MY DILL-IANT FRIEND

How two men, three decades apart in age, found fitness and healing in pickleball—and in their friendship.

- BY LAUREN LARSON

Temesvari (left) and Boynton at a birthday celebration for one of their fellow pickleball crew members in October 2024.

WHEN TODD "HAPPY" Boynton is vetting someone new for his pickleball squadron, he asks them to accept four rules: Don't get hurt, have fun, don't be a dick, and "the more the merrier." The last is not so much a rule as an existential mandate for the 56-year-old Boynton, who approaches possible recruits with the pleasant persistence of a missionary.

So it was with 82-year-old Gabor "Gabe" Temesvari. Two years ago, Temesvari was hitting a tennis ball by himself on a court in the small town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, not far from where Boynton, who lives in the nearby town of Greenfield, was playing pickleball with some friends. Temesvari, a retired schoolteacher, was a lifelong tennis and squash player, but he had never tried pickleball and was reluctant to join the others. However, when Boynton approached him, lent him a paddle, and began hitting with him, Temesvari took to it quickly. "I didn't think that I was as good as I wanted to be right away, but I said, 'Eh, I think I can handle this,'" he says. That afternoon, he bought a paddle of his own and returned the next day, and most days since. "I admired this guy's scorpion-sharp shots over the net," he says of Boynton. "I started calling him 'Scorpion' all the time. He hooked me on the sport."