Squash Magazine: Open Letter to Jack Barnaby

Excerpts from An Open Letter to Jack Barnaby (September 9, 1909-February 12, 2002) By James Zug Jack Barnaby Image courtesy of Harvard University

Jack Barnaby Dear Jack, You are gone. There is an empty court now in our hearts, a white-walled space just about 32 by 18 and a half feet left vacant, barren, dark, gone. How best to say good-bye? We write a letter to you because you were a passionate corresponder. Each day epistles flew off your plain steel desk in the gym by the dozens. You dashed off notes to Charlotte, your beloved wife of 61 years. You sent clippings on your teams home to your parents along with long dispatches explaining what the reporter had missed and mistaken. You wrote monthly updates for the group of alums and supporters, the Friends of Harvard Tennis & Squash—an invention that you dreamt up and now exists for almost every college squash team. You reeled off telegrams to former players when they won a national title. Friends received thank-you notes, memos, well wishes. You refused to recruit players; instead every September you, stubbornly old-fashioned, penned a three-page, hand-written personal letter to every 18-year-old who had appeared in Harvard Yard looking like a potential squash player, and invited them to come to Hemenway. Jack Barnaby (left) and his 1951 team—his first to win the National Intercollegiate title< Photo courtesy of Charlotte Barnaby We miss you because you were the greatest squash coach in the history of the game. Your record, from 1937 to 1976 with the Harvard men's varsity, was 355-95, with 17 Ivy League titles, 16 national championship teams, 10 victories at the end-of-season four-man tournament and nine players who won the intercollegiates a total of 14 times. Four of your charges went on to win the national singles a total of 10 times. Once you won 47 matches in a row, over a period of five seasons. Twice your varsity team won the highly competitive national inter-city team tournament. Unlike other coaches you got better in your final years. You lost just six dual matches in your last 16 seasons, and in 1976 your farewell team went undefeated. Photo courtesy of Charlotte Barnaby We miss you because you almost did not become the coach extraordinaire. You played tennis for Harry Cowles at Harvard, and when in your sophomore year you asked Cowles if you might pick up squash, he told you the team was filled and there was no more room at the courts. So you practiced alone at odd hours and took private lessons. Your junior year you played six. Senior year you reached the semis of the intercollegiates and got to three on the ladder. With Beek Pool, current national champion, at one and Willing Patterson, future national champion, at two, it was not such a bad team. You won the national teams. We miss you because of your embracing personality. You looked like a professor, with the owl-ish horned-rimmed glasses, and this was, after all, Harvard. But you chain-drunk Cokes and smoked and you were always alive, laughing, incessantly talking, leaping to your feet to make a point. You had a contagious love for the game. You parried and poked a subject for hours. (To read the complete Letter to Jack Barnaby, please pick up a copy of the April 2002 Squash Magazine.) © 2002

Excerpts from An Open Letter to Jack Barnaby

(September 9, 1909-February 12, 2002) By James Zug