Homecoming

Golf is not TigerBlog's best thing. Or favorite thing, for that matter.

Back in the pre-TigerBlog Jr./Little Miss TigerBlog days, TB used to play at Springdale in the afternoons every now and then. TB is pretty sure that if you were University staff, you could go after 4 on weekdays and play as many holes as you could before dark for something like $14.

Eventually, TB became good enough that he could shoot under 100, though not by much. As an aside, he once played in a foursome in which one of the golfers made a hole-in-one and then remarked: "This is really going to help my score."

Once TBJ and LMTB came along, time and money - the two things you need to be good at golf - became scarcer, or at least redirected. As such, TB hasn't played in years and years.

In fact, the last time he played was at Ivy League football media day, circa 2002, at Yale's golf course. TB's last shot came on, he believes, the 17th, a par three.

It was about a million degrees out, and TB hit an eight-iron. On his follow through, the club flew out of his hands and helicoptered its way to the left, while the ball went, actually, straight.

Simultaneously, the ball landed on the green while the club landed in the lake next to the hole on the left. TB has never hit a golf shot since; he didn't even putt out on that hole or play the 18th.

He's okay with it. Squash? You can play for 45 minutes and have a great workout. Golf? It takes more than four hours and costs a ton of money. Maybe if a course could be four holes, TB would play again.

Anyway, that's TB's background in golf.

He also remembers one time two or three years ago that he went to the Frist Campus Center for lunch and ran into Amy Bond, the women's golf coach, and Bond joined TB for lunch. That was really the only time that TB had an extended conversation with Bond, who left last week to go to Florida State to become the head coach for the Seminoles.

Bond, from the one time eating lunch and the other times of saying "hi, how are you?" at department meetings, seemed like a nice enough person. TB wishes her well.

Certainly you can't blame her for wanting to take the Florida State job. After all, the Seminoles finished 10th at the NCAA championships this past spring, and the school is her alma mater.

And, in the world of college athletics, that happens all the time. Coaches leave one place to return home to coach at their alma mater.

Why, at Princeton it alone, it's happened, well ... never before?

TigerBlog has tried to find another example of when a Princeton head coach has left to take the head coaching job at the school he or she attended. And the answer is? Well, TB can't find or think of one before Bond did so.

He also has the feeling he's wrong and that he's overlooking something obvious.

If it's never happened before, it's because such a large percentage of Princeton head coaches through the years have either 1) attended Princeton or 2) built a program at Princeton that exceeds what they could have done at their alma mater.

Still, it has to have happened at some point, right?

TB thought Fritz Crisler, who went from coaching football at Princeton to Michigan in 1937, might have been an Ann Arbor alum, but he actually went to Chicago. As an aside, he graduated in 1921, which means he did not play in the 1922 Princeton-Chicago game, one of the most famous in school history.

In men's basketball, Princeton's coaching lineage back to the 1940s goes like this: Sydney Johnson (Princeton), Joe Scott (Princeton), John Thompson (Princeton), Bill Carmody (Union), Pete Carril (Lafayette), Butch van Breda Kolff (Princeton), Jake McCandless (Princeton), Cappy Cappon (Michigan). None of the non-Princetontians went to their alma mater - though Cappon came from his, becoming the head coach at Princeton after being an assistant coach and administrator at Michigan.

TB can't be sure of every coach in Princeton history and where he/she went to school. Still, he went sport-by-sport and didn't see any who left here to go back to their alma mater.

Was Amy Bond the first?