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Congratulations for being the fifth President
of SRAM. Can we have a brief background of your squash?
Thank you. I was introduced to squash in about 1979
in Brighton when I was studying at National Diploma Invited Technical
College. I played at Brighton Squash Club with my cousin. I did not
realize how interesting the game was until there was an exhibition
match between Heidi Jahan and Jonah Barrington. When I watched that
game, I realized how competitive and skilful squash is. Before squash,
I was a badminton player, adapting to squash was not too difficult, it
is just a matter to be enclosed in a court with a bouncing ball across
it. I played less squash between 1983 to 1987 when I furthered my
studies in United States. I was playing tennis instead. After 1987, I
was playing reasonably good squash, 3 times a week until now.
Besides squash, what other sports your are
keen and actively involved?
I played all four racquets game. I used to play a
lot of hockey and football. Now, the emphasize is purely on squash,
badminton and tennis. Basically, these are the three sports which I
play and can give anyone a reasonable game. I am also involved in
motor sports but that is a different kind of sporting activity.
I believe that you are involved in SRAM for
many years before you became the president, what was your role then?
I got involved with SRAM through the late Tan Sri
Alex Lee at a cocktail reception after Diana Ross concert. Somebody
pointed out to him that I was a keen squash player and he immediately
turn around and told me that I am just been co – opted to SRAM as a
finance committee. In fact, he asked me to do a lot of fund raising
then. That is how I got involved in the administration and the
organisation of SRAM. That was early 90’s.
As a president, what is your vision of SRAM?
SRAM’s role is changing and it is not the stagnant
entity. I see that we have to change and adapt because the standard of
the game in Malaysia has improved tremendously. I used to admire
watching the likes of Jansher Khan and all the tops Australian
players, but I never once imagine that we would have Malaysian’s
player competing at that level. Today that is a reality. We have the
likes of Ong Beng Hee, tremendous skill of Kenneth Low and Azlan, and
the girls, of course Nicol David and Sharon Wee who are world class
players. SRAM has to tailor itself, adjust and adapt to what is the
requirement of Malaysian’s players is today. I am trying to reshape
and restructure SRAM to make sure we remain one step ahead of what the
Malaysian’s playing public requires. That means we need to have a
bigger and more fine tuned training programme for the young to make
sure they succeed as high as where Nicol David and Ong Beng Hee had
reached. We also have to spread that base, so that more people play
squash and play for a longer period. We are not looking at just having
world class players but we want the average person in the street to be
more familiar with the game. We need people to come and watch the
games. We need companies to come and help us with our programme,
sponsor the players and the tournaments that we want to organize. We
need to do a lot of things and I feel in the past not a lot of
emphasize was done to make sure the public knows the game, knows the
players, help us with the programme and of course build enough
platform for our professional players to build their career. Now, we
see elements of that happening, players aiming far higher than they
did previously. We see retired players, now moving on to professional
coaching and we see schools getting more involved in squash. Those are
the things that I want to formalize in SRAM. SRAM will be a template
which can be implemented anywhere and at any level in Malaysia. This
will help to promote squash in the country. That’s what I want to do
and that is where I see SRAM is heading towards.
There is a talk among the sporting fertility
and the media that SRAM is finding difficulties in identifying and
producing the likes of Ong Beng Hee, Nicol David and Mohd Azlan and
similar view and concerned targeted at our senior players performance,
can you comment on these two issues?
Sure
I can comment. The thing is we are always looking for new talent. As I
said before, what we have done in the past which, I feel we have to
move away from, was we didn’t concentrate on building a pool of
talent. The pool was very small. If you look at where our top players
come from, is either from Penang or Sarawak. We need to grow this
pool. Now we have to look at what schools are doing. Bringing players
from school to the squash academies that we are setting up. Now we
have the one in Penang, we are going to have in Pahang and hopefully
the one in Sarawak. This is a certain that we will have the constant
supply of young players moving up the ladder. As they grow older, they
will go to different category and hopefully excel in each category,
locally and nationwide. We must not look at it base on tournaments
that we want the players to participate in the future. For instance,
Nicol David and Ong Beng Hee. We had targets for them participating in
Commenwealth Games, Asian Games and even Olympics. It becomes game
oriented rather a formula to produce players regardless whether there
is a tournament in the future or not. We were going the other way
round. We were looking at where we want to have our players in each
tournament. Then working backwards from there to see who we should
groom. It was a system which worked for a while, specifically to win
medals in Commenwealth Games and in Asian Games. Then our resources
were thrown into towards just these players. It was not a real channel
for talent to go through rather it was very specific. That was why the
pool of talent was very small. Now, we are concentrating in building
and growing the size of the pool so that we will always have a steady
stream of players moving up the ladder. We have to give more time for
this programme to succeed. |
