“Everything that shouldn’t have happened, happened already.”
There are moments when a single interaction — or in junior squash player Malak Khafagy’s case, a match — seems to encapsulate our circumstances in life.
Khafagy’s squash match in El Gouna, Egypt in April was just that: a representation of the struggles she was going through. Yet, it proved to be exactly what she needed.
The match was not looking promising even before Khafagy stepped on the court. Khafagy and her teammate on the Egyptian team were on the plane, ready to fly from Pakistan to Egypt, when it was announced that the plane was having engine problems and would fly out the next morning. Her match — in the Copper tier of the Professional Squash Association’s world tour — was in El Gouna in just 48 hours.
Khafagy and her teammate slept at the airport that night, only to hear the next morning that their flight was canceled again. It was now 24 hours before her match in Egypt, and she was still stuck in Pakistan. She decided to take things into her own hands and booked another flight out of pocket to Cairo, while her teammate decided not to compete in Egypt.
Khafagy didn’t really have much of a choice.
“[In Pakistan], you can’t leave the hotel. You can’t eat. And I got pretty sick in Pakistan because of the food and the water,” Khafagy said. “When you leave the hotel, you have to leave in a bulletproof car with a bunch of soldiers around you.”
Khafagy suffered a tough loss at the Under-23 World Squash Championships in Pakistan and was ready to go back home to Egypt after time away, but also to bounce back at another match.
Since the Penn squash season ended and she was competing professionally on her own, Khafagy was traveling alone. Her strength and conditioning coach in Egypt, who had trained her since before she arrived at Penn, would have usually accompanied her. But he had recently died, and she felt the weight of his absence.
“It was kind of hard for me to deal with the fact that he’s not there anymore, because he was like a father to me … I notice[d] that I’m struggling a lot mentally because of that,” Khafagy said.
Going back to Egypt was a chance to win and make up for her loss in Pakistan, but it was also a familiar place after being stuck in a foreign country — a place to restart and refocus.
Khafagy landed in Cairo at 1 a.m., and her match was scheduled for 12 p.m. the same day in El Gouna — a town seven hours away by car. She emailed the tournament officials to see if the match could be rescheduled to 6 p.m. that day, just to give her more time to travel and rest. After the officials received proof of her travel itinerary and permission from her opponent, Scotland’s Georgia Adderley, the match was rescheduled.
That was perhaps the only thing that went according to plan during this string of professional matches. After arriving at the airport just outside of El Gouna, Khafagy stood at baggage claim, waiting for her bag that had her squash clothes, shoes, and racket — only to find out that it never came.
Khafagy knew she had to improvise to able to compete in the PSA match. Her younger sister had been in South Africa for a squash tournament of her own, and she was landing in Cairo that morning.
Roughly the same size as her sister, Khafagy decided she would borrow her sister’s clothes and shoes as well as her friend’s racket. Again, with her own money and without telling her sister, she bought her sister a plane ticket from Cairo to El Gouna.
Khafagy looked back with a laugh while recounting the story, but she noted that it felt horrific. She was tired from the difficult travel, frustrated by her recent defeat in Pakistan, sad she lost her coach, and overall, overwhelmed by life.
However, to support her, her sister, parents, friend from her squash club, and squash coach were all watching her in El Gouna, cheering her on.
The match consisted of five games, and Khafagy lost the first game and won the second. It was the beginning of the third when, somehow, amid all the lunges, short sprints, drives, and strokes, her knee started to bleed, and Adderley alerted the referee. In squash, bleeding can cause the player to concede the game.
Because the match was held later at 6 p.m., all the other matches had already finished in the morning and the paramedics had gone home, so Khafagy’s friend took one of his white socks, put it on her foot, cut off the top, and slid the thin fabric until it covered her knee and stopped the bleeding.
“I was impressed,” Khafagy admitted. “I was really impressed. I’m like, ‘Okay, you saved my life twice here, man.’”
It was a makeshift bandage, a symbol of the hard work she and her loved ones had put in to stop the bleeding of her difficult few days and months.
But the referee automatically gave the third game to Adderley, so it was the beginning of the fourth game, and Khafagy needed to win the next two games to secure the match.
“Obviously, I was panicking, I’m not gonna lie. … My heart started pumping so much more than usual,” Khafagy said. “Everything that shouldn’t have happened, happened already. … I don’t know why my knees started bleeding. I don’t know why she told the ref that I was bleeding and I don’t know why the ref was so harsh on me [instead of giving me a warning].”
It was the sort of panic that made her eyes water.
“I’m so tired, I’m so drained. And you know, when you travel for so long, all you have is lactic acid in your legs. So you basically can’t move either,” Khafagy said.
The current match wasn’t the only one on her mind. In Pakistan, she had lost in the quarterfinals of the U23 World Squash Championships, which made her stay up until 6 a.m.
“When you’re too invested in something and you’re giving everything you have for that sport, and then you lose, it’s more. It’s just so much more than just a match … or just a tournament. You get all those flashbacks from all the time you trained and all the efforts you put [in], all the sacrifices you’ve made,” Khafagy added.
It all came crashing down at this moment, in these last two games of the match, with her knee bound up in her friend’s sock. Tears were building up in her eyes. Her legs were feeling like lead. Her clothes, shoes, and racquet felt foreign in her hands against her skin.
And that’s when she knew she needed to calm herself down.
“I kept telling myself, ‘The match is not over yet. Don’t get too hot, don’t get too excited, don’t get too sad,’” Khafagy recalled.
And she just played, ignoring her emotions, the pain, the tiredness. Stroke after stroke, until she won game four, 11-5. She went on to also win the last game, 14-12.
She went to her mom and immediately hugged her. After her loss in Pakistan, she had also called her mom and cried. The tears this time, in Egypt, were different — just as exhausted, but with a weight off her shoulders.
There, after everything, Khafagy embraced her mom.
“I told you, [mom], I still have it,” Khafagy said.
While Khafagy did not win the El Gouna International Squash Open, she took the grit and lessons learned into the summer, where she claimed the biggest win of her PSA Squash Tour career at the Santiago Open.
