With few juniors to compete against, the prepubescent Geoff Hunt played squash against men from the start. One was former Australian cricket captain Ian Johnson, 30 years his senior, who expressed good-natured surprise to lose to such a stripling. Another time, Hunt matched wits with Bob Cowper, a future Test triple century-maker.
Squash legend Geoff Hunt on the Gold Coast with the racquet he won a British Open with.Credit: Paul Harris
What was for the cricketers a diversion became for Hunt a calling. From those distant beginnings grew an unparalleled career in which he won 178 of the 215 tournaments he played as well as helped to pioneer professionalism in squash, and culminates now at 77 in his elevation to Legend status in the Sport Australia Hall of Fame. He’s still shaking his head. “I’m pretty shocked,” he said.
Among Australians, Hunt’s record pales only beside that of his idol, Heather Mackay, who lost twice early in her career, then never again in nearly two decades before retirement. Squash is a sport that somewhat mysteriously lends itself to improbable streaks. Pakistani Jahangir Khan, who trailed Hunt to the game’s summit, won 555 matches in a row.
Ever so slightly, Hunt talks down his own career, not out of false modesty, but matter-of-factly. “I wasn’t as skilful as some others around me in terms of my ability to hit shots,” he said. “I’d almost call myself a manufactured player rather than a natural player. I never ever really got my game to the level that I thought was good enough.”
Hunt marked himself down for his forehand. “It always let me down,” he said. We should all be so troubled! He compensated with smarts, a cool head and speed around the court. “One of my fortes was that I got in early,” he said. “I was quick onto the ball. I’d give my opponent no time to think. That would cover up my inability to play some shots. I don’t think I was ever a great shot player.”
Hunt holds up the British Open trophy in 1980.Credit: AP
But he was what all greats are, archly competitive. “I used to think everyone thought like I did,” he said. “I didn’t think I was different to anyone else in that sense. But I realised when I was coaching, everyone thinks a bit differently.”
His steely mindset served him well. As Hunt trawls over his career, it becomes clear that he is not talking about wins and losses, but degrees of victory. Some came easily; for others he was made to sweat. Against some highly rated opponents, his aim was not so much to win as to win in shorter order than previously.
Hunt grew up in Melbourne’s southern suburbs, in a family who all played some squash. He loved it at first sight. “One of the biggest appeals was how competitive it was,” he said. “You’re standing beside someone, you can see the whites of their eyes, it’s a contest,” he said. “And I loved the physicality of it, too.”
Squash was a winter sport, but Hunt played all year round, which he thinks sped his meteoric rise. At one stage, he played every day for three years, including Christmas Days. “I had those extra few months of the summer, and so I was improving much quicker than the people around me,” he said. “I did it not because I didn’t like other sports, but because I loved playing squash.”
Hunt in action in the ’80s.Credit: The Age
Out of school, Hunt qualified as an industrial chemist. “My job at one stage entailed every morning visiting the Carlton and United breweries,” he said. But he quickly realised that full-time work was incompatible with serious squash.
The game then was mostly amateur and played almost exclusively in private clubs. “In England, professionals weren’t even allowed in the main bar at the clubs,” Hunt said. “They had to go through a side entrance.”
Englishman Jonah Barrington was on a mission to popularise the game and enlisted Hunt and his mate Ken Hiscoe among others for a hectic series of exhibition matches. Hunt’s father, who worked in marketing, did the sums. “You could probably earn four times what you’re earning now in your first year,” he told his son. In Australia, Hunt and Hiscoe played 21 matches in four weeks. In England, he played Barrington 15 times and beat him 13-2.
As Hunt’s career blossomed, so did squash in Australia. Previously, it was a club sport, also a second sport for tennis players and cricketers; the 1939 South Australian champion was Don Bradman. For a time, squash became the fitness sport, until perhaps a few too many heart attacks and the jogging craze dulled its appeal.
Hitherto, Hunt kept fit by playing squash. Now he realised it was not enough. Generally, he could beat Barrington, except in the hot, stuffy, bouncy conditions inside London’s Lansdowne and RAC clubs, for instance, where the big finals were played.
Hunt (left) competes against Pakistan’s Mohibullah Khan in 1976.Credit: AP
So he dedicated himself to a program of gruelling 400-metre and 800m interval training, modelled on middle distance runners. “I was fast, so I didn’t need any more strength training. I needed to be able to endure,” he said. “Barrington had elevated that side of things to a new level.” He admitted that he overdid it, for a while neglecting his courtcraft. “No matter how fit you are, you’ve still got to be able to control the ball,” he said.
There is an inbuilt marathon dimension to squash. Careers, matches, even points tend to the epic. One day in England, Hunt and Pakistani Gogi Alauddin had a rally that lasted 10 minutes and 400 strokes. “It wasn’t really a great rally. When you’ve had such a long rally, you think, I can’t lose it,” Hunt said. “We both played a bit conservatively. It was a bit awful, really. I was almost getting punch drunk, it went on so long.” He won it, naturally.
Hunt puzzles over squash’s vast winning streaks, his and others’. “The only explanation I can think of is that you don’t have to be that much better than a player to beat them,” he said “But if you’re a little better, you do win.”
As squash underwent a somewhat tense, tennis-like metamorphosis from amateur to professional, Hunt won everything for which he was eligible several times over, most significantly the British Open eight times when it was regarded as the world championship. His last win in 1981 was over Jahangir, who promptly won the next 10 Opens. Hunt also won the first four world championships in the sport.
Hunt said he was never conscious of his prodigious record, nor jealous about protecting it, and to this day does not know his career win-loss stats. “Every tournament was a new tournament. I just tried to win that one,” he said. “It was a new challenge every time.”
Hunt can talk through his opponents’ strengths and weaknesses still. To beat Hiscoe, he had to stay in front of him on the court. Barrington, it came down to fitness. Jahangir, he had to keep in the corners.
His repertoire was his own. Because he was quick, he would often play backhand shots off his left leg, rather than step across his right in the usual way. That meant he was already on the move back to the centre of the court.
“I was quick at getting in and out of the backhand corner,” he said. “If you can imagine, if you lunge into that corner, you’re almost falling over.”
One day in a match at Stockton-on-Tees, he did. “My back gave way, I fell on the ground – and that was it,” he said. Though he had injections and played another couple of tournaments, his back would not stand up to competition again and eventually needed surgery. He was 35.
“I certainly think I was at my peak at that time. I was as physically fit as I ever was,” he said. “I felt like I was hitting the ball better than ever before. I was still hopeful of getting on top of Jahangir. To me, he was a fantastic challenge. I felt like I was cut short at the time.”
Squash remained and still is Hunt’s life. He coached in England and Qatar and at the Australian Institute of Sport. There, he learnt about all he could have done in terms of diet and psychology, for instance, to make himself even better, if only anyone had known. Until he was nearly out of his teens, he’d never eaten pasta!
He let his fitness go, briefly, and hated it, and now at 77 looks as if he’d be good to get through a couple of early tournament rounds still. He says squash obviously could never have made him rich on the football-tennis scale, but it has given him something even better: satisfaction.
In some ways, Hunt was a rock star, but of a stone age. He acknowledges that in a crowded sports landscape, squash in Australia will never reclaim the participation rate of its heyday and his prime.
But he loves improvements in the sport’s presentation on television, for instance, and how it has broken out of its Commonwealth hide. “Internationally, it’s grown enormously over the years,” he said. “It’s played in countries I’ve never heard of.
“It will maintain a level. It’s such a lovely sport.”
Skier Michael Milton, a six-time Paralympic gold medallist, has also been elevated to Legend status in the hall of fame.
