Bill Sykes, 1935-2018   
by Rob Dinerman

June 18, 2018

    DSR is sad to report the death of Bill Sykes, a former No. 1 player on Episcopal Academy’s championship teams of the early 1950’s and later a No. 1 player at Trinity College, winner of the 1969 John Jacobs Invitational, salesman for Slazenger and later Black Knight and manager of the Greate Bay Racquet Club during the first decade of the 2000’s. His passing on June 11th occurred barely a week after his 83rd birthday and just 18 days before he and his wife Alice would have marked their 50th wedding anniversary on June 29th. A member of the Merion Cricket Club for more than 70 years, Sykes’s ability to generate exceptional pace, especially on his forehand side, enabled him to overpower most of his opponents, and during his senior 1953-54 year at Episcopal, he captured the New York Invitational Interscholastic Tournament with a final-round win over Charlie Kingsley, Exeter’s No. 1 and later a captain of the Yale team that won the 1959 USSRA Five-Man Team Championship. Sykes also contributed a win that season in Episcopal’s 4-2 victory over Haverford School in the dual meet that decided which school won the Philadelphia-area league, known as the Inter-Ac, and won Episcopal’s school championship for the second straight time. In later years, he would win the club championship at the Racquet Club of Philadelphia three times and Merion’s club championship in both singles and (with Hastings Griffin) doubles during the late 1960’s.

  Hailed as “the lion of Atlantic City,” in deference to what a presence he became at the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall Racquet Club (which later was renamed the Resorts Racquet Club when gambling became legalized in the city), Sykes is most widely known for his boundless “young in spirit” enthusiasm for the sport and its practitioners, a trait that never diminished even as the years passed. Right to the end, he would love to reminisce about great players or matches he watched or was part of over the years and his great memory and ability to provide nuances and details of those events caused him to be regarded as one of the foremost raconteurs in the sport and made interacting with him a uniquely enjoyable experience. He dove headfirst into whatever project he embarked upon --- no halfway measures with him --- exuding in the process a level of excitement and positive energy that communicated itself to those around him. As someone who, even to his final day, 64 years after his high-school graduation, bled Episcopal Blue and White, he was thrilled to learn that a History of Squash at Episcopal Academy had been commissioned this past winter and was a copious provider of background and information as the manuscript (which is dedicated in part to him) was being researched and written.

   Sykes was also immensely proud of the squash achievements of his daughter, Laurie, who was a four-year No. 1 and won all-American honors at Dartmouth during the late 1990’s. Even in his later years, though slowed somewhat by spinal stenosis and a bout with colon cancer, he remained a force in the Jersey squash community. Greg Park, a star on the SDA pro doubles tour and Sykes’s successor at the helm of the Greate Bay Racquet Club after Sykes retired in 2006, spoke for Sykes’s many squash friends when he characterized his friend as “One of a kind, a LEGEND. I learned a lot from him. He is surely going to be missed.”