Pennington At ANC

TigerBlog saw that this weekend's high school football schedule includes Pennington at Academy of the New Church, a matchup that made TB smile.

After all, without that game, there'd be no TigerBlog, at least the blog itself.

As for TigerBlog the person, well, without Pennington-ANC, he'd probably be just another really, really, really bored lawyer - or maybe an actuary. TB always thought that would be an interesting career.

It was 27 years ago today that people all over the Mercer County area woke up breathlessly to TigerBlog's 12-inch story on the 1983 Pennington-Academy of the New Church game. As TB recalls, Pennington needed one win to set a school record for consecutive wins, while ANC wasn't supposed to be very good. It was a close game through the first half before Pennington pulled away and won easily.

That 1983 game was the first game TB ever covered. He had zero writing experience before that, and he was only covering the game because of a weird series of events that began when BrotherBlog got a different work study job and vacated his old one in the psychology department.

TB then took BB's old job, where he worked with another guy (who today is the head coach of the University of Iowa men's basketball team) whose brother wrote for the Trenton Times.

As TB became friends with them, the older brother, Jack McCaffery, said that his newspaper was looking for people to cover some high school football games that fall and would TB be interested.

And so, for $15 per story and $.22 per mile, TB went off to cover that game and a bunch of other ones that fall. By the following year, it was basically a full-time job, and TB worked in the newspaper business for more than a decade before coming to work here.

The first half of his time in the newspaper business was spent covering high schools. Eventually, he moved up (graduated?) to covering college sports, which mostly meant games at Trenton State College (now the College of New Jersey), Rider and of course Princeton.

And it all started at the game at ANC. Jack McCaffery went with TB to the game and gave him a few pointers, and then it was back to the gigantic newsroom on Perry Street in Trenton.

Back then it was a wide-open room with desks interconnected and word processors on which to write. It was also a smokey place, as TB figures nearly half the people were still lighting up in the work place, and it was always a challenge for TB to find a spot away from the smokers.

At the time, TB figured it was a hobby - and way to make a few extra dollars. But Jack did warn TB that day that "once you get the ink in your blood, you never get it out."

He first told TB that 27 years ago yesterday, when he pointed TB down a road that he never imagined nor had ever seriously considered beyond the "hey, this would be a fun thing to do" way of thinking that TB had when he read newspapers as a kid. In doing so, Jack detoured TB away from a career as a lawyer (which is what he had set out to do) or something else (TB probably would have drifted into something else).

Since that day, TB has, between the newspaper and Princeton, written about, what, 5,000 games? More? How many features, pregame stories, columns, player bios and everything else? How many words and column inches?

Looking back now, he can see some of the great games (and crushing ones) in his mind like they were yesterday. He can remember details, final scores, quotes, disagreements, travels, friendships, all of it. They are among the best memories he has.

Ironically, most of those involve Princeton University, the biggest rival of his own alma mater.

Everybody takes a different path to their ultimate career. When TB was a freshman at Penn, his roommate was a kid named Seth Rubin. He knew he wanted to be a doctor from Day 1, even volunteering in the hospital at Penn at something like 5 a.m. or something. Today? He's a doctor.

Others are like TB, who had a vague idea of what they wanted to do and then were sent in a completely unforeseen direction.

Princeton hosts Lafayette tomorrow in its home opener in football, with kickoff at 6. Community Day activities, including the very popular sports fair for kids 5-13, begins at 4.

TB invited the families who played lacrosse with TigerBlog Jr. over the summer to come to the game. TB has done this many times in the past, and it's almost always met with a comment like "you get paid to go to games? You have the coolest job in the world."

In many ways, they're right. As TB has said often, we work where other people pay to go watch.

It all started with a story that ran in a newspaper about a high school football game, one that ran 27 years ago today.

TB would never have guessed what that was the start of when he first saw his story in the paper. All he knew that day was that it something different, something fun, something cool.