Her win in the semis was the signature one. She came back from an 0-2 deficit to beat Vanessa Atkinson in five. It was a gutty win—10-8 in the third, 9-7 in the fourth—and Atkinson was, at the time, a top-twenty player and on the rise. That was when everyone realized that David might be destined to become a world champion. “I remember going into Major Maniam’s office after she beat Vanessa,” Glanfield told me, “ and we said, ‘my goodness, what have we just witnessed? Ok, we need to start planning. This is going somewhere.’”
"She was such a tiny tot, but she covered the court so efficiently. We called her ‘ikan bilis’—a little anchovy." CV to bring back to Malaysia. First, Glanfield coached in Kuala Lumpur. He was content: the food, the weather, the people, the job. “One day Major Maniam brought me into his office. He said, ‘We want you to go up to Penang to coach this ten year-old.’ I had been there a year now. I thought this was a demotion, going away from the capital, to coach some little girl. I thought about resigning.” But first Glanfield went to see her play at the national junior championships. He approached her after a quarterfinal win. “She was wiry and just ran and ran and
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106 A month later she captured the world juniors in Antwerp with scintillating ease—no opponent got more than five points off her in any game. “She was a paradox,” Glanfield said. “She was a friendly, charming girl. Everyone wanted to be friends with her. She’d open the door for her opponent to get off court. But during a match, she was the Smiling Assassin. I used to laugh. You could see when it clicked in a tough match: her jaw would go rigid, her eyes would glaze over and she’d just go.” She could be shy with adults—“she wouldn’t say boo to a goose,” said Andrew Shelley, then the director of the women’s pro tour—but she was sociable with fellow players and loved meeting new people, making friends, learning new things. Glanfield told her that if she kept smiling, she could be a world champion. She had that youngest child energy. She continued with her studies. She went to school in the mornings and trained only in the afternoon; on the weekends she played just on Saturday afternoons. No woodshedding, robotic hours on court. “She had the perfect family,” Glanfield said. “Never ever pushing her, very relaxed. Her house was her sanctuary. It was a free-flowing period. It was like downhill skiing: at that point, she was fearless, without pressure.” When they went to tournaments overseas, Glanfield made sure she would sightsee, visit with friends, hang out. No holing up in a hotel room—Glanfield was a social coach and he brought David along to chat with everyone at the venue. “There was a normal integration,” said Ivy Pochoda, the American squash player who spent a summer training in Malaysia as a junior and played David in a tournament in Finland in 2000. “Richard was social and Nicol was always around. It was a really great boon for her to have a coach that didn’t treat her like a precious thing that had to be fed, put to bed early and stretched out in the morning.” Because of the early involvement of the squash federation, she also had a thoughtout, scientific training program. She saw an orthopedic surgeon at age thirteen to make sure her body was developing the right way, that the training was appropriate. She met with sports psychologists and The little anchovy was one of the great squash prodigies, winning five British Junior Open titles and two World Junior titles.
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did visualization, making that a regular practice. She started working with Ronald Fauvel, a Canadian physio who was originally brought in to help the Malaysian track and field team in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games and with Sean Sturgess, a physical trainer. “She was a little stick figure of an insect,” remembered Jamie Hickox. Like Glanfield, Hickox had arrived in Kuala Lumpur in 1993 as another one of Major Maniam’s hires (and also with a touch of serendipity—an Englishman in New York, he was bumping along with odd coaching jobs when he got word from George Meiras, the Scottish WSF official, that Malaysia was looking for coaches.) “Nicol was an incredible athlete, though. She could do 440 sprints right with all the guys. She could rival the men. She had just no body weight. It was incredible sprinting with her. And she was always interested in learning.
David was in trouble, stretching, hitting off her back foot, making errors. A couple of years ago in downtown Philadelphia, I got on the trolley to head west for the Delaware Investments U .S. Open. I saw a familiar sight, a player with a squash backpack getting on near me. It was the world No.1 going to Drexel for her morning hitting session. “Oh, hello,” David said with a shy, guile-less smile and we sat down next to each other. I told her I was surprised to see her traveling alone on public transportation, no entourage, no coaches. “I like it that way because I can’t do this in Malaysia. I like the freedom to be with people out on my own, doing everything like a normal person.” There has never been a squash celebrity like Nicol David. Since winning the world junior championships in 1999, she was a star in Malaysia. She appeared in newspapers, magazines, on television. People
almost without effort (no more than four points lost each game, never more than nineteen minutes on court per match), but in pro events, she sustained as many losses as wins and had early exits from many tournaments. It came to a head at the October 2002 Asian Games in Busan, South Korea. She crumbled in the finals to Rebecca Chiu. It was a terrible defeat. Chiu was a fine player, but everyone expected David to defend the title she had won in 1998 (when she dismantled Chiu in the finals in under half an hour). Trying to sort out whether she’d quit squash for good, David fulfilled one last obligation, playing for Malaysia at the world team championships later that month (winning four of her six matches) and then put down her racquet. She traveled to Auckland and spent two months there with relatives. She took five months off. Her ranking plummeted to fifty-three.
"That was when everyone realized that David might be destined to become a world champion" I remember once I was giving a shin-splint massage to another player and she asked to learn about it. What other twelve yearold kid cares about physiology like that?” David finished her studies at the end of 2000 and after that, she was finally able to play squash full-time as a professional and have the normal, two-a-day training sessions. She was clearly good. Only the top players could work out how to beat her tactically. “She was very much a runner back then,” Glanfield said. “She used to get to the ball and hit it, no delay or deception.” It wasn’t surprising. She played junior squash. She was used to warm courts and being able to track balls down that went past her to the back wall. So she never volleyed. Players learned how to keep the ball deep, to push her to the back corners. She was too quick in the front of the court. If they got the ball behind her,
stopped her in the street for an autograph. People came up to her in cafes and complained about a recent loss. When she rode an elevator, some stranger would make a comment. “I remember playing her in Malaysia,” said Sarah Fitz-Gerald, “and I am world No.1 and world champion and she was very young and they bagged on her for losing to me.” Another problem was that she had outgrown Glanfield. She needed to work with a different coach, someone more advanced and experienced who understood the elite echelon. It was claustrophobic, perhaps, as well—Glanfield only worked with her, one on one. “It was too co-dependent,” Glanfield said. “It was a difficult time. She was growing up. She started to need to look out for herself. Change was hard. ” She was also stagnating. In 2001 she won her second world junior title, again
Meanwhile, Glanfield moved off to coach in Peru. After a stint there he moved on to Trinidad & Tobago and later Las Vegas. Today he is based in Santa Barbara, privately coaching a family of seven children. “After working with Nicol David, it is like having trained Tiger Woods or Roger Federer—it will be a let down. I was one of the lucky ones to say I was a part of greatness. This is the greatest female athlete in the world. I will never coach such a great player in my lifetime. I was gifted this incredible opportunity. As a coach, you learn from players, and I learned so much from Nicol.” In March 2003 David’s exile from squash ended, and she moved to Amsterdam to work with Liz Irving. David has been a stalwart when representing Malaysia, having gone more than ten years without a loss in international team play.
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III THE RUDDER
“I
don’t watch much squash,” said Amr Shabana, the fourtime world champion. “I don’t like to watch other people playing, but when I was young I used to watch Liz Irving. She was an amazing player. She was an incredible technician of the mind, she had great psychology.” Liz grew up tooling around her mother’s squash club in Bisbane, Australia. Her mother, Jenny, spent many seasons winning a lot of matches until she faced her fellow countrywoman Heather McKay. Jenny Irving got to the finals of the British Open one year (1971—a 9-0, 9-3, 9-1 loss to McKay), and thus, before the women’s tour and official rankings, she was the number two player in the world. Like mother, like daughter. For many years Liz Irving also rusticated at the penultimate ranking of world No.2, just behind great Antipodean players, this time Susan Devoy and Michelle Martin. Liz reached the finals of three British Opens and one World Open. She snagged tournaments on four continents and remained ranked in the top five for a dozen years. “She was a brilliant player,” said Vanessa Atkinson, the former world champion. “I remember playing her when I was young and she absolutely killed me. Lovely movement, pure squash. It was nice on the eye to watch her, but brutal to play her.” She suffered injuries—particularly a shoulder and a lower back—and the indignity of being left off the Australian squad in the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, so she decided to hang on until the 2002 Games in Manchester. “At that point, I was playing on memory,” she said. “You don’t forget your skills, even if your body starts to fail you.” Since Manchester, she hasn’t played a single competitive match. Irving led a peripatetic life. She turned pro at age eighteen and went overseas. She constantly traveled to new training bases. She worked with Keith Walker in Sydney. She spent 1986 at the Australian Institute of Sport, just when it opened, working
with Heather McKay and Geoff Hunt. She trained with Ahmed Safwat in London and Vicki Cardwell in Melbourne. For a couple of years she was based in Reading, England, a part of a gang of pros working with Mike Johnson. Richard Eaton, the British squash journalist, explained Irving’s inability to dislodge Devoy and Martin by writing that Irving was “engaging, talented, persistent and immensely watchable but flawed and eventually slightly rudderless.” After the years of travel, she unexpectedly found herself with a rudder: in March 1999 SquashCity asked if she might replace a departing pro. It was a part-time, temporary job. She thought she’d stay for a year or two, wrap up her career and move back to Brisbane, maybe study for a degree in human movement. Building a famous training academy, becoming an entrepôt for a global band of wandering women— none of that was the plan. But she fell in love with the city. Amsterdam at the time was at the crossroads of squash. England typically had a lot of players and continental Europe was thriving with professional squash leagues—Germany, Netherlands, Belgium. Players flew in and out of Amsterdam, staying for a few days or a few weeks before or after a league match. Some rented apartments: Jonathon Power, Rachael and Natalie Grinham, Annelize Naude, Anthony Hill, Joe Kneipp, Rodney Durbach. Amr Shabana clocked in a year. John White was in The Hague, as was Vanessa Atkinson. Ellie Pierce, the American, was coaching at Amstel Park, Irving was at SquashCity. Eventually, the men seemed to move on but the women stayed—at one point seven of the top ten females were living in the Netherlands. SquashCity, built in the late 1980s, had thirteen courts, a huge space upstairs for weight training, spinning and other classes, two co-ed saunas (this is Amsterdam after all), deep leather chairs outside the courts, a pool table and a restaurant and bar right in the middle of the galleries. The club was very social. “I remember coming off the court and there’d be a guy sitting there in
one of the chairs smoking a cigarette and having a beer,” remembered Carlin Wing, an American who moved to Amsterdam in 2002. “But that was the scene: it was very social and you didn’t feel you were training all by yourself.” “It’s the kind of place where members would come to work out for forty-five minutes and end up staying for two hours,” said Annelize Naude, the South African who trained in Amsterdam for thirteen years. Irving began working with more than club members. “It was a very fluid operation,” Ivy Pochoda said. She moved over to Amsterdam in the fall of 1999 and stayed until 2005. “We pros, we’d pay for private clinics, one-on-one lessons. It wasn’t that formal in the beginning, there were no signed contracts. Liz didn’t see this as an academy yet.” In 2001 Atkinson began traveling over from The Hague a couple of times a week to work with Irving. They tried to find a balance between Atkinson’s natural style and Irving’s hopes. They changed Atkinson’s movement, having her be more open to the ball with a two-footed stance. They worked on Atkinson’s flexibility with long stretching sessions with a physio, and they talked about the mental side of the game. In 2004 Atkinson won the world title. It turned out Irving’s work with Atkinson was a dry run for when Nicol David moved to town. “Nicol knew how to get into the top tier,” Liz Irving said, “but she didn’t know how to stay there. She was always destined to become world champion, I think that was. But to endure, to be consistent, for this long—no one expected that.” David’s first visit to Amsterdam came after she graduated from high school and was playing in the Munich Open. She sojourned for a few weeks and when the break-up with Glanfield occurred, it was a natural fit in some ways for her to migrate there. In March 2003, at the age of nineteen, she moved permanently to Amsterdam. She and Sharon Wee, a fellow Malaysian player, took an apartment. Every day was organized, every session
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“Nicol knew how to get into the top tier, but she didn’t know how to stay there.” – Liz Irving
was monitored and measured. Irving slowly created a team around David, including three Dutch professionals: Maurice Berghout, a physiotherapist and Annelies van den Hoven, a nutritionist and Frank Cabooter, a psychologist. David trained upstairs at SquashCity. Reports constantly flew back to Desmond David, Sean Sturgess and the National Sports Council of Malaysia which continued to fund David’s program. Irving changed David’s swing, getting her to add space below her arm. She brought new thinking to her movement, having her go into the back corners more firmly, with both feet planted and transferring weight at the right moment. You can’t coach speed, the saying goes, but you can make it more economical and efficient. And she worked on tactics, the way David structured rallies and her shot selection. The key issue was she never volleyed. “She played like a junior,” said Sarah FitzGerald, the former world champion who first encountered David in the late 1990s. “She was typical—no volleys.” It was a lot of hard work, said Irving, and progress was at times slow. “I always like to quote Vicki Cardwell: ‘If it was that easy, everyone would do it.’ But I’ve never worked with someone with that much passion for learning. She has the confidence to challenge herself, to make changes.” Like Michael Jordan perfecting his jumper, David has improved her game as she’s aged. She dictates play more. She moves her opponents around more, throwing in boasts and volley drops, trying to end rallies earlier. Retrieving might be a philosophy but shotmaking is a religion. “She doesn’t have the gift of a great shotmaker,” said Hickox, “but she has been focused on improving that.” Everyone will remember the three match-ball volley tins that Raneem El Welily smacked in the fourth game of the world championship final in December, but it was the fourth saved match ball that spoke volumes about David’s shotmaking improvements. At 7-10, during an epic, raggedly taut rally (at one point David quicksilvered one of El Welily’s cross-court drops at fullstretch), she saw a loose forehand rail and boldly cracked a cross-court volley into the nick. “I almost died,” Irving said. “She hasn’t hit that shot all tournament and there she is, on match ball, and she goes for it.” Irving is not protective of her territory.
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“Nicol and I get on well as humans,” Irving said. “We treat each other as equals. We challenge each other, we work hard together. We have a good connection. I don’t hold onto her too tight. The minute she wants to move on, she’s free to do so. Right from the beginning, we said that. We don’t have a contract. We don’t take it too seriously . This is just a game about hitting a ball in a box.” Farming David out to a number of other coaches for short, broadening stints, Irving annually sent David to Sarah Fitz-Gerald, the former world No.1. David went home to Malaysia for the Christmas holiday, relaxed and played not an iota of squash and then spent a couple of weeks training with FitzGerald in Melbourne. They worked on her backhand swing and expanding her game, focusing on hunting the ball while controlling the T. “When she was younger, she’d let people bump and push her a little,” said Fitz-Gerald. “She has such a beautiful personality, so honest and sincere and she got pushed around. Now, she’ll stand her ground. There was one moment. We were playing a real ding-dong match and I was hammering it down her backhand. I was working that backhand hard and she was bloody beating me back. It was improving. I told her, ‘You little one, you just beat me down the backhand side. Good on you.’” Amsterdam, it turned out, has had a wonderful, tonic effect on David. She has enjoyed the off-court life. “She never let the fact that she was young and destined to be so great interfere with us,” Pochoda said.” She had an amazing head on her shoulders. A lot of people, if they were nineteen and moved to Amsterdam, after a couple of years they’d be dead.” David immediately liked the scene at SquashCity. The players used one court during the summer and another during the winter. On most Friday afternoons, the women set up a squash tournament. Everyone put E10 into a pot; players got a handicap and then played ten-minute matches and the winner moved up a court, the loser down. There was no break for ninety minutes. Afterwards, they had a beer together or organized a family night in which every woman prepared a dish from their home country. There might be a dozen different dishes. Often Liz hosted a group of players at her apartment and cooked her famous roasted-chicken dinner. David is very polite. She smiles all the
time, a guileless, open smile. She claps when her opponent is introduced onto court. She often trains with lesser players. “There would be the typical American squash tourist,” said Pochoda, “and Nicol would never complain about hitting with them. She took the time to work with everyone.” David has a sizable ego—she has to, like anyone who gets all the way to the top—and does enjoy being a world champion, but she doesn’t flaunt it at all. “The main thing about Nicol is that she has almost no visible ego,” said Carlin Wing. “She knows she’s good and she doesn’t need to prove it over and over again or even once. She was always happy to play and could find value in working out with anyone.” David still seeks out new experiences. She has done eight ambassador tours for the women’s tour and the World Squash Federation. “Nicol is one of the most giving, open persons I have ever met,” said Andrew Shelley who has accompanied her on the tours. David doesn’t live in a suburban bubble—in Amsterdam, she has had five bikes stolen (Irving has had ten). For seven years she roomed with Aisling Blake. “I ran into Nicol at a tournament,” remembered Blake, “and she said very casually, ‘Oh, Sharon is going back to Malaysia, would you like to be my flatmate?’” The apartment is in the Jordaan, a typical Dutch rowhouse above an art supply shop. It is half a block from Prisengracht Canal and the Anne Frank House and Westerkerk, the famous Amsterdam cathedral where Rembrandt is buried. The Westerkerk bells ring every quarter of the hour but for years David never noticed. The apartment was on the fourth floor of a walk-up. Often David would leave the apartment and forget to bring her key and Blake would put the keys in a sock and toss it out the window to her. “She was the best flatmate,” Blake said. “My only complaint was some of her Malay soups. They were so spicy. I was nearly crying after one of them.” David likes street dancing and fashion (she might design clothing someday) and takes glassblowing classes. She loves music and attends hip hop , R&B, funky house and chilled lounge concerts. She has numerous friends in town, like the one I met, who have nothing to do with squash— “they can’t believe she is the world No.1,” said Blake, “since she hasn’t changed a bit since she arrived.”
“We don’t take it too seriously. This is just a game about hitting a ball in a box.” — Liz Irving
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MONTHS A
PIERRE ETCHEBASTER Court Tennis 312
PHIL TAYLOR Darts 156
TIGER WOODS Golf 138
EDWIN MOSES 400m hurdles 132
NICOL DAVID Squash 106
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David, having achieved everything in the game of squash, is perhaps Malaysia's most famous and beloved athlete and one of Asia's most famous women. She has over 900,000 likes on Facebook.
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HS AT No. 1
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GARRY KASPAROV Chess 255
JOE LOUIS Boxing 140
KANE WASELENCHUK Racquetball 136
STEPHEN HENDRY Snooker 108
STEFFI GRAF Tennis 94
LEE CHONG WEI Badminton 73
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FEATURES
IV POWER AND PARTNERSHIP
O
ne afternoon this past October, Irving, David and I wandered around West Philadelphia, looking for a café. We found a small, out-of-the way deli and sat outside chatting with our drinks. After a while, shadows spread across our table and an autumnal breeze picked up. It began to get cold. During a pause in the conversation, David said, “would you mind if we move—I’m a little cold.” It wasn’t a request but it wasn’t a demand. We migrated to a sunny spot. Jamie Hickox, at the time the national coach in Malaysia, remembered a difficult situation with the National Sports Council who decided to change the way funding was distributed. “There were a lot of meetings and discussions, and then Nicol breezed back into town and had a meeting and said, ‘We are not going to do it that way.’ The way she wields her power is respectful, but she does wield it.” Irving and David have become one of the greatest coach-player partnerships in professional sports. Some other coaches note that she’s not replicated her success with David with other players, subtly suggesting she’s a one-trick pony. The record says otherwise. Naude got to world No. 13, Samantha Teran has gotten to world No.11, Blake to world No.21. And everyone tends to forget that Irving was a driving force behind Vanessa Atkinson’s rise to world champion. Moreover, new players will come along once David retires and Irving has more coaching bandwidth—she still coaches ordinary SquashCity members for about twenty hours a week and has to manage David’s team and coach and travel with David herself. Still, Irving is the den mother to a fleet of professional women squash players based in Amsterdam. Additionally, each June and July since 2004 she has run a two-week camp just for girls. It is one of the best-kept secrets in the summer camp scene. The girls and women who end up training with her, at the camp or when they are passing through or even for a few
months (more American female squash players seem to be spending a semester abroad in Amsterdam) revere her. “She was my first female squash role model,” Aisling Blake said. “She is so friendly, so normal, so approachable. She deconstructed my game but it was never overwhelming. And she’s still learning. She’ll still send articles through, talk to people, still searching for things to work on.” In January, Irving took me on a midmorning stroll around Amsterdam. She delighted in pointing out the legendary quirks of the city: the townhouses that slightly lean to one side (the so-called crooked teeth rowhouses), the way to cross the bike paths without getting plowed over by the stream of determined riders, the meaning of some of the lights in first-floor windows, the real estate values of various blocks, the hoist at the top of the canal houses. “I’m turning fifty next month,” she said as she talked about the possibility of getting a Dutch passport. But she dismissed, with typical Aussie bluntness, any idea of the half-century milestone precipitating a midlife crisis. “I’m just getting on with it.” She owns her apartment, a light, plant-filled aerie. She has lived longer in Amsterdam than anywhere else in her life. She is in Amsterdam to stay. As for David, if Cairo in December proved anything, she is very much in the prime of a singular career. She is a better player now than she has ever been. David turns thirty-two in August. She’ll be a couple of weeks shy of her thirty-seventh birthday when the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo commence. She has had an amazing streak of not sustaining a serious injury, unheard of in the modern game. She is dedicated to a routine of stretching, warming up and warming down, and her team has kept her fit. “I went two years without getting injured and thought I had done a great job,” said Sarah Fitz-Gerald. “She’s done it for fifteen years.” And she has dealt with the stress of being number one. “Everyone is after you, every time you take the court,” said Fitz-Gerald, who was world No.1 for forty months. “The mental part is very hard. You have all these girls snapping at your heels.
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When I retired, the first thing I thought was ‘Oh, great, I don’t have to get up and train—no one is going after me.’” As for the pressure at home, the 6,000 miles between Penang and Amsterdam has enabled David to mature into the person and player she now is. She is much more comfortable with her place in Malaysian society. In July 2008 she was knighted, in Malaysian style, and given the honorific title of Datuk; she is the youngest person ever to become a Datuk. In August 2010 her old club was renamed the Nicol David International Squash Centre. David is still dedicated to Malaysian squash. She hasn’t lost in an international team competition since the 2004 world teams—an incredible streak of forty-seven straight victories. “She’s delivered that number one spot, amidst so much pressure, against top players, time after time,” said Hickcox who coached her and the rest of the Malaysia team at a number of championships. “She’s the complete team player.” After Lee Chong Wei, the badminton
player and two-time Olympic silver medalist, David is the most famous athlete in Malaysia. “People flock to her for photographs and autograph,” said Major Maniam. “But she is humble, always polite, always smiling.” Since the news came out in the autumn that Lee has tested positive for an anti-inflammatory drug at the 2014 world championships, David stand alone in the Malaysian sporting firmament. Last month she hired Rob Sutton (Irving’s cousin) and his partner—they run a talent agency in Hong Kong—to be her first managers and promoters. (Until now Desmond David has been doing it from home.) At some point, her visibility might match her achievements. The apex of her fame so far was returning home after winning her first world title in Hong Kong in 2005. At the airport the crush of fans and media was so thick that it took her two hours to get through all the interviews. (Irving was there and filmed the whole scene.) She now knows how to handle it— after winning the world title in December, she secretly flew into Kuala Lumpur and then caught a connecting flight to Penang, so a smaller media contingent would greet her. She finds her anonymity elsewhere in the world ironic. One afternoon a few years ago while training with Sarah Fitz-Gerald in Melbourne, Gus Hansen popped into the club. Hansen, an avid squash-playing Dane, hit with David and then invited them to the Crown Casino in Melbourne. When the three of them walked in, a crowd of people turned and stared and started to point at them and then rushed over and took photographs of Hansen. Fangirling, shrieking, selfies. It suddenly was a scene. The fans had no idea who David and FitzGerald were. It was Hansen they wanted to be near—he’s a world-famous professional poker player (he often plays squash with Viktor Berg when he’s in Las Vegas). Hansen moved off eventually and got $100,000 in chips and sat down at a poker table. “We burst out laughing:,” said Fitz-Gerald, “Neither of us knew he was famous until we saw a poster of him at the casino and then this mob of poker fans. No one paid any attention to us. There we were, ten world titles between us, and no one cared at all.”
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