Love of sport inspired Pakistani athlete to risk her life to play
World-renowned squash star hopes to blaze a trail for girls in her homeland
Growing up in an ultraconservative Taliban stronghold in northwest Pakistan, squash star Maria Toorpakai Wazir realized early in life she wanted only one thing: to be treated as an equal.
“Where I come from, girls are not allowed to play sports,” the 26-year-old said from a comfortable chair at the Calgary Winter Club, where she competed this week in the Calgary CFO Consulting Services Pro-Am. “We weren’t allowed to go outside and play like the boys. I wanted to play freely, so I took all my girlie dresses and burned them.”
She cut her hair short, put on her brothers’ clothes, and headed outside to start enjoying some of the freedoms boys had. She wasn’t yet seven years old.
“I just wanted to be free, and in my eyes the only way to freedom was in boys’ clothes.”
Despite the risks involved, her liberal father fully supported her bold stance, well aware of the feisty nature of his child, whom he took to calling Genghis Khan after the Mongolian emperor. From that point on, Wazir was introduced and treated by her family as if she was a boy, getting into the same sort of fights and troubles as her brothers.
At age 12, she fell in love with squash, a popular sport in Pakistan played by women, but not in the conservative tribal regions.
“Playing tournaments, I would dress up like boys, travelling on buses I would arrive at midnight sometimes and wait all night in front of squash clubs with stray cats and dogs,” Wazir said. “Eventually, the squash people knew (I was a girl). I had trouble with boys and men because they were uneducated and from village areas. They would stare and pass comments and rather than go for the ball, they would bump into me. I never looked like a girl at that age, so for them, they loved making me feel uncomfortable.”
Nothing made her or her family more uncomfortable than the day her father had a letter taped to his car from Taliban members, who also called her native Waziristan home.
“I was winning tournaments, and president (Pervez) Musharraf was very progressive towards women and awarded me a few national awards,” said Wazir, who stopped wearing boys clothing at age 16. “It was in the news and that brought a lot of attention. When (the Taliban) found a girl from their area is playing squash in skirts and no veil, they could not bear it and threatened us.”
It was devastating.
Her father — a teacher dedicated to women’s rights — insist- ed again he would support his daughter, whatever decision she made about her career.
“That was a time when there were bomb blasts every day,” she said of the conflict in her area in 2006. “I thought, ‘Let’s not make trouble for my dad, he has been through a lot.’ It would be heartbreaking for me to cause trouble for my family. Also, if a bomb blast goes off in a squash court, there’s so much glass, many innocent kids can die, too.”
So she played sporadically for three years with the help of the Pakistani national squash federation, which provided snipers to secure her passage to and from the squash courts. Homeschooled as a child, she wrote letters around the world in search of a way out.
At 19, she won bronze at the world junior women’s championship and later received a reply from Canadian squash champion Jonathan Power, who offered to train her at his facility in Toronto. She’s been a Canadian resident since.
“I truly respect Canadians — they’re always on the humanitarian side,” said Wazir, who dropped to 82nd in the world after missing the last year due to injury. “Justin Trudeau is a very respected person in Pakistan. They have portraits of him on truck art because he’s super kind and has a lot of humanity in him, and that’s what Canada is about.”
Still on the mend, Wazir played her way into the Calgary event as a qualifier but lost in the first round to the top-ranked player.
Her next stop is London, U.K., for the Human Rights Watch Festival, which will feature a documentary on her life, Girl Unbound: The War To Be Her.
Her sister is the youngest parliamentarian in Pakistan, and Wazir doesn’t rule out joining her at some point to help effect more change. An obvious women’s rights advocate, she has set up a foundation back home encouraging families to educate girls and allow them to play sports, all of which is documented in her 2016 memoir, A Different Kind of Daughter: The Girl Who Hid from the Taliban in Plain Sight.
“I just want to help people — that’s all I care about,” said Wazir, whose face still bears tiny scars of a rugged childhood fighting with boys.
“If I can help through politics, I will do that. I think sports can bring all of us together, and so I want to build sports facilities and schools for under-privileged kids and a hospital for women and children in tribal areas. I’m young and I think the youth can very much change the world. Young people understand this is not the way the world should work. They have more humanity, more understanding and more information.”
Few know that better than Wazir.