John G. Davis, 1936-2014, Harvard Squash And Baseball Star by Rob Dinerman
photo Charleston Post & Courier
Dateline December 3rd
--- DailySquashReport.com is sad to report the death on November 21st
of John Davis, 78, who was a standout squash and baseball player at
Harvard during the late-1950’s and who won the deciding match that
determined the outcome of the 1964 USSRA Five-Man National Team
Championships. In May of his senior year, as captain and an
all-American catcher on the 1958 Crimson baseball team, Davis and his
squash teammate, southpaw sophomore Gerry Emmet (who later captained
Harvard’s national champion 1960 squash team), helped Harvard win its
first-ever Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League title, with Emmet
pitching six scoreless innings in a key win against Dartmouth.
Six years after their exploits on the baseball diamond,
Emmet and Davis, both based in Washington DC at the time (in Davis’s
case as a Pentagon speechwriter), were the top two players of a
Washington team that won the 1964 USSRA Five-Man title in Annapolis by
dethroning their defending-champion alma mater Harvard in the
quarterfinals and then defeating Philadelphia 3-2 in the final. In the
latter triumph, Davis won on simultaneous-match-ball against Darwin
Kingsley, who on the previous point had tinned what would have been a
certain winner with Davis completely out of position.
Davis came from a family with quite a pedigree in racquet
sports – his grandfather, Dwight Davis, founded what became the Davis
Cup, and the younger Davis himself was an exceptional high-school
tennis player at the St. Marks School in Massachusetts. His passion for
racquet sports led him to the International Tennis Hall of Fame where
he was the principal designer for the Davis Cup room and eventually
became Vice President.
It was while in Newport, RI that he undertook
the publishing of the America's Cup Magazine. After moving to South
Caroline in 1992, Davis engaged his new community on a philanthropic
level for over two decades with the charities Darkness to Light, the
Concert Association, Kids with Cameras, and the Miracle League. He
later started a company called Celebration Books where he created many
fine brochures, annual reports for the Fresh Air Fund in New York as
well as many other charitable marketing materials, all pro- bono. In
recognition of his endeavors in this multitude of fronts, Davis was
selected to receive the Malcolm Haven Award for Selfless Community
Giving.
Although he received that honor during the early-2000’s, those
qualities were never more on display than in the early-1980’s, when he
forcefully and successfully interceded on behalf of an aging friend.
Bob Lehman for a number of decades single-handedly had produced the
MSRA (Met-New York) annual yearbook --- photos, write-ups,
lay-out, the works --- which became so popular a document that USSRA
members and Associations from all over the country would order copies,
to a degree that made it effectively the “squash Bible” in the United
States. But by that stage this iconic octogenarian (and two-time
recipient of the Board Of Governors Award for outstanding citizenship)
was suffering from declining health, and the production of the Yearbook
was falling so far behind schedule that the MSRA Board was forced to
contemplate the painful possibility of needing to have someone else
take it over.
At this juncture Davis, in a tremendous gesture of loyalty
to his longtime close friend Lehman, requested a meeting with the MSRA
Board, during which he asked that he be allowed to produce the book in
partnership with Lehman and promised that, if it came to it, he would
produce the book himself, on his time and at his expense, as long as
this face-saving measure were adopted on Lehman’s behalf. A relieved
MSRA Board granted Davis’s request, the Yearbook was published on time
and a grateful Lehman was allowed to retire with honor and dignity ---
and on his own terms --- several years later, all as a result of
Davis’s selfless intervention on his friend’s behalf. Not surprisingly
in light of the foregoing, Davis was a beloved figure (and a USSRA
top-10 during the 1960's) throughout the squash world, and he will be
sorely missed.
