Jonathon Power finds sweet spot after squash supremacy

So, less than a year removed from his triumphant return to the top of international squash, he enrolled in Young Drivers of Canada. During one dreary classroom session, a teenager kept turning around and looking at the 33-year-old with the familiar face sitting hunched over his instructional material.

“Are you Jonathon Power?” the kid finally asked.

Power lowered his head, embarrassed.

Then the kid asked another question, the one that makes Power laugh when he repeats it.

“What’s your deal, man?”

It was a fair question. After living and breathing squash for almost two decades, Power has spent the last eight years learning how to live in the real world.

He can’t cook, not really anyway (“I’m strong with toast and peanut butter,” he insists. “Strong to very strong”), and despite his heavy travel schedule he doesn’t collect air miles.

“I just figure if I don’t do it, I don’t want it bad enough,” he reasons. “I know it’s stupid, but not stupid enough where I’d be prepared to change it.”

He can drive now, but with an electric car and no snow tires, commuting to his squash academy in Downsview Park this time of year is an adventure. (“I thought I was doing the world a favour,” he says. “I just wasn’t doing myself one.”)

He also has a tendency to space out, the way you might if you were trained to block out any thoughts not pertaining to whacking a tiny rubber ball around a glass box. During a recent photo shoot at the posh Badminton and Racquet Club in north Toronto, Power ordered an espresso from the lounge, then forgot all about it and had to drink it cold 15 minutes later.

Leaving the lounge at the end of our interview, hair tousled and stubble on his neck, he tripped over the power cord lighting up the club’s tiny Christmas tree.

Most serious athletes suffer to varying degrees from arrested development: their job is to play a game, and more often than not the boring day-to-day tasks of getting from place to place, and clothing and feeding themselves, are taken care of by others. But for squash players, the problem — and the fun — is especially acute. Many go pro in their teens, dropping out of school and growing up fast in one sense, but also prolonging adolescence.

Power grew up an army brat —his father operated gyms at military bases across Canada. Jonathon was an obsessive athlete.

“He grew up in a gym, basically,” says his father, John Power. “He was so comfortable from day one, with a ball around him. It was one of those freak things.”

By the time he was 13, Power had the same sponsor as the best squash player in the world, Jahangir Khan. That summer, Khan’s coach convinced the Powers to send their son to London for an intensive training program with the master.

Working with Khan, Power’s game soared. “My parents mortgaged the house for it, but it was worth it,” he says now. “I was living in London, England, and I would take the subway an hour and a half by myself every day to get to Wembley Stadium, and at Wembley Stadium I’d play squash for like six hours with Jahangir Khan.”

“I dare say he didn’t phone home once,” his father says.

Three years later, Jonathon was ready to turn professional. At 16, he dropped out of high school and moved to France, joining the roving cast of 50 or so players who make their living at squash.

“It was way better than Grade 11,” he says. “Trust me.”

Power soon established himself as a great showman, mercurial and hot-tempered. The comparisons to John McEnroe were inevitable, but unlike McEnroe, Power always had something impish and innocent about him, a droll slacker who happened to be really good at squash.

After slipping and cramping up in a tense match with Peter Nicol — Power’s greatest rival — he exclaimed to the umpire, “someone shot me with a pellet gun from the crowd.”

(“Nice shot,” Nicol retorted.)

By the end of the decade, Power’s flash had gained substance — in 1999, he became the first world No. 1 from North America. At his peak, Power brought new prominence to the sport; that big personality was a nice antidote to the demure, mannerly champions of the past.

But the tour’s grind took a toll on his body, not to mention his personal life. Toward the end of Power’s career, he travelled with a coterie of doctors and therapists to loosen up his hips and back; his wife Sita stayed at home in Montreal. In 2006, Power regained the top world ranking — then retired two days later.

“He had been living out of a bag from the time he was 16 or 17,” says his father. “I think he felt it was time to put his feet on the ground.”

Within a year, Jonathon and Sita had a daughter, Parker.

After moving to Toronto in 2008, Power set about trying to fill the hole in his life carved out by retirement. He threw himself into parenting — “That was huge. That was huge” — and helped found an after-school squash program for kids in the Jane-Finch area.

He also tried his hand at coaching squash prodigies, doing for them what Jahangir Khan had done for him. One of his charges was a Pakistani girl named Maria Toorpakai Wazir, driven from her home near the Afghan border by the sexism of her fanatically religious community. Training her was a “blessing,” Power says.

Maria and Parker helped him become less self-absorbed, he says, a trait virtually required in top-flight athletes.

“You try to get out of yourself, ’cause you’re so self-centred for so long. You have to be — there’s no room to not be completely absorbed in yourself.”

His competitive fire was just as hard to dim. He still loves winning (“I’d cheat my 7-year-old daughter at backgammon,” he jokes) and plays occasional exhibition matches against Nicol and other contemporaries in the Legends of Squash Tour. But he knows the cost of his old life was steep — and often borne by his family, from the $6,000 his parents spent sending him to London to the months that Sita spent alone while he was travelling. When his daughter was younger, they were riding the elevator in their north Toronto apartment building when Parker began singing a schoolyard ditty: “First is the worst, second is the best, third is the one with the hairy chest.”

“What are you talking about? Being the best is way better,” Jonathon told her.

“No, no, dad,” she shot back, with a sly smile. “You don’t understand. When you’re the best, everyone wants to talk to you and you have no time for your wife and kid.”

He knows there’s truth in that quip, and has no plans to rejoin competitive squash.

“To recreate it is not worth it,” he says. “There’s no Michael Jordan/Washington Wizards in me.”

If Power has resigned himself to retirement, to fatherhood and adulthood, to responsibility and selflessness — however slowly — the lure of his youth still tugs at him once in a while.

He spends five or six days a month on the road, playing tournaments or putting on clinics, “just to get a taste of (my) old life.”

Towards the end of our interview, Power started glancing at his phone — he had a doubles squash match to play that afternoon at the Granite Club in North York.

“Still, I see a ball on the ground, I zoom in, I chase it,” he says. “Like a little boy, like a 2-year-old boy . . . I just didn’t evolve as a human. I just stayed right there, chasing the ball. Forty years later . . .”