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.”
