Canadian National Singles And Doubles Champion Jay Gillespie, 1955-2016     
by Rob Dinerman

photo Ontario Squash Hall of Fame

Dateline February 7th --- DSR is sad to report that Jay Gillespie, 60, died Saturday afternoon after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. A Canadian intercollegiate individual and team champion at the University of Toronto during the late-1970’s, Gillespie also won the Canadian Nationals in 1981 and a pair each of Canadian National Doubles (in 1982 with Dave Hetherington and 1987 with Victor Harding) and U. S. National Doubles (with Harding in 1983 and Peter Martin in 1985). In addition to these exploits in national Open competition, he captured a total of 16 Canadian, 2 US and 3 World age-group men’s and mixed doubles titles as well as three Ontario Open singles and 21 Ontario doubles championships, eight of them at the Open level, the last of which, with Scott Dulmage in 2004, occurred when Gillespie was 49 years old.

Affectionately known as Jungle Jay, Gillespie was a fixture in Ontario and in national and regional play for nearly four decades. Remarkably, he stayed connected to squash and kept competing nearly to the very end, even while undergoing medical treatments. Indeed, as recently as this past spring, he reached the final on sequential early-April weekends of the Canadian Mixed 55’s with Joyce Davenport and the Canadian Men’s 55’s with Namsoo Oh. On the eve of that latter event, he was inducted into the Ontario Squash Hall of Fame, having previously been selected for the University of Toronto Sports Hall of Fame in 1997 and the Cricket Club Squash Wall of Fame in 2013.

Jay is survived by his wife, Lili, and their two children, Sean and Jackie.