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The solution at the time was MapQuest, which provided turn by turn written directions. He would never do it and this became a factor on our trips to England, some of which took place before the perfection of the GPS let alone a GPS on your phone. Some things were absolutes and driving on the wrong side of the road was one of them. Our travels took us to England, Scotland, France, and Australia and to the other courts in the United States, all as chronicled in Around the World in 50 Courts, soon to be a major motion picture. Our time playing together in Washington extended from September 1997, when we had to hit just a few balls even though the paint on the lines was still wet, through late May or early June 2021, when we played with Robert Liberace, the artist who is painting the portrait that will hang in the Grassi room at the new Prince’s Court at Westwood Country Club. True, this omission puts me in the same category as the Washington Post reporters who ignored his emails and I know Temple will be disappointed in my not telling you every detail, but I do think you are the better for it. Besides, it extends over the better part of four decades. There will be no recounting of that story because those who want to know it already do and those who don’t know it really don’t need to. Neither of us remembers when or where we met, but we both thought it was in the early to mid-1980s at the start of the Quixotic mission to build a court tennis court in Washington. So, Temple retired and became a sportsman, and this led to his becoming The Ambassador. Unfortunately, over his career, that objective declined in importance to parents who came to prefer the prestige of college stickers on the back of the family SUV. Temple was the teacher of choice if you cared about what kind of person your son might grow up to be. Though Temple might have skipped the odd chapter in the fifth-grade math workbook, he was clearly an accomplished mathematician otherwise his backgammon addiction would have cost him dearly.įar more important than arcane aspects of math, he taught boys to stand up, shake hands, look him in the eye and say their names - both first and last - without mumbling. The one on counting systems to the base six rather than the base 10 comes particularly to mind, but he did teach fractions and decimals… as needed.
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In math, he would skip whole chapters deeming them unnecessary. I suspect many more lessons were learned running up the hill then would have been remembered from a recitation of regiments and tactics. He taught generations of boys about the Civil War by taking them to Gettysburg and making them reenact Pickett’s Charge. You learn to do that when you teach fifth grade. Grown-ups were often surprised when he would ask if anyone needed to go to the bathroom before the start of the journey. He taught 10- to 12-year-old boys, first at Allan Stevenson School in New York and later at Landon near Washington. Technically, Temple was a teacher but his second career following retirement was sportsman, an exemplar of the finest traditions of that craft. Almost any story on sports misbehavior, cheating, double dealing by officials or any form of exploiting a sport for personal gain would elicit an email directing the reporter to come to Prince’s Court to witness a sport in which these things never happen. Large numbers of people go long periods of time without emailing Washington Post reporters to decry the absence of court tennis coverage in the sports pages. It seemed that he let it happen rather than trying to make it happen. Too few people aspire to be unusual and I’m not sure Temple did either. Temple Grassi was a most unusual fellow but now he is gone, and we are less. The inadvertent word choice grew over time to reflect reality. Had they done so he would have been one among many, but “The Ambassador” made him unique. Ambassador, but nobody ever called Temple Grassi “Mr. Clearly the title should be Farewell, Mr.