The first world champion

By Nathan Clarke

Imagine that you take up squash at 18 when courts are first built in your town, that you compete keenly with your friends and that one day you decide to enter a tournament. You win both the junior and senior titles and are encouraged to go on. 

You enter the championship of your country, have to qualify and as a complete unknown, having only been playing for one year, you knock out the no.1 seed and go on to win the title. 

At 21 you win the world’s premier title, the British Open, and go on to win it 16 times in succession. One final opponent you beat in 14 minutes and another 9-0, 9-0, 9-0; and through all these years you are undefeated. 

That is the true story of one of the greatest sportswomen of all time: Heather McKay.

Born Heather Pamela Blundell on 31st July 1941, she was number eight in a family of six boys and five girls and was brought up on sport. Her father Frank, a baker in the town, loved sport.

He was one of the best rugby league footballers that New South Wales had produced and encouraged all his 11 children to play sport.

There were no squash courts in the town of Queanbeyan, seven miles from Canberra, the Australian capital, until 1959, so at the age of ten Heather took up tennis and at 13 hockey. She was good at them, won prizes at both, became Queanbeyan junior and senior tennis champion and played hockey for Canberra. It was a happy childhood.

“Having brothers helped,” she said. “I was a bit of a tomboy; I kicked a football to my brothers and bowled to them in cricket. That helped my movement and co-ordination when I took up squash.”

On leaving school, Heather took a job in the local newsagent’s. She continued to play tennis and hockey, which was how she got started in squash.

“When the squash courts came to Queanbeyan, I was a member of a hockey team and several of the girls and I took up squash to get fit for our hockey,” she said.

Soon Heather had overtaken the other girls and was looking to the men for competition and, when the next season came, she entered the NSW country squash tournament in Woollongong. To the surprise of all, she won the junior and women’s events.

The following month, she was encouraged to enter the important state championships and, being a shy girl, she travelled to Sydney for the tournament with her mother and grandmother.

“When we went to Sydney, I won the juniors and had the number one seed two games to one and 8-2 down in the women’s … and then lost!” Was she disappointed? “Not at all; I thought I’d done rather well! I wasn’t worried because I had just won the junior match and I didn’t really expect to win anyway.” 

That performance meant that Heather was picked for the state team to play at fourth string in the Australian Inter-state series, at which she decided that she would also enter the Australian Individual Championships.

“I played in the elimination rounds, got into the draw and then went on to  win it. I knocked out the number one seed 10-8 in the fifth. It was close. I beat the number eight seed in four and won the final in four. That surprised everybody.”

It was a sensational performance, the stuff of dreams. An unranked outsider, having played squash for just one year, was the Australian champion!

Disappointment followed. Although national champion, Heather was not selected for the Australian team sent to tour Britain. Later she was to admit that, despite her initial discouragement, the extra 12 months gave her more time to gain the experience she needed and that the decision was not such a bad thing.

From that first Australian title in 1961 Heather kept winning with only one hiccup. On her first trip overseas she lost in the final of the 1962 Scottish Championships to the British Open Champion Fran Marshall. A month later she avenged that defeat, winning the British Open final 3-0 and was never again to lose a competitive match.

Over the next three years as Miss Blundell and then, after marrying Brian in 1965, as Mrs McKay, she won an astonishing 16 successive British Open titles. In that period of total domination she dropped just two games at the Open – games, not matches. One was to Anna Craven-Smith in 1964 and one to Sue Cogswell on her final appearance in 1977, at the age of 36.

As well as dominating the British Open, she reigned supreme in Australian events until she turned professional in January 1974.

“I played every year in the New South Wales, the Victorian and the Australian,” she said. “I entered the British and one or two ‘warm-up’ tournaments in England. Those were the major events I played in every year.

“I held the NSW and the Victoria titles from 1961 through to 1973, the Australian from 1960 to 1973 and the British from 1962 to 1977. I just played these, the odd smaller tournament and league matches every week.”

On reaching the top, Heather kept on improving. Doyen of squash writers Rex Bellamy wrote of her that “her capacity for learning was to some extent inborn”. But it was developed by remarkable concentration. Other natural talents were her athleticism and agility (she was 5ft 6in tall and usually weighed about 9 stone 4lbs), her flair for striking a moving ball, and her superb competitive temperament.

“She knew where the ball was going and she was fast enough to get there with time to spare for a balanced, controlled return. Later she acquired more shots, more variety and the experience to exploit to the full everything she had learned. The outstanding qualities of her game were still persistent power and precision,” Bellamy continued.

Being so far ahead of the other women was not a handicap for Heather because she always had men to compete with, and she picked her partners carefully to provide sensible practice and serious competition.

“My biggest asset was my driving,” said Heather of her own game. “I drove hard and to a good length, probably a little bit better than most girls. My movement around the court was another asset; people told me I was a good mover. There was also the fact that I trained bloody hard, so I knew that if I was getting tired the other girl had to be feeling worse than I was.

“Basically, I made them do more work.”

As well as mastering squash, Heather, who was initially a painfully shy girl, horrified at the thought of meeting strangers and making speeches, fought to combat her self-consciousness and in the end readily made herself available for speeches, interviews and broadcasts.

“Behind her small remaining shield of small-town shyness, she seems forever ready to accept friends and strangers on whatever terms they offer,” says Jack Batten, author of Heather’s Book of Squash. “Heather has no notions of showing the world anything except honesty and a smile, and she trusts the world to respond in kind.”