Today is Arlen Specter’s funeral. The former Pennsylvania senator died at age eighty-two on Sunday. He was perhaps the most famous of squash-playing lawmakers.

Beginning in October 1970, he played nearly every day. Almost every obit in the country has reported that fact, usually noting that Specter considered squash a key reason why he survived so many health battles (brain tumors, heart bypass, cancer).

He really played every day. In my history of squash book I mentioned that Senator Bob Packwood hit Specter so hard that he fractured his cheekbone (he was wearing eye goggles). A doctor in Bethesda gave Specter six stitches and told him to stay off the squash court for six to seven weeks. Specter went out and bought a hockey mask and played the next day.

In July 2003 he was at a ceremony at the National Constitution Center when a steel cross-beam fell and slammed onto his upper right arm, seriously bruising him. Later that afternoon, Specter played squash.

In Egypt in 1982 he more or less made a $100 million bet with Hosni Mubarak over a squash match, but Mubarak avoided playing the match. Not because Specter didn’t want to—he always played when he traveled. In Never Give In, his  2008 memoir, he described playing six times on a ten-day trip (once in Brussels, Riga, Amman and Frankfurt and twice in Tel Aviv). When he landed at home, he went straight to play squash.

After he and Senator John Chaffee argued over who had won more when they played regularly in the 1980s, he started keeping track of his daily squash matches—a practice that lasted more than twenty-five years.

When he first was diagnosed with cancer at age seventy-five, he continued to play squash, dragging himself the courts to play two games. He did get back to playing full matches and beat Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker 3-1 in a 2006 match. He played hardball, long after the switch to softball (maybe that is why Toobin lost), on hardball courts either at the Federal Reserve building in Washington or at the Sporting Club near the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia.

Here he is playing later in life: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEepype5ZPA

He repeatedly said: “My definition of winning at squash is playing and surviving, and I’ve never lost a match.” Under that definition, especially on a day like today, Arlen Specter was a squash champion.