Squash Magazine: Mike Way

The Way of Way Scenes from the Life of Coaching Genius, Mike Way By James Zug Photo by Ben Collier

The biggest moment in his life? Doha, Qatar, December 1998. His kid, his Pygmalion, his ultimate protégé, the wild mustang he reined in and saddled and made true and fine, was about to play the most important match of his career. The World Open. $175,000 tournament. The kid had the talent, everyone said. Could be a world champion. Who was ever going to get him to focus? Who could make him work? He did. The coach pulled off a miracle and got him here. The kid is warming up, a Walkman jingling tunes in his ears, in a nearby court. The referee signals the coach: go get your player, it's time to start. The coach walks into the warm-up court. The kid is pumping backhand volley drops, tunes blaring, hopping around, oblivious. The coach says, aware of the awful seriousness of his message, as if he is a guard leading a prisoner to an execution: “Hey, J., it's time.” Taking off his Walkman earphones, the kid says, “Look at this, Mike,” and cracks another backhand volley drop. “Yes?” “I played Hilly yesterday.” “Yes, J., I saw you play Hilly. I was there. I coached you.” “Yeah, well, so I saw Hilly dropping his forearm a little when hitting this shot, sort of laying his arm down, like this.” He slaps another backhand volley drop. “J., Okay, that's interesting. Let's go.” “No, so, I'm thinking of changing my stroke on that shot. It's pretty cool. I can do it like that. I can lay down my arm like that.” Slap. The coach thinks, hello, you are the guy who's got the best short game in the world and on the biggest day of your life, five minutes before your match starts, you're deciding to tinker with your bread-and-butter? This is ridiculous. This is a pretty sight. Now, I'm a conservative bloke and you're killing me. “Okay, J. that's cool,” he says calmly. “That's fine, that'll work.” He walks out of the court and says, “Let's go then.” After the kid goes out and wins the World Open, he is being mobbed by fans and friends in the court. All the while, the kid is looking for his coach. When he makes eye contact he lifts his right arm and gestures. See, he says, see I was laying down my forearm on my backhand volleys. See? I bump into Way at a junior tournament. We watch as a coach counsels a player in between games. I ask him what he does with Power during a match. “I don't do a goddamn thing,” he says. “J. is so wound up when he comes off court, so for the first 30 seconds I don't say a thing. I hand him his water and a towel and just sit there. Silence. Then I say one, two or three pieces of advice to him, and I repeat what I tell him three times. Quickly, and then send him back on court.” We watch another coach using flash cards with words like “Patience” written on them. “If I used that with J.,” says Way with a smile, “he'd hit me.” * “Mike's a man's man,” says Dean Brown, a former pupil and current pro doubles player. “He coaches at a men's club. He swears a lot. He's tough and works you hard. He takes no gruff. It's a lot easier now that Mike has stopped playing competitively. He wasn't that brilliant a player, he was good, but not unbeatable, but when he took you out on the court he would beat the hell out of you.” * Mike Way was born in Kent in 1954 and raised in Suffolk, England, but the one place from his upbringing that is critical to his biography is Nottingham. In the 1970s Way migrated to the Midland's city to play squash. It was a hotbed. Gawain Briars, Chris Dittmar, Dean Williams, Ross Thorne—they all played at a club called The Park. “I got addicted and had to play all the time. Good players are attracted to good players and we all naturally ended up in Notts. We would pile into a car and drive off to some tournament, get billeted at a house, sleep on the floor, play all weekend, come back all knackered and play league squash on Sunday nights.” Way was a good player but never one of the best. He helped Nottinghamshire win the county championships. He never qualified for the British Open. Twice he made it through the qualies to reach the first round at the Canadian Open. The first time he faced Jahangir Khan. Ten years later, the second time, Jansher Khan. * “We overtrained in the 1970s,” Way says. “I look at what we did then and realize we had no effing clue what we were doing. There was no peaking, no emphasis. We did the same boring drills over and over again, the same 400s sprints. We did everything bloody wrong. We were just emulating Geoff and Jonah.” Suddenly, he stands up, pushes back his chair and walks away from me. He walks stiffly, wobbling from side to side, as if he's suddenly gone lame. “It's the old squash player, what I call 'The March of the Penguins,'” he says as he totters back to the table. “My most precious goal is to have my players walk away from the game with nothing chronically wrong with them: two good hips, two good knees, a good back. The old measuring stick for squash players—whether they can play a round of golf at age 50—is an effing joke. I want them to have a full life.” * I ask Jonathon Power about Way. We discuss how Way will work with him to perfect a stroke: breakdown, adjust, clean, tinker, examine, polish and groove some shot, like he is cleaning a rifle. “So, he pretty much breathes squash,” I comment. “No, not really,” Power says bluntly. “He's passionate about squash, but he doesn't breathe squash. He's got other interests that are important to him. That is one of the key things that make him a great coach. He has a life. He's got a brain. He's got perspective.” Way's first love was classical guitar. He dreamt of going to Leeds' College of Music and playing jazz. He gave up that dream but still plays a mean guitar. He and his brother, Ken Way, who is the team psychologist for Ipswich, a Premier League soccer team in England, had a band. Its first name was Deafening Whisper. Didn't quite have that ring of greatness, so they changed it to Hieronymus Bosch. Sailing is now his biggest off-court activity. Way keeps his van loaded with his windsurfer in case the wind freshens on Lake Ontario. He owns a Laser and a Hobie Cat. His latest thrill is a new sport called kite boarding, which is windsurfing with a kite attached so you can do extreme, big-air jumps. “It's brilliant,” he says. “It pumps more adrenaline than anything. Huge jumps that are totally unplanned.” * “Nothing happened by design,” Way says of his squash coaching career. Living hand-to-mouth near Nottingham, he worked part-time giving lessons. In 1981 he took a one-year job at the Ontario Racquet Club. Softball squash was just coming ashore in Canada and Way rode the rip-tide. He coached and played in 20 or so tournaments a season. He decided to stay. He moved to the Valhalla Club. Six years later he switched to the Toronto Athletic Club. He was happy, teaching squash, stringing racquets, occasionally working with a junior player. Around 1994 he took up coaching a Canadian teenager with potential, Graham Ryding. Soon after they started, Ryding's PSA ranking jumped into the top one hundred. One day in 1995 Ryding was playing with a friend named Jonathon Power. After they finished, Way huddled with Ryding, discussing the match, when Power approached them. “Do you notice something about my game?” he asked. Honest, straight-shooting, Way said, “Yes, I do.” The next week Way took Power into the court at the Toronto Athletic Club. He said, “Let's work on your forehand drop shot.” “Which one?” Power asked. “Which one?” “Yeah, which one? I have six.” “Six?” Sure,” Power said and ran through them. Way tells me this story to show not only how immensely talented Power was, not only to demonstrate how Power had an abiding fascination with his sport and all its obscure details, but also as an example of how Power taught Way about the game. The teacher became the student. Then Way adds, “Well, in the end, he actually had only four drop shots.” * “The greatest limitation found in teachers is a tendency for them to teach the game the way they play it. This should be avoided. A new player may be quite differently gifted, and the teacher's personal game may be in many ways inappropriate to the pupil's talents. A good teacher assesses the mental and physical gifts of his pupil and tries to adapt to them. There is no one best way to play the game.” -Jack Barnaby, Winning Squash Racquets, 1978 * At the time Power was running through his forehand drop shots, he was the énfant terrible of Canadian squash. No coach could work with him for more than a couple of sessions. He smashed racquets, fled the court, balked at drills, refused to workout, partied too hard. He had talent, gobs of talent, but everyone in Canada was tired of watching the talent being wasted on such a brat. At the time Mike Way started working with him Power was languishing in the 60s in the PSA rankings. He should have been in the top 10. “The boredom factor with Jonathon was huge,” Way says. “He got bored early, much earlier than any other player I'd had. He forced me to come up with exciting drills, forced me to keep things interesting. One-shot drills killed the creativity in his mind. How to engage this kid was the question. No one would have ever tolerated the bulls— that he pulled where I grew up, but I liked him. He's got an intelligent, cerebral mind about squash, and life. He could have been a professional in about six different sports. And he's very funny. He would drive me bananas, but still it worked. I have learned much more from J. that he has from me. He's the master. All I had to do was make him a little more consistent.” The first few months were difficult. Often Power threw what Way calls a “wobbly.” “He would break his racquet, storm off the court, take a shower and leave the club,” says Way. “Slowly, as we developed an understanding and some structure, the wobblies got less dramatic. He would break his racquet, storm off court, shower but wouldn't leave the club. Then he would just break his racquet and storm off court and then after a couple of minutes he'd come back on court. Then he would just break his racquet. Eventually he stopped the wobblies.” * “It is an absolute miracle what Mike has pulled off with Jonathon,” says John Fleury, the veteran Vancouver guru who worked with Power briefly before Way. “With Power it was always yelling, not coaching.” * “My philosophy is simple,” Way says. “Squash is a ball, a bat and a wall. It is that simple. I try to remind my players that they fell in love with the game because of those three simple things. For a lot of guys like myself, when you hear the squash ball hitting a wall, it drives you back into the court—the love of that sound.” * The coattails of Jonathon Power have been very long. In 1997 Way moved to the Toronto Racquet Club and launched the National Training Centre of Canada. Officially the club is the headquarters for the national team and Way the director of the Centre. He is not the official Canadian national coach, but he coaches all the men and half the women on the team. Sponsored by Wilson and a sizable group of patrons, the Centre is now the leading place for squash players to train in the world. Every Canadian of note trains there—Melanie Jans, Margo Green, Viktor Berg, Kelly Patrick, Josh McDonald, Shahir Razik—and players from South America, Europe and Asia appear for weeks or months at a time and train with Way. They pay Way the bargain basement price of $12 a day as retainer fee. (Compare that to the £50/day that Neil Harvey, the famed English coach of Peter Nicol, charges.) At any one time there are a dozen players training under Way. Way has produced three instruction videos, “Power Squash,” that he hawks at tournaments and in magazines like this one (a little more than one hundred dollars for all three). He jets around the US and Canada giving clinics. He is now recognized as the top coach in the Western Hemisphere. Power is not his only product. Ryding has repeatedly come close to cracking the top 10, Razik is in the top 50 and climbing, and Berg and McDonald are the two young stars on the pro doubles tour. “There's no question that J. put me on the map,” says Way. “He made people take notice after winning the Worlds in '98. But I've never been just 'Jonathon Power's coach.'” At a pro tournament in Toronto, a National Training Centre booth contained a television monitor broadcasting one of Way's videos. I joke with Way, “What's this stuff?” He says, without a glance, “It's rubbish. Don't believe a word of it.” * “The thing about Way is that he treats everyone uniquely,” says Jason Jewell, one of the many Americans who has made the pilgrimage to Toronto to train with Way. “He's very perceptive. He doesn't have a formula and try to mold you into one certain style. He'll tailor his ideas to your game, not vice versa. He isn't hung up on who's who. And he knows an incredible amount about squash.” * Way is very protective of the Toronto Racquet Club. He is proud of the club. Every evening there is food laid out on a table in the lounge overlooking the courts. The members have gone far out of their way to accommodate his ideas. They allow him to travel to conferences, clinics and tournaments. They have only two singles courts, yet allow Way to fill the off-peak hours with his drilling protégés. The club is men-only, but has allowed women players to come and play. The day I visited, Margo Green had just changed in the tiny ladies bathroom and was leaving the club. The TRC, east of downtown Toronto, is a phenomenally unattractive building, low-slung, hulking, derelict. A funeral home across the street looks more like a squash club. No one would think this is the national training center for Burkina Faso, let alone Canada. “It's the oldest squash club in the world, founded in 1905,” he says. I remind him of a bunch of clubs that have had courts longer—The Racquet Club, Germantown Cricket Club, Philadelphia Cricket Club and Merion Cricket Club in Philadelphia, Baltimore Country Club in Maryland, Tennis & Racquet Club in Boston, Queen's Club in London all had courts in 1905. “But they aren't squash clubs, they aren't clubs that exist just for squash,” he says. I look at him blankly for a second and then realize it is this precision, this focus on detail that combined with a touch of pride makes him Mike Way. * One infinitesimal aspect of technique can occupy 20 minutes of Mike Way conversation. He might joke about his insatiable thirst for knowledge, but he admits there is no place he'd rather be than around the proverbial squash water cooler. “There is a huge debate right now about the broken wrist issue,” he tells me. After 10 minutes of hearing about how some pros are hitting an attacking boast with the broken wrist, my eyes glaze over, but Way's are shining with excitement. “I like to coach by elimination,” he says. “What works, what doesn't, why? Almost all innovation comes from the players. All we coaches are doing is catch-up, trying to figure how what they are doing. I might spend an hour thinking about how it works. The kids all mimic the pros and we've got to find out what they are mimicking. You never stop learning. I get stimulated by the learning. I enjoy it, for God's sake. My thinking is there might be five different ways of hitting a shot. You need to have three in your bag of tricks. There is a framework of acceptability. I don't believe in cloning. I think if you could shoot 20 photographs of 20 different players hitting a shot, you know, like that guy [Eadweard Muybridge] who photographed horses galloping in the late 1800s, when you broke it down you'd see very little deviation in the hitting zone. The players might do a whole lot of bizarre stuff at the beginning or end of their swing, but not in the hitting zone. Don't worry about the other stuff, I say, just worry about the hitting zone.” * The other story from Qatar. A couple of hours before the World Open finals, Way goes to Power's room to check up on him. When he walks in, Power presents him an old, ratty ankle brace. For half a year, ever since Power badly sprained his ankle playing basketball with his father, he had worn this brace. Not once had he stepped on the court without it. “The brace is broken,” Power says dejectedly. “That's all right,” Way says, thinking he'll take the brace and mend it somehow, jerryrig something, anything to keep Power from fixating on it and feeling the psychological damage to his comfort zone. Power doesn't say anything. He also didn't hand the brace over to his coach. “No, don't worry about it,” Power says. “I won't wear it. I'll be fine.” Way stands open-mouthed, staring at his charge. How can he abandon his crutch, now, just hours before his match? Way says, “good” and leaves the room. He had learned by then to ride along with Power and trust, despite the wobblies and changes in volley drop technique, in where they were going. © by James Zug, 2002

The Way of Way

Scenes from the Life of Coaching Genius, Mike Way