Barney Lawrence died on Saturday 30 April. He was eighty-five.

Rial George Rutter Lawrence, Q.C., B.A., LL.B  was a legend, the absolute definition of ebullient.

I usually saw him at Lapham Grant weekends. The last time was at Apawamis a year ago. We talked for a long time, as was usual with Barney.  He was a good player, we tended to forget in later years—he told me a story about losing a close match to Diehl Mateer in the semis of a tournament in the1950s. But he was the great raconteur. He said he just recited the Gettysburg Address at his birthday party, he said. He was known for being able to reel off long stretches of memorized poetry.

The emails have been flying ever since the news of his passing came out. Kit Tatum said he was squash royalty. “One of the comments that Barney made at the Lapham Grant final luncheon speech was that he had made an ‘anonymous’ gift to the Lapham Grant event, and he sure as hell wanted everyone to know about it. The crowd broke up, and it was pure Barney.”

Ted Marmor talked about Barney’s warm, husky voice. “His distinctive role for after dinner talks was to speak a form of gibberish. That meant talking very fast, reversing sentences, reversing endings and beginnings of words, all the while smiling as if he were the funniest, wittiest, and most elevating speaker one could find.”

“I am deceptively slow these days” was his classic one-liner that Alladin Mitha recalled.

Guy Cipriano remembered Barney’s brilliant, after-dinner rendition of “Little Red Riding Hood.”

“We have lost a friend,” said Alan Fox. “Squash has lost one of its most colorful (and contributing) characters. Some of the glow goes out of the game for all of us.”

The masters trophy at the Lapham is named in part after Lawrence (the other half is another legendary guy who worked into his eighties, Howard Wilkins) and hopefully the glow will return, along with a Barney laugh and a joke or two.