Pete
Bostwick Jr., August 22, 1934--July 7, 2022, Multi-Sports Athlete
Extraordinaire and Three-Time U.S. Squash National Age-Group
Champion by Rob Dinerman Pete Bostwick after winning the World Court Tennis Championship in 1969
Pete
Bostwick (left) and Jimmy Bostwick receive their trophies from Bob Hope
after the Bostwick brothers won the “Ike,” a combined-score amateur
golf tournament sponsored by the New York Daily News that was named
after President Dwight D. Eisenhower and held at the Wheatley Hills
Club in Long Island circa 1970
Dateline July 11, 2022--- We at DSR are sad to report that George H. Bostwick Jr.,
universally known as Pete, one of the most multi-talented
racquet-sports athletes of his or any era and a three-time U. S.
national age-group squash champion, died this past Thursday morning,
just six days after the passing of Lilias “Lili” Knott Bostwick, Pete’s
wife of 66 years, and less than seven weeks before what would have been
his 88th birthday on August 22nd. The Piping Rock Club in Locust
Valley, Long Island, where Bostwick was a member for more than five
decades, is reportedly planning to host a celebration of his life in
September. In marked and instructive contrast to the current age of
specialization, where almost from childhood athletes increasingly focus
virtually exclusively on “their sport,” Bostwick excelled not only at four
different racquet sports --- tennis, squash, court tennis and racquets
--- but at golf and ice hockey as well. At one stage or another, he
played golf with Jack Nicklaus, Ben Hogan and Sam Snead, played tennis
with then-Vice President George H. W. Bush and scrimmaged with such New
York Islanders hockey stars as Bryan Trottier, Clark Gillies and Bobby
Bourne during the early-1980’s period when the Islanders were in the
process of winning four consecutive Stanley Cups.
In squash, Bostwick was ranked as high as
seventh nationally, even though his extensive involvement as a leading
member of the St. Nicholas Hockey Club from 1958-83 throughout the
winter months limited him to four or five squash tournaments a year.
His runs to the winner’s circle in the U. S. National 40-and-over in
1975, 45-and-over in 1980 and 70-and-over in 2005 (with several
final-round advances in other years as well) each required him to
defeat the defending champion and each was distinctive in varying ways.
In 1975, he had to play Henri Salaun and Charlie Ufford, who between
them had won this event all eight times it was held from 1967-74, in
the semis and finals. He trailed Salaun two games to love and had to
survive a best-of-nine overtime session to win the fourth game 18-16,
then saw a 10-1 fifth-game advantage almost completely disappear before
finally winning 15-12 and sailing through a three-game final the next
day with the defending champion Ufford, who was too fatigued from his
grueling semifinal match with Mel Sokolow to offer much resistance.
Victor Niederhoffer, who won the U. S.
Nationals that weekend, called Bostwick’s performance in that fifth
game with Salaun “one of the finest I have ever seen,” and Bostwick’s
winning effort in that event was a major reason for his being named a
few months later as the recipient of the 1975 Eddie Standing Trophy
“For Exceptional Sportsmanship And Excellence Of Play,” one of the most
prestigious awards that the New York Metropolitan Squash Racquets
Association (MSRA) bestows on its members. The following year, Bostwick
had a thrilling 17-15 fifth-game semifinal win over the legendary Diehl
Mateer before losing the final, 15-13 in the fifth, to Dick Radloff.
Two years after that, Bostwick entered the U. S. Nationals Open
Division (since he had hockey games on Sunday, which by all odds would
have caused a scheduling conflict if he had played in the 40’s) and
actually was within a couple of points (leading 2-0, 10-all) of what
would have been a monumental upset win over Phil Mohtadi, the reigning
two-time winner of the Canadian Nationals.
Then in 1980, Bostwick won the U.S. 45’s
event, defeating defending two-time champion Les Harding in the semis,
while in the bottom-half semi, just as had happened five years earlier,
Sokolow and Ufford had an epic battle that left the eventual winner
(Sokolow in this case) so exhausted that Bostwick won the ensuing final
in three dominant games. By 1982, however, a painful inflammation of
his right hip severely limited his mobility and prevented him from
playing squash for the next few years before the condition improved
enough to allow him to return both to the St. Nick’s hockey program ---
although by this time skating for the “Legends” team (no checking
allowed) --- and to the U. S. Nationals squash tournament in 1985,
where he made it to the finals of the 50’s draw before losing to Tom
Harrington. Although Bostwick then reached the semifinal stage in 1986,
fairly soon thereafter (in November 1987) he had to undergo a double
hip replacement that sidelined him from squash for a number of years.
A DEFINING MOMENT
But in 2005 Bostwick won the U.S. 70’s
division in a five-game final over defending champion Dick Mason that
had a defining moment at 10-all in the fifth when Bostwick had to hit
the ball into the back wall to return a shot that Mason had hit past
him. Bostwick’s return was therefore a total sitter, an open ball on
which Mason could have hit any shot he wanted. Just before Mason began
his backswing, Bostwick charged full-out to the front right, gambling
that Mason would hit a straight-drop to that area of the court. Had
Mason hit any other shot, it would have been a winner by 15 feet, but,
as it turned out, Bostwick guessed right and therefore got to the ball
in plenty of time to and blow a cross-court past Mason, a psychological
inflection point as much as a statistical one from which Mason never
recovered as Bostwick then swept through the match’s final four points.
He thereby became the first person ever to win a national age-group
squash singles championship after having undergone total replacements
on both hips, in what turned out to be his last-ever appearance in
squash’s U. S. Nationals, since a “revision” replacement (in effect a
replacement of the existing replacement) had to be performed on one of
his hips several months later.
Preceding that trio of national age-group
squash championships were many outstanding performances in the regular
amateur circuit, including winning the 1971 Apawamis Invitational
(defeating Jay Nelson, 16-14 in the fourth, in the semis followed by a
final-round win over Tom Poor after trailing two games to love) that
led to a No. 8 national ranking for that season. Bostwick also won a
tournament in Dallas in 1977 in which his final-round match with Ralph
Howe came down to a misdirection winner that Bostwick hit on
simultaneous-championship-point. He was ranked five times in the top
12, including in 1977, by which time he was 42 years old. For nearly
two decades he played a major role on the Racquet & Tennis Club A
team that frequently won the MSRA A League, and in 1981 he won a
crucial playoff match in five games against the much-younger Peter
Stephen that helped R&T win that year’s league championship.
WORLD CHAMPION
However, as previously noted, squash was
just one of a host of sports that Bostwick played at an elite level. In
court tennis --- probably his sport of greatest achievement --- he won
the World championship in 1969 by beating Frank Willis in the
championship match after Northrup “Norty” Knox resigned the title.
Bostwick then successfully defended his championship, beating his
younger brother Jimmy, who then won a rematch for the World title in
1972. Both Bostwick brothers were taught the nuances of the game by
Pierre Etchebaster, the longtime court tennis pro at Racquet &
Tennis and himself the World title-holder from 1928-55. Pete Bostwick
won the U. S. Open in court tennis three times each in both singles and
(with Jimmy as his partner) doubles. Each year throughout the
seven-year period from 1966-72 the U. S. Open was won by one of the
Bostwick brothers, who also teamed up to win the U.S. Open Doubles
three-straight times from 1968-70. Pete Bostwick also won the U.S.
Amateur singles five straight years from 1965-69 and a sixth time in
1971, along with the U. S. Amateur Doubles in 1969 and 1973 with Jimmy
and in 1983 with Howe.
Both Bostwick brothers were inducted into
the International Court Tennis Association Hall of Fame in the
inaugural class in 1994. They are one of only three sets of brothers
--- Ralph and Sam Howe and Jimmy and Sammy Van Alen are the others ---
to have been honored in that fashion. Bostwick also won the U. S. Open
in Racquets in 1969 and 1970 (as well as the Racquet & Tennis Club
championship in that sport throughout the eight-year period from
1964-71), and in 1967, when the Montreal Racquet Club held a centenary
tournament that included eight world top-ten ranked players from
England, Bostwick surprised everyone by winning the tournament,
defeating in succession World No. 2 James Leonard and then Jeremy
Hogben and Charles Hue-Williams.
As a member of the Class of 1958 at
Middlebury College in Vermont (where the nine-court Bostwick Family
Squash Center was dedicated in 2018) Bostwick played No. 1 on the
tennis team all four years and competed in the U. S. National
Championships (later called the U. S. Open) at Forest Hills. He later
won the Eastern 35-and-over title and was ranked either first or second
in multiple upper-age group brackets. In addition to being the star
player on Middlebury’s tennis and hockey teams, Bostwick was the best
college golfer not only at Middlebury but in all of New England (as he
proved when he won the New England Intercollegiate Championship), and,
by playing in golf’s U. S. Open at Winged Foot in 1959, he became one
of only three people (Ellsworth Vines and Frank Conner are the others)
to play in the U. S. Open in both golf and tennis. Bostwick was one of
the best amateur golfers in the New York metropolitan area during the
1960’s and early 1970’s. Among the tournaments he won in that sport
were the 1964 Richardson Memorial, the 1966 Travis Memorial and Long
Island Amateur, the 1968 Northeast Amateur and Hochster Memorial and 16
club championships (eight at the National Golf Links of America, seven
at Piping Rock and one at the Seminole Golf Club).
CREATIVE CROSS-POLLINATION
In all of these substantially different
sports, Bostwick’s excellent results were primarily based first and
foremost on extraordinarily accurate ball placement, followed by a
mastery of all the given game’s shots, clear-headed and frequently
inspired shot selection, wonderful (and sometimes instinctive)
anticipation (witness the decision he made to go for broke in his
retrieval effort against Mason) and an understated but powerful will to
win. The fact that he played so many racquet sports allowed him to
occasionally engage in some “creative cross-pollination” by borrowing a
shot from one sport while playing a different one. This often forced
his opponent to deal with a shot he hadn’t previously been exposed to,
a scenario which almost always worked to Bostwick’s advantage. He also
wasn’t afraid to go out of the box --- for example by hitting a
crisscross hard serve that angled sharply into or across the serve
returner’s body at a crucial stage of a squash match in which he had
heretofore exclusively hit lob serves --- with the similar goal of
making an opponent react under pressure to a surprise maneuver.
Impeccable sportsmanship was always part of the Bostwick
self-presentation, as was the fact that he was invariably the most
immaculately dressed person on court.
ATHLETIC ANCESTRY
The great-grandson of Jabez Bostwick, a
wealthy 19th-century businessman and later a founding partner of
Standard Oil, Pete Bostwick came from a family of athletes and he has
done an admirable job of passing that trait onto the next generation of
Bostwicks --- and the one after that as well. His namesake father was a
Hall of Fame polo player (who actually died of a heart attack while
seated on his horse during a polo match in 1982), his mother, Laura
Curtis Bostwick, was a fine golfer, and his great-aunts, Harriot and
Margaret Curtis, won national amateur golf championships and later
co-founded the Curtis Cup Matches, a biennial competition between the
best women amateur golfers from the U. S. and Great Britain &
Ireland.
Notwithstanding the remarkable number of
achievements that Pete Bostwick attained in this potpourri of sports,
he always maintained that what gave him the greatest feeling of
fulfillment were the times he got to play these sports --- tennis in
most cases --- with his namesake son (a winner of multiple national
age-group squash doubles championships in his own right, and the MSRA
President from 1987-89),with whom Bostwick won the Eastern Father/Son
Grass Courts during the late 1970’s and twice were ranked No. 1 in the
East, as well as with daughters Catherine --- universally known as
Cackie --- Lili and Janet, and in more recent years his grandchildren.
Like Pete Bostwick himself, Cackie Bostwick was a multi-sports (in her
case field hockey, basketball and tennis) athletic legend at St. Paul’s
School --- and recipient of the Loomis Medal emblematic of the school’s
best female athlete and sportsperson --- who then was taught how to
play squash by her father and in just her second competitive season
advanced all the way to the final round of the Intercollegiate
Individual championship as a Trinity College sophomore in 1977 before
incurring a serious knee injury when she was tripped from behind on a
breakaway during a lacrosse game that spring that ended her squash
career.
Cackie, Lili and Janet all partnered up
with their father to earn numerous top-five and top-ten national
Father/Daughter rankings, as was also the case with Bostwick and his
son in the Father/Son rankings. In November 2004, Lili (playing
in her first-ever Father/Daughter tournament) and her
recently-turned-70 father Pete won the semifinal round of the
70-and-over National Clay Courts in Jupiter, FL. The following day
(when the final was scheduled) it rained heavily and incessantly
throughout the daylight hours, making it impossible to play. Since both
members of the opposing team had to fly back to California that evening
(and Lily also had to fly back home to New York that night), it was
decided to declare both teams co-winners of the event, and both were
awarded one gold ball and one silver ball as co-National 70-and-over
Father/Daughter Clay Court champions. Lili and Pete continued as
Father/Daughter partners throughout the next decade-plus (including
playing several years in the 80’s flight), until Lili’s elbow required
surgery, after which Janet, the youngest, became Pete’s Father/Daughter
partner for a few years as well. Bostwick and his grandson, Jamie
Wilson --- the youngest son of Cackie and her husband, Harrison Wilson,
and the hero of St. Paul’s 2008 New England championship squash team
when he won the final and deciding match against Brunswick School’s
Jamie Davies after trailing two games to love --- also earned a
national ranking in the Grandfather/Grandson division.
FOREVER YOUNG
Of all the many praiseworthy aspects of the
Pete Bostwick persona, perhaps the most noteworthy of all is the degree
of enthusiasm for the sports he played that neither time nor the
various infirmities he endured ever diminished one iota. The sheer joy
that he experienced every time he was on a court --- any
court (or golf course, or hockey rink) --- was so visibly apparent that
he almost seemed to levitate. Even during his final few years, by which
time he was virtually completely immobilized, he would frequently
arrange for someone to feed him tennis balls so that he could still
experience the thrill that hitting the ball and feeling its weight on
his racquet continued to represent for him. He also never lost his
intense curiosity about the various sports, remaining interested in and
willing to re-examine his views of shots and tactics and always keen to
experiment with and refine his approach to the game.
Invariably when returning to squash for the
first time in autumn after a summer spent playing golf and tennis, he
would ask his practice partner what new shots players were using, and,
if there was a new shot that
had gained currency during the interim, he would ask the practice
partner to demonstrate it, after which Bostwick himself would make it a
priority to play that shot when the opportunity to do so arose during
the subsequent practice game, just to see what it felt like and in
order to explore the possibility of integrating it into his array of
shot-making options. Whenever, as often happened, he executed this new
shot successfully --- sometimes in his first-ever attempt at it --- he
chuckled with the amused delight of someone who has just made an
exciting discovery. The zest with which he undertook these potential
expansions, like a scientist immersed in a novel experiment, was both
contagious and very palpable.
Current Racquet & Tennis Club President
Morris Clothier, himself a nine-time U. S. National champion in both
squash (all doubles) and court tennis (four singles, five doubles),
characterized Bostwick as “a legend at R&T and one of the greatest
all-around athletes in the history of the club.” Ultimately Bostwick’s
most salient quality --- and the one that endeared him more than any
other to so many of his fellow playing partners and competitors --- was
not the (enormous and multi-front) list of his successes, but rather
the eternal and truly extraordinary youthfulness of spirit that he
perpetually exuded as he pursued (not obsessively but joyously) his
quest for perfection in these maddeningly imperfect racquet sports. It
was a quality that inspired so many of those who were fortunate enough
to spend time in Bostwick’s extensive orbit, one that remained with him
throughout his entire life, and one that will live on, undimmed by
time’s relentless march. Even with his passing last week, in a very
real sense Pete Bostwick is and always will remain, in the hearts and
minds of the legion of fellow athletes and friends who remember him
with great admiration and affection, forever young.
Rob Dinerman was Pete
Bostwick’s frequent squash practice partner at the Uptown Racquet Club
in Manhattan’s upper east side from the late 1970’s into the early
1990’s. They served together on the USSRA Ranking Committee during part
of that time frame as well. Mr. Dinerman would like to thank Morris
Clothier, Guy Cipriano, Harrison Wilson, Lili Bostwick Noesen and Jim Stephens for the
substantial assistance that each of them provided to his research for
this document.
