Player To Be Named

Doug Davis, the freshman who is the leading scorer on the Princeton men's basketball team, has let us know that he would prefer to be known by his full name from now on. All future mentions of him will therefore be of Douglas Davis.

Davis is not the first Princeton basketball player who has changed his name from a nickname to a full name. James Mastaglio, for instance, started out his freshman year as "Jamie" before requesting that he be called James, which he was for the remainder of his time with the Tigers.

Besides Davis and Mastaglio, who was known as "Stags" more than Jamie or James, there is former women's hockey player Lizzie Keady, who was Elizabeth Keady as a freshman, Liz Keady as a sophomore and Lizzie as a junior and senior. Also, two field hockey juniors have made changes. Christina Bortz was Tina as a freshman, and Cynthia Wray went by Cindy.

TigerBlog also called men's water polo player Mark Zalewski by the name of Steve Zalewski in his freshman year, obviously scarred by Clarkson's men's hockey player Steve Zalewski's success in games against the Tigers.

And while we're talking pronunciations, former basketball player Ahmed El-Nokali wanted to change his first name from "ACK-med" to "AH-med" for the second half of his senior year, but TigerBlog never bought into it. Former basketball coach Bill Carmody (whose team lost a tough one last night to Purdue on a shaky call at the end) insisted that his big man from Evanston, Ill., was Mason "ROH-kuh" and not Mason "ROCK-uh," but Mason himself said either one was fine.

All of this takes TigerBlog back to its Trenton Times days of covering high school sports. Trenton High had a quarterback who one year was called Spencer Lester, only to correct that the following year by saying his name was actually Lester Spencer.

TigerBlog has been trying to remember other cases of Princeton athletes who asked to have their name changed but has come up empty. Regardless, the freshman guard from Philadelphia by way of the Hun School is now Douglas Davis.