July 13,
2004-Stanley
W. Pearson, the three-sport Princeton star who won USSRA National
Singles And Doubles championships in the late 1940's and was the second
half of the only father-son pairing ever to win the National Singles
championship, passed away at age 86 in a nursing home in Bedford, MA
this past February 7th. A lifelong resident of the Philadelphia area,
Pearson, who suffered from Parkinson's disease during his final years,
moved to Massachusetts two years ago to be near his daughter.
Described as "the best all-around amateur athlete I have ever seen" by
his Princeton classmate/teammate, four-time Nationals winner and recent
USSRA Squash Hall Of Fame Inductee Charlie Brinton, Pearson was a
starting safety in the Tiger secondary and a hard-hitting shortstop on
their baseball team. He actually hit .500 one year and during his
sophomore season, just a few months after winning the Intercollegiate
Individual squash championship (a decided rarity for an underclassman
back then), he drove in the winning run in a game between Princeton and
Columbia on May 17, 1939 that is famous for being the first baseball
game ever to be televised. One of his favorite mementos was a letter he
received in his last few years from Ted Williams, major league
baseball's last (in 1941) player to hit .400, who signed off with the
salutation
" Best wishes from a .400 hitter to a .500 hitter."
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Pearson's Princeton squash teams, which also featured Brinton, John
Humes (later the U. S. ambassador to Austria) and many-times New York
State champion Calvin MacCracken, had a winning percentage far above
.500 and would have been unbeatable had they possessed greater depth in
the bottom half of the line-up: one year they swept the top four slots
against Yale only to lose 5-4 when the Elis ran the table from No. 5-9.
Though forced to play in his fellow Princetonian Brinton's shadow
throughout the half-dozen years after his graduation in 1941, while the
latter was winning the Nationals that year and in 1942, 1946 (after a
three-year hiatus caused by World War II) and 1947, Pearson got his
opportunity in Boston in 1948 when Brinton was upset in the first
round, and he took full advantage, defeating Andy Ingraham in the final.
In so doing, Pearson was able to add his name to a prestigious list
that already included his father and namesake, who had won this crown
six times (from 1915-17 and from 1921-23), a record that still stands.
The senior Pearson, who was also outstanding at court tennis and hard
racquets, taught his son to play squash on the Germantown Racquet Club
courts in suburban Philadelphia, where the youngster starred at
Chestnut Hill Academy and where as a teenager he won the Philadelphia
Junior Boys title three times, the last of which was at the final-round
expense of Brinton in the first of many meetings between this pair in
what evolved into a lifelong friendship.
Though during most of their overlapping squash careers they were often
rivals, Brinton and Pearson did team up to win the 1948 U. S. National
Doubles championship in Baltimore, and they accomplished this feat in
most distinctive fashion. Both players, understandably in view of the
manner in which each excelled on the backhand flank, greatly preferred
the left wall; indeed, each had manned that slot while winning this
title during the prior two years, Brinton in '46 with Donnie Strachan
and Pearson in '47 with Dave McMullin.
TWO-WALL TWOSOME
Rather than having to make a difficult decision as to who would get to
play which wall, the two hit upon the ingenious compromise of having
each player stay throughout the point on whatever wall he served from!
If Brinton began a point by serving from the right service box, he
remained there throughout the point, and if they won that point Brinton
would then serve from the left box and play that wall during the
ensuing rally. When they were receiving serve, Brinton played the left
wall, but when they were serving they employed the foregoing approach,
which had the additional benefit of confusing their opponents, the last
of which, Strachan and Johnny Smith, had no answers in what became a
fairly decisive final. It is a tribute to the versatility of the two
Princeton men both that each was able to win two National Doubles in
the three-year period from 1946-48 with two different partners and that
each was able to alternate so successfully from one point to the next
between the left and right walls in the execution of a game plan that
would be unthinkable in today's specialist-oriented era where often a
player acts downright insulted when asked to switch away, even
temporarily, from "his" wall.
Later that year Pearson and Brinton were among the first set of
inductees into the prestigious Jesters Club when the legendary Ned
Bigelow established an American branch of that formerly England-only
organization. Pearson also became a lifetime member of the Philadelphia
Racquet Club and Philadelphia Cricket Club, though his active squash
career ended shortly after his great singles-doubles "double" 1948
season. The proud and indeed history-making Pearson family tradition
has now extended yet another generation to Stanley's grand-nephews and
-nieces: Marshal and Duncan Pearson both played at Trinity in the late
1990's; Eric was one of four stand-out members of the Princeton class
of 2003, deemed the best in school history by current Tiger coach Bob
Callahan and three-time Ivy League champions (two of them due to Eric's
winning the deciding matches in 5-4 Princeton victories over chief
rivals Harvard and Yale) during their varsity careers; and Ali, class
of '07, cracked the top six of the surprisingly successful Princeton
women's line-up as a freshman this past season and, like her older
brother a few years back, is a prominent part of a multi-member
incoming crop of whom great achievements are expected in the years to
come.
In addition to his squash exploits, Pearson also won the US Hard
Racquets singles title in 1952 and the US Hard Racquets Doubles title
in 1956 and 57 with his brother Babe, thus becoming the only person in
history to win US titles in Squash singles and doubles and Racquets
singles and doubles. He was inducted into the College Squash, Chestnut
Hill Academy and Lawrenceville School Halls of Fame.
This first appeared on squashtalk.com