Saurav Ghosal is selling a dream.
He's grey-hounded around cloistered, box-like courts over the world in the past decade without the Olympic goal dividing his calendar into peak and non-peak halves or centre-spread obsessions over his fitness regime.
He's wayfaring a different path.
"Growing up, there were no idols in squash from India who I could look up to and go, 'I want to be that guy'," Saurav tells ESPN, "That's who I'm trying to be now."
Over the past month, he's gotten closer to it.
At the start of April this year, Saurav became the first Indian male squash player to break into the top 10 of the PSA rankings. Three weeks later, he won the Asian Championship title. Again, the first Indian male player to do so.
The upswing wasn't pulled out of thin air. Work on it began around last summer, partly stemming from a surprise second-round defeat at the Commonwealth Games. "It took me six weeks to recover from that loss," he says, "I told myself I have to get out of this rut and make a big push."
The push began with a call to former World No. 1 David Palmer, also head coach at Cornell University. Saurav then was already working with one of squash's finest minds - Malcolm Willstrop - and soon began juggling sessions with both coaches. "The idea of working with Palmer was that I had already had a basic foundation of what I wanted my game to look like by working with Malcolm. I just wanted to add more intensity and pace and get tactically stronger... I've assimilated a lot of it. We're still perfecting it."
For a sport that's almost never on TV, success can be harder to break down or drum up interest around. You don't get to see these players chasing down a hollow rubber ball caroming at blinding speed (At 176 mph, the fastest squash shot is 13 mph faster than the fastest serve in tennis), alternating between lunging and exploding back into the T (centre of the court where mid-line meets line dividing back half of the court in T-shape) in what is believed to be among the most physically demanding sports in the world. Just how physically intense are we talking?
PSA teamed up with sports data labs to capture athlete data and here's what it uncovered: In his 97-minute win over Mathieu Castagnet in Round 1 of the Swedish Open in February 2018, Tarek Momen covered 4965.5 metres during 100 contested points, an average of 48 metres per point. In comparison, Rafael Nadal, according to IBM SlamTracker, covered 3645.1 metres during 389 points, an average of 9.4 metres per point, during his 288-minute defeat to Giles Muller at Wimbledon 2017. Which is saying that Momen covered 1.3 km more than Nadal in a third of the time.
At 32, Saurav has to be able to preserve his body in this brutal sport. "Picking schedules and understanding when to hold back has helped me in the last two years," he says, "I get it right most of the time. The mental side too is huge. To have the gumption and appetite to focus for continuous periods through the season can be as hard as getting the body to respond to every drill, every shot you want to push yourself to execute."
A large part of it has to do with spacing tournaments and fighting the urge of getting sucked into a mad chase for ranking points. "Last summer I told myself, 'look I've been in the top 20 for so long and no one's going to ever take that away from me even if I go out of it but what do I need to do to make top 10'? That's how David happened. Now I'm top 10. I'll go down in history as a top 10 player but for me to make top 5 I've to do well in the big events. Small events aren't going to take me there. That's what I play for and train for and that's where I want to be."
He has to throw in a lot to do that.
Egypt dominates the sport with four of the top five players in the PSA rankings belonging to the country. India, in contrast, has a total of six male players in the top 100. After Saurav at No. 10, the next Indian player, Ramit Tandon, only shows up at No. 49. It's not without sufficient reason. "The number of kids who play junior nationals in India is just as much as local club tournament numbers in Egypt. So, they have strength in numbers," says Saurav, "Take someone like Tarek (Momen) for instance, he's No. 3 both in the world and in Egypt so he doesn't get the same amount of recognition because in Egypt it's all about who's World No. 1. That drive pushes the top group of players."
"Now I think if anyone is playing me, they know that it's not about just competing, I can win too. That's the difference. There's been a gradual progression from being seen as a talent to someone who can compete to a guy who can win. It's not a question anymore about me having a good day and others having a bad day...On their good days, I can still win." Saurav Ghosal
Saurav occasionally spars with World No. 2 Egyptian Mohamed El Shorbagy since they share a common coach in Palmer but in a match scenario he knows Shorbagy can turn into a completely different animal. "He can be physically imposing on the T so you have to do whatever you can to get him away from it. You know when he hits a rough patch in a match he's going to turn on beast mode. If you can stick with him at the beast mode, that's when you have a shot at beating him." Right now, it's a lopsided 2-7 head-to-head record in favour of Shorbagy.
The pace at which the sport is played also makes heavy demands on the mind. "You have to constantly think of different things since the dynamics of a match change so quickly," says Saurav, "Apart from basics like taking the ball early, controlling the T, getting the length right, you also have to focus on specifics like whether you want to trade with your opponent short or take it back with a lob, for instance. Adding deception to my movement is something I'm working on now, more in attack than just defense."
Beyond boast (a shot which hits the side wall and then the front wall) and drive routines, Saurav also makes room for training kids in the sport in India through short camps twice a year. It's something he hopes to make more time for once he's wrapped up his playing career. It's what, he says, India needs most - good coaches at all levels. Right now, beyond junior level, most players end up moving abroad for training."We need to get an influx of quality foreign coaches and get our Indian coaches to work with them. It's the only sustainable way. Once our coaches have sufficient expertise and exposure, we can produce top-level players in India."
There's still another tiny problem though - that of squash's image. Perhaps not entirely unexpected of a sport which has its origins in 19th century British-prep school and continues to be closeted in hoity-toity private clubs in the country. For a broader base, Saurav suggests the sport must have more public infrastructure available. "Schools together with the federation and government must get more kids in," he adds, "Only through larger playing numbers can we get higher-quality players. And of course, we have to get the sport on TV. If no one gets to watch it, why would they pick it up?"
Squash isn't making the Games program in Saurav's playing career, at least not until 2024, beyond which he doesn't see himself playing squash for a living. It's also a strange question he's faced more often than he'd like. To keep up the drill, we put him through it for the nth time. "They could say all sorts of things like the ball can be hard to spot on telly or it's not spectator-friendly enough. But clearly, there are sports much harder to spot or follow in the Games. So I don't know what works anymore."
As a kid, Saurav had a choice to pick a more popular sport. He played both cricket and squash with serious ambitions in neither. "I just went with the one I was having more fun in." At home though, squash beats cricket in numbers. His wife's sister, Dipika Pallikal, was the first-ever Indian squash player to be ranked in the top 10. She's married to cricketer Dinesh Karthik. "DK and I both are foodies and automobile junkies. He probably likes cars more than I do. Since we both travel a lot, the downtime we manage to catch together is spent talking about anything but our careers."
The squash season is winding down, with the British Open in a week's time carrying the inevitable hopes and burdens of the final tournament before the break. It's also high up on Saurav's goal sheet. On the tour, he's seen attitudes and perceptions gradually change. "Now I think if anyone is playing me, they know that it's not about just competing, I can win too. That's the difference. There's been a gradual progression from being seen as a talent to someone who can compete to a guy who can win. It's not a question anymore about me having a good day and others having a bad day," he says, "On their good days, I can still win."
But in this melee of goals and targets, India's best player in the sport knows he's trundling down a quiet road. The sport lives on the periphery in both attention and following in the country. He's battled despondent feelings in the past when lesser-accomplished athletes were talked up, but now he's learned to live with it. "In whatever time I've left as a player, I want to push the bar high, so high that people in the country go, 'OK this guy is doing something great in squash'.
Until then, he promises to continue to scorch draws, throw up roof-scraping lobs, carve his space among Egyptian behemoths and wait on the balls of his feet for a belated applause.