Jahangir Khan
Susan Devoy
Stat by stat
Bars are scaled to the leader in this list.
The verdict
Jahangir Khan leads 4 of 4 categories. Our all-time ranking places Jahangir Khan at #1 and Susan Devoy at #7.
The case for Jahangir Khan
The holder of the longest winning streak in professional sport: 555 consecutive matches unbeaten over five years and eight months, from a British Open final loss to Geoff Hunt in November 1981 until Ross Norman beat him in the 1986 World Open final in Toulouse. He had already won the world amateur title at 15 and the World Open at 17 in 1981, still the youngest men's world champion. He finished with six World Opens and ten consecutive British Opens from 1982 to 1991, sixteen majors in all, built on a length game so accurate and a fitness base so deep that opponents described facing him as an interrogation rather than a match. His 1983 win over Gamal Awad lasted 2 hours 46 minutes, the longest recorded competitive squash match. Son of the great Roshan Khan and nephew of Hashim, he later served as president of the World Squash Federation. No one else in squash combines that peak with that duration.
The case for Susan Devoy
The player who held the women's game together between Heather McKay and the Australians, and one of the shortest, most concentrated great careers in the sport. Devoy won eight British Opens between 1984 and 1992, seven of them consecutively, and four World Opens in 1985, 1987, 1990 and 1992 — twelve majors in barely a decade. She was world number one for almost the entire stretch from 1984 to her retirement, which came at 28, immediately after winning both the British Open and the World Open in the same year, a departure at the absolute summit that is almost unheard of in professional sport. Her game was aggressive by the standards of the period, built on early volleying and a willingness to attack the front court rather than grind. She was later made a Dame and served as New Zealand's Race Relations Commissioner, and remains the country's most successful racket-sport athlete.