Sport changes in strange ways.
Sometimes it changes through systems and spreadsheets, through investment plans and governing-body strategies. Sometimes it changes because a genius appears and bends the geometry of a game to his will.
And sometimes it changes because a handful of people, in precisely the right moment, have the courage to imagine something so audacious it initially sounds absurd.
The 1996 Al-Ahram International at the Pyramids of Giza was one of those moments.
Looking back now, with Egypt established as squash’s overwhelming superpower and outdoor glass courts now central to the sport’s identity, it is tempting to view the tournament as inevitable.
Of course squash would end up beneath the Pyramids. Of course Egypt would rise. Of course the sport would eventually discover spectacle.
But at the time, the idea sounded faintly ridiculous.
A full glass squash court in the desert? At the foot of the Pyramids? For a sport still largely hidden inside private clubs and conference centres?
And yet somehow, it worked. More than worked. It detonated.
The vision belonged largely to Ibrahim Hegazy, the influential editor of Egypt’s national newspaper Al-Ahram. Hegazy did not simply want to sponsor a squash tournament. He wanted Egypt to stage something the sporting world had never seen before.
Hegazy with Michelle Martin in 1998
“He had an old dream he spoke about often,” his daughter Rasha later recalled. “Hosting a championship at the Pyramids.”
At the time, even supporters considered the proposal almost impossible. A full squash arena on protected historic land, exposed to wind, sand and desert terrain, sounded less like sports promotion than fantasy.
“The response was disappointing,” Rasha said. “They told him the idea was almost impossible.”
For Hegazy, impossibility merely became another logistical problem to solve.
He commissioned feasibility studies, lobbied authorities and used his influence within both Al-Ahram and the Mubarak government to push the project forward. This political alignment mattered enormously. Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president at the time, was himself a squash enthusiast.
Even then, disaster nearly intervened.
After the court had been purchased, engineers warned the installation could not safely happen because of the terrain and the powerful desert winds. Hegazy had intentionally selected elevated ground so the Pyramids would rise dramatically behind the court. It looked magnificent in theory. In practice, experts warned it could not work.
Yet what emerged in May 1996 was not simply a tournament but an act of national staging and at the centre of it all stood Ahmed Barada.
For while Hegazy's vision and Mubarak's governmental backing enabled the vision to become reality - it was the figure of Barada who gave it life, inspiring a generation of Egyptians to take up the game.
Barada’s run during that first Al-Ahram International has since passed into mythology. Unseeded, charismatic and thrillingly aggressive, he surged improbably to the final against Jansher Khan, defeating Rodney Eyles and Chris Walker along the way.
He lost the final, but in truth the result barely mattered. Egypt had already fallen in love - with the spectacle, with the charisma - with Barada, and through Barada, with squash.
James Zug, the American squash historian, later described the reaction with amazement.
“Mubarak drives up in a limousine, it’s all over the newspapers, it’s on the radio, it’s all over TV,” he recalled. “People just went nuts about squash.”
This was not merely a successful tournament. It was a national event.
Andrew Shelley, the former CEO of World Squash who helped oversee player operations during the tournament, still speaks about those evenings in Cairo with something close to disbelief.
“At the time it really did make a difference to the sport,” he says. “The Times in England had a picture of the court in front of the pyramids on the front page of the paper. It took the sport forward dramatically.”
That matters more than it might initially sound.
For most of its modern history, squash had struggled with visibility. It was a sport trapped behind white walls. Difficult to televise. Intense and beautiful in person, but strangely invisible to the wider world.
Then, one evening in Cairo, squash found its own postcard.
The image remains startling nearly three decades later: a glowing glass court framed by ancient stone, modern sport colliding with one of humanity’s oldest landscapes. Floodlights cutting through the desert night. The old world watching the new game.
Ali Farag, who would eventually become World No.1 himself, remembers attending the event as a child.
“My dad used to take me and my brother to go and watch,” Farag says. “There weren’t really satellites and there were only maybe 10 channels on TV but Barada would always be on it. This is how popular he was.”
Farag’s generation did not simply admire Barada. They absorbed him.
“We all aspire to become top players like Ahmad Barada and play on such an inspirational stage in front of the pyramids,” he says. “So we picked up the racket.”
Before Al-Ahram, squash in Egypt had tradition. After Al-Ahram, it had aspiration.
But the tournament’s influence stretched far beyond Egypt itself.
Before Cairo, portable squash courts had largely been functional objects staged inside arenas, conference centres and exhibition halls. The Pyramids changed that completely.
The sport suddenly possessed something few others could claim: portability combined with visual drama. Unlike football pitches or tennis stadiums, a squash court could effectively be dropped into almost any environment on earth.
The lineage from Cairo is unmistakable.
Grand Central Terminal transformed squash into Manhattan theatre beneath its vaulted ceilings. In Hong Kong, courts rose beside Victoria Harbour with skyscrapers glittering behind the glass walls.
San Francisco staged squash along the Embarcadero waterfront. In Hurghada, the court stretched out into the Red Sea on a pier - incidently another event masterminded by Hegazy.
The court in Hurghada
Each event carried echoes of that original Egyptian ambition.
Steve Line, whose photographs from the Pyramids became among the defining images in squash history, remembers the atmosphere vividly.
“I’ve never come across an atmosphere like that ever since,” he says. “You felt squash had arrived internationally.”
Naturally, there was chaos too. The desert wind blew sand into the court corners. Construction delays caused panic. One evening, according to Shelley, a camel stood on telephone wires and cut communications between journalists and their newspapers.
“These are the sort of things that would happen in those days,” he laughs.
And perhaps that matters too.
Because the Al-Ahram International never felt sterile or corporate. It felt alive. Rhythmic. Human. Crowds clapped in unison for Barada beneath the desert sky.
“The crowd loved him,” Shelley remembers. “It would bring goosebumps on your arms and neck.”
Three decades later, the image still endures. Glass walls glowing beneath ancient stone. A nation discovering belief. A sport discovering imagination.
For one extraordinary week in Cairo, squash stopped looking like a hidden game trapped inside private clubs and started looking like the future.
