Canada’s world squash champ takes a young Pakistani player under his wing.
AS A GIRL GROWING UP IN THE LAWLESS TRIBAL REGION of northwestern Pakistan, it’s a marvel Maria Toor Pakay was able to play squash, let alone become the country’s top female player. Continue reading
Canada’s world champ comes home to craft his grand squash plan
BEFORE RETIRING IN 2006, JONATHON POWER was notorious for shouting at refs, throwing fits and playing an unpredictable, vicious brand of squash that earned him world titles and top ranking. Now a somewhat mellowed dad, he is about to open a cavernous, $1.3-million, 10-court squash club in a decommissioned military airplane hangar at Downsview Park, set to launch this fall. The National Squash Academy isn’t just a slick state-of-the-art facility. Continue reading
I’D BEEN LIVING ON MAUI FOR ABOUT a month before discovering the cowboys. Not far up the Haleakala volcano, off Olinda Road, there’s a ragged little rodeo-arena called Oskie Rice, and there they are, all belt buckles and spurs, roping cattle on a quiet hillside barely 30 kilometres from the stacks of beach condos below. Continue reading
At the biennial Arctic Winter Games, the Inuit sports can cause competitors to scream in pain
MINIK RASMUSSEN AND HIS TWIN BROTHER, Pilo, sit side by side at the first-aid station, wincing as the medic applies bags of snow to their bloody knuckles. The Greenlandic brothers – identical right down to their sparse mustaches and tattoos – have just been knuckle-hopping. It’s a traditional Inuit sport that mimics the way seals shuffle across the ice, which, for humans, means bouncing forward on knuckles and toes, straight as a plank, until collapsing in agony. Continue reading
Jasmine Budak 