How it unfolded
This final, held in Chichester, England, is still cited today as squash's benchmark for endurance. Egypt's Gamal Awad trailed 1-8 in the first game before rallying to take it 10-9, a single game that alone took one hour and eleven minutes. Under the English scoring system of the time, only the player serving could score, so a game could theoretically run indefinitely, and both players seemed to test that rule's limits by extending rallies as long as possible. Jahangir then closed out the next three games, 9-5, 9-7 and 9-2. Total elapsed time: two hours and 46 minutes, or 166 minutes. This record stood as the official longest match for roughly 30 years, unbroken until a 170-minute professional match in 2015. Awad was judged never to have fully recovered the stamina he burned in this match, and Jahangir was, at the time, in the middle of his 555-match win streak.
Why it still matters
This is the match that most bluntly showed the world what kind of sport squash could become. The impression it left fed directly into rules-reform discussions, and the introduction of 11-point rally scoring on the men's pro tour in 2004, later extended to every level, was ultimately a choice made to reduce exactly this kind of attrition warfare. Half the reason modern squash is short and aggressive traces back to this one match.