PSA50: Jonah & Geoff: Squash’s Greatest Rivalry

By RJ Mitchell

It is no exaggeration to say that in any sport, the greatest athletes benefit from having great rivals. With an opponent of equal measure to face off against, athletes are forced to raise their level. For Federer, there is Nadal, for Ali there was Frazier, for Evert there was Navratilova, Bjorn Borg had McEnroe – the list goes on.

The closest rivalries provide the ultimate motivation for athletes to break down the barriers, push the body beyond normal feats of physical endurance and challenge aspects of their mentality to discover minutiae which help achieve marginal gains that sway the balance of power.

In squash, the first rivalry of the professional era between Jonah Barrington and Geoff Hunt is still arguably one of the greatest the sport has witnessed – with the brutality and endurance that epitomised their gripping battles in the 60s and 70s having never been replicated in their gladiatorial intensity.

It was an intensity that was immortalised in the 1972 British Open final, when after over 30 minutes of play, Barrington had failed to score a single point – finding himself trailing Hunt 9-0, 2-0. Despite the frightening deficit, Barrington was ahead on the other count – who had more fuel in the tank. As a result he prevailed in a mammoth two hour battle, which left the triumphant Barrington according to Clive Everton, his manager, ‘with sore teeth, swollen gums, and a long face’ while Hunt was said to have endured a full body cramp from three days.

It was also a rivalry which, like all the great head-to-heads, spanned several stanzas as first Hunt, then Barrington and finally Hunt chronologically grasped supremacy.

Played out to a background of the burgeoning professional game as squash belatedly followed tennis out of the stay pressed starchy Amateur credo and linking the opposite ends of the earth, Barrington v Hunt had it all – and that’s before we talk on-court style.

Opening Shots:

When it comes to setting the scene of this almost pugilistic ‘feud’ there is no one better than Jonah as he recalled with perfect clarity: “My rivalry with Geoff was the preeminent of my career. Obviously, the sport in those days was very different to nowadays and circumstances dictated that you would only meet up with your main rivals three or four times at most.

“Things developed when the professional tour got going but at that early stage there may be three or four months between the biggest events, and this meant that it was almost like preparing for a boxing match.

“You would have a long period of putting in background work, focusing the mind on what would be required when you did meet up and always reminding yourself about the difficulties when you had last played and all the time remembering that your main rival, which was of course, Geoff, would be training.

“Over the years I then travelled to Australia to play the Australian Open so that I would be playing Geoff over there but there was a huge gap before we would meet up again.”

When it comes to the Antipodean angle on the opening shots, Geoff has no doubt that their rivalry made him, in those pre-Jahangir Khan days, the greatest professional champion of them all and he said: “It had to be my greatest rivalry as it was over a long period of time from the Amateurs to the Professionals.

“It all started in 1963 when I went across to England with the Australian Team, although I wasn’t part of it, just attached to the team, and I was only 16 and we were playing matches against a lot of the Amateur and County players, it was almost a tour in terms of playing these guys.

“So it was great for me and I played the British Amateur and I got through a couple of rounds and lost to a beaten finalist, so I was playing a decent level and Jonah was a leading county player and on the periphery of the national team and I ended up playing against Jonah at the Lansdowne.

“Jonah came up to me to ask what kind of training I did and we started chatting. He was very keen on getting better as he wasn’t in the England team at that time. So that was the first time I had come across Jonah and it was before he really got serious about squash.”

But Jonah was indeed about to become deadly serious about his squash as Geoff was soon to find out and as Jonah explained: “As with many sports people, waking up tired, which is what happens when you train remorselessly, then there is a great temptation, given the voice in your head is telling you to go back to bed, to take it easy. Yet, then there was that stronger voice telling me: ‘Geoff will be training, he will be getting in another day’s work.’

“That was unbelievably motivating for me as he was technically exceptional, unbelievably athletic, and incredibly formidable mentally and you knew all that when you were playing on court against him.”

Battle Joined: 

Soon battle was joined – on an epic scale – as Geoff recalled: “So I played Jonah in the final of the second World Amateur Championship in London (Lansdowne Club) back in 1969 (Hunt: 9-7, 2-9, 9-4, 9-0) and we also played in the final of the Amateur team event which Australia won (2-1 v GB) and Jonah beat me in that (Barrington: 9-2, 4-9, 10-8, 4-9, 7-9).

“So we had good battles at that stage. Then we had that 15 match series in 1969 (Hunt: 13-2) he was a very difficult person to deal with at times, he just hated losing and got so cranky afterwards, but at the end of the day we had a few dinners together and became friends.”

During Jonah’s run of six British Open titles spanning 1967 to 1973 he was to face Hunt twice (1970, unhelpfully played in December 1969 and 1972) and it was the thought of these coming battles that drove Barrington to new depths of training intensity to ensure he would prevail over his greatest rival.

Jonah admitted: “With most players you were battling on a number of fronts but not in the same way mentally. It was a huge mental battle with Geoffrey as he was incredibly difficult to break down and I knew when I played him there had to be an erosion factor before he would start to wilt in any shape or form.

“The early part of any of our matches was always very difficult as he was wonderfully clinical, made very few unforced errors and so it was a battle waged over a long period that built up over many months as I knew I would be playing him in the British Open and that I would not cross swords with him for quite a while before that.

“Geoff’s mantra was to make it hard and fair, no quarter was asked for, but the match was always played within the spirit of the game and that is what happened every time I played Geoff Hunt.”

Style Challenge:

When it came to Geoff’s take on Jonah there was nothing but respect and squash’s first professional World Champion said: “We were quite different in the way we approached the game albeit we both put a big emphasis on hitting good length.

“At that stage I hit the ball hard and my game was based on pressure, hitting the ball hard, getting in early and keeping the pressure on while Jonah was very patient, he had a very good soft serve and used his fitness to the maximum by always being in good position and he was just very difficult to play.

“He had a superb ability to keep the ball in play but on a colder court he wasn’t as good, as you need the ball bouncing to keep getting it back, so on a colder court he struggled against me as I was more attacking.

“Even though you couldn’t get pace on the English ball I could still exert a lot of pressure. But Jonah manoeuvred the ball around, had very good length and was very clever about it all and we had contrasting styles.

“When I used to play him one of my attacking shots from the back of the court was the boast, particularly on the backhand, and Jonah would run up and lob it back to my backhand and the high lob is one of the hardest things to play back.

“So I would have a 1000 backhand volleys from up high, then I would get tired, and in those days I wasn’t at the fitness level required.

“But we had a series in Australia and I lost to Jonah a few times and at the end of it I realised that to beat him consistently I had to get fit. That is when I started my running training.”

Squash has always been compared to a particularly gruelling game of physical chess and listening to Jonah respond it is easy to see why: “Geoff’s natural instinct was to get on the ball as quickly as possible and he hunted around the middle of the court, literally, to keep the pressure on.

“There were and are relatively few players who hunt on a squash court, it has to be worked on and my game against Geoff was sensibly more defensive.

“Basically, I had to try and negate the effect of the power he had and to make him wait for the ball longer than he would like, because it was almost suicidal to get the ball onto his racket quickly.”

The British Open Finals:

So to the first great British Open (1970) final between the duo, held at the Edgbaston Priory Club in December 1969, (Barrington: 9-7, 3-9, 3-9, 9-4, 9-4) writing in the excellent ‘Book of Jonah’, the author was clear on his approach: “I had trained to play at a slower pace for an extended period but Geoff was taking me round at four-minute-mile pace when I had come prepared for 10,000 metres!”

Yet Geoff could not maintain his searing pace as Jonah recalled: “The pace went on through the second and third games as Geoff dominated the centre of the court and made no mistakes yet there was an eventuality about the final outcome.

“In the fourth after advice from Nasrullah (Khan, coach to Jonah) I decided I would not make a single error and at 3-4 down, Geoff slowed and was unable to take the ball on the volley, he began to founder and I won the fourth and fifth.

“At the end Geoff suffered cramp and I just felt awfully tired through the mental hammering I had taken in trying to play the bitter war of attrition for almost an eternity.

“The match took 2hrs 12 minutes and we were both shattered. It took me a long time to get over that match but Geoff must have felt absolutely destroyed.”

The ’72 Rematch: 

Yet, if anything the 1972 British Open final (Barrington: 0-9, 9-7, 10-8, 6-9,9-7) was even more brutal as Geoff reflected: “I used to cramp after around one hour and 25 minutes, I knew it was coming on and as it did I had probably 10 minutes left to play.

“So in ’72 we had a really tough match and I was 2-1 down and won the next game and I knew I was starting to cramp and had to win the fifth as quickly as I could.

“So I got to 6-0 up in the final game and then cramped in the hands, the quads, you name it, so it wasn’t the fitness that got me, it was the cramp and it was very frustrating for me and I had to find a solution to the cramp. It was Jonah who helped me find it!”

From the other side of the court Jonah’s perspective that this was the greatest battle of the rivalry which defined him is clear: “In a way the British Open final in ’72 has to be that (defining encounter). I think that when we played that match it only had about nine lets in the whole match and that was hand – in, hand-out scoring back then.

“People would say to me that: ‘You are a great mover’ but with regard to Geoffrey Hunt, well no I wasn’t! My objective was to make him play more my way than his. I had to make it more difficult for him physically and to force him to generate the power, as that is more tiring than if you give power to people as they can generate more and do so economically.

“It may sound easy, but it certainly wasn’t when you had to go over the two-hour mark. With Geoff he didn’t start to cramp until at least the third quarter of the second hour, certainly it would have been helpful if he had cramped after an hour – but that wasn’t the case!

“It would come in the last quarter of the match, and it would happen and yes, he did have a problem at that stage in our ’72 final and I had to work awfully hard to make that happen, believe me!

“But for me there is no player today that had the willpower on court that Geoff Hunt had, he would have collapsed rather than give a match away and he almost did so in that 1972 British Open final.”

The Appreciation:

And so it’s time to let these two great men provide their ultimate appreciation of each and as with everything about these gentlemen, this oozes class.

“Ultimately when Jonah decided to stop playing our friendship blossomed and Jonah was very helpful to me,” said Hunt.

“We have been friends ever since that time. We had such a strong rivalry, that we used to hate playing each other on the court – he would bend over backwards to win. But then we became good friends in the end which was just really nice.”

A sentiment echoed by Barrington: “In my mind regardless of the fact there were other very good Aussie players, Geoff was without doubt my foremost rival and that rivalry was on a different level to anyone else.”