In squash, unlike its second cousin tennis, there is no official Grand Slam. For professional squash, one could conceive of creating a mythical trophy that emulates golf and tennis: Take the British Open, U.S. Open (or Tournament of Champions?), the World Open and well, it gets sticky, the Hong Kong Open or probably the Al Ahram.

In the United States, among amateurs, no acknowledged quartet of great titles exists. A half century ago there was a whiff of one in the U.S. and Canadian Opens and U.S. and Canadian nationals, but no one came remotely close to winning all four in the same year and only one player, Henri Salaun, ever won all four.

I propose the USA Squash Grand Slam for the four most prestigious U.S. national championships: singles, doubles, intercollegiate and veterans.

In choosing the four, the national singles and doubles are automatic.

The intercollegiate title, begun in 1932, belongs because it's youth on display, it's the cream of the most competitive corner of U.S. squash, it's boys and girls with their hearts and school colors on their sleeves. The question is oracular: who will be a future champion?

The intercollegiates has a long litany of fascinating matches and great champions, especially those who dominated open tournaments thereafter but never won the adult nationals---Charlie Ufford, or four-time intercollegiate champion Gail Ramsey (the only person, boy or girl, who has ever won the title four times)---or Steve Vehslage, who won three intercollegiates in a row and had to retire from a head injury after taking just one nationals or Kenton Jernigan who was intercollegiate and national singles champion his freshman year but yet played number three for his Harvard team.

The veterans (over 40), needed in part to round out the foursome, is as much a prize as the other three. It's by far the most respectable and longest-running age-group division, originating in 1935 for men with Stanley Pearson, six-time open singles champion, winning the inaugural tournament, and in 1949 for women. The veterans, along with its classic matches and champions (Salaun won six veterans titles; Goldie Edwards won ten in a row), has equally been a quietly wonderful reminder that not all squash players grew up playing in high school and college, that there is room in the "Historical Data" for late-comers and late-bloomers.

Only one player has won all four Grand Slam titles in a lifetime. Not Charlie Brinton or Eddie Hahn or Anil Nayer or Stanley Pearson Jr. or Ralph Howe or Vic Niederhoffer or Peter Briggs or Joyce Davenport or Demer Holleran or Alicia McConnell---all of whom won three of the four. Not even Diehl Mateer who won a record sixteen Grand Slam titles.

The only player to put his name in gold up on all four boards is Germain Green Glidden.

Glidden, known to his friends as G3, was born 5 December 1913. He grew up in Englewood, N.J., and his parents pulled the old 20-20: they were married for twenty years, got a Reno divorce; and twenty years later remarried each other. Glidden started playing squash at age fourteen and played for Exeter in high school.

At Harvard he was coached by the self-advertised "155 champions" Harry Cowles. In his sophomore year Glidden got to the finals of the 1934 intercollegiates where he played Harvard teammate E. Rotan Sargent. Down two-one, Glidden forced a fifth game, whereupon Tanny smoked him fifteen-love.

Time to get a new backhand. Glidden, like most left-handers, had a horrible, dead-fish backhand. In one of his last moves before he suffered the nervous breakdown that led to his committal to a state institution, Cowles rejiggered the southpaw's swing. The legendary coach took him into a court and made him hit tins repeatedly, until he was, as he wrote in his memoirs, "hating that terrible sound." That aversion therapy worked, and Glidden stopped getting bageled in fifth games.

He took his first tournament, the Boston Open, his junior year, beating Harvard assistant coach Jack Barnaby three-two in the finals. Glidden won the intercollegiates his junior and senior year as well as the national singles his senior year.

Barnaby later wrote that Glidden was "perhaps the most extraordinary player in the history of the amateur game." Glidden was quick afoot and had a quick, short stroke, but what separated him from all other players was his quick eye. Glidden had extraordinary anticipation. He seemed to play four feet in front of the T. He volleyed everything.

The joke was that Glidden would volley with one foot touching the tin. His speed of mind was crucial, because he had an average three-wall boast that he could not resist from hitting. Cowles in fact counseled him to hit his shaky boast because it moved his opponent up and back, causing the trademark Glidden melee. "Every tough match developed," wrote Barnaby, "not into a grim exchange of basic drives leading to a weak return and a crisis, but rather into a mad whirling dervish up-and-back scramble---a mess of quick volleys, shots and nicks that seemed all wrong but was somehow unbeatable."

Moving to New York after graduation, Glidden defended his nationals title two years in a row. He would drive up to Cambridge a week before the tournament and work out with Barnaby. The 1937 nationals, in Cleveland, was notable. Glidden, playing former national champion Neil Sullivan in the finals, lost the first two games 14-15 and had to save four match points in the fourth game before winning the fifth 15-11. LIFE magazine did a photo shoot of Glidden that month which took up the center spread of the issue.

Glidden, upon arriving back via train from Cleveland, played a famous practical joke. He went to a costume store and bought a fake mustache, tinted glasses, a cut-away dinner jacket and derby hat, and went, as a full-blown professor of Greek, to the Yale Club. He told the pro, an old friend named Frank Lafforgue, that he wanted a lesson. Lafforgue said sure and took Glidden into the court. Lafforgue taught him the grip and stroke and the rules and they started playing, Glidden with his right hand. Every few shots, when Lafforgue wasn't looking, he'd switch hands and snap a ball past him. Finally, Lafforgue caught him bare-left-handed and asked, "Why don't you play with your left hand all the time, sir?"

Glidden, in a quick reply as Lafforgue was about to guess his true identity, said, "Why, is it fair?"

In 1938 Glidden won the nationals for a third straight time. Only one man, Stanley Pearson, had done that before him and it wasn't until the 1970s when such a feat was repeated. Glidden, with a tough draw, beat Tanny Sargent and Hunter Lott to get through to the finals where he outclassed Leroy Weir three games to one.

Then he retired. He took the national championship trophy---in those days you could keep a trophy if you won it three times---and returned home to Seir Hill, Silvermine, outside Norwalk, Connecticut. There, until his death in 1999, Glidden kept the trophy with its inscriptions of champions from 1924 (the year after Pearson himself retired the trophy) on his table, jammed packed with paint brushes. "It's a perfect place to keep my brushes," he said less than a year before he died.

Glidden, known in the squash world for his frog cartoons, was a professional portrait painter. Hundreds of people sat for him, everyone from George Bush to Ivan Lendl. He also founded the National Art Museum of Sport in 1959. Today the museum fills ten thousand square-feet of exhibition space in a building in downtown Indianapolis.

"Germain was a great pal to have around at the tournaments," says Charlie Brinton, four-time national champion. "He loved to play this card-flipping game, flipping playing cards into a hat. He always won and took all our money. It was only later I learned he was so good at it because it was a habit of his to flip cards with his right hand while he painted with his left."

Abandoning squash after his retirement was never in the picture. In 1949 at age thirty-six Glidden reached the finals of the Harry Cowles at the Harvard Club, the most prestigious tournament of the year after the nationals. He also recalled the Woodruff-Nee, the annual Washington, D.C. tourney, when it was two-all, seventeen-all in the finals against Charlie Brinton. Glidden hit a risky double boast that neither player was sure of whether it touched the front wall. So they played a let. Glidden won the replay. In the gallery that Sunday afternoon was a young senator from Massachusetts, John Kennedy.

Returning to national tournaments, Glidden won three veterans titles in the mid-1950s and then retired that trophy. After losing in the finals of the national doubles in 1951, Glidden teamed with Dick Remsen, a Dartmouth grad. In the 1952 semifinals, they took the great combo of Mateer & Lott to thirteen-all in the fifth. Remsen dove for a Mateer reverse corner and got a lucky winner. Then Glidden feathered a cross-court dropshot into the nick and they were in the finals. Again, it was rough. They were down two games to one before pulling it out in the fifth.

Total hardware: nine national titles, one Grand Slam.

Glidden died in February 1999, but his legacy is still with us. A women's professional tournament held in Connecticut for the last seventeen years bears his name. And, as a member of the USSRA's executive in the 1960s, he came up with the idea that individuals pay an annual fee to be members of the USSRA. That first year it cost $10 and there were about one hundred members. Now you know who was the guy who suggested you ante up forty bucks a year.

In April 2000 Glidden will be in the inaugural class of inductees into the U.S. Squash Hall of Fame. He deserves it. He was the man who hit the Grand Slam.

Mottos attributed to Germain Glidden:

---"Getting along with your wife is like passing a car on a narrow road---you both have to give."

---"Being educated is to know where to find out what you don't know."

---"On important missions, leave early enough to come back in time to pick up what you forgot."

---"The older I grow, the more I listen to people who do not talk much."

Germain Glidden: Self Portrait (courtesy Christine Glidden)

Glidden: Creator of the world famous "let-please" cartoon.

" Can't Get this damn thing out of second!" (cartoon reproduced with permission of the Germain G Glidden Estate.)

Germain Glidden: Photo by Bachrach, Life Magazine