By James Zug
Robert W. Callahan died in January 2015 at the age of fifty-nine. He was the coach of the Princeton men’s team for thirty-two years, retiring in 2013 after a diagnosis of brain cancer. His record was 324-84, with three national championships and ten Ivy League titles. He started the world’s oldest summer squash camp in 1982 and directed the World Junior Men’s Championships at Princeton in 1998.
In February more than 1,500 people came to Bob Callahan’s memorial service at the chapel at Princeton. A number of people gave eulogies, including squash players Dave Bottger, Dent Wilkens and Paul Assaiante, as well as his widow Kristen Callahan. Bottger said that “Bob Callahan taught us how to live and in the thousand days of his illness how to die.” Wilkens asked every former pupil of Callahan’s to stand, and hundreds of people stood in their pew, a testament to Callahan’s legacy. Assaiante spoke of some of the titanic matches between Princeton and Trinity and how Callahan’s values will reverberate for generations to come.
