Happy Thanksgiving

A year ago, TigerBlog had this to say about Thanksgiving:

As holidays go, you can't do much better than Thanksgiving. It's got it all, really: a huge meal (with turkey, no less), football, family, history (dates back to 1621), start of a four-day weekend for most people, leftovers. It's even a secular holiday, so every American can dive right in, regardless of religion.

TigerBlog attended many Manalapan-Marlboro Thanksgiving games a long, long time ago. The Lions and the Cowboys, obviously, always play at home on Thanksgiving, and the NFL has now added a third game (maybe a little too much). Beyond watching football, how many out there have played their own Thanksgiving football games, all of which, by the way, are named "the Turkey Bowl?"

The holiday may lag behind Christmas in terms of great Hollywood movies, and "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" is no match for "A Charlie Brown Christmas" or "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown." Still, there are some great moments in movies and TV shows around Thanksgiving.

Rocky and Adrian had their first date on Thanksgiving – "To you it's Thanksgiving; to me it's Thursday," Rocky said romantically – as did Meadow and Jackie Jr. on "The Sopranos" (it didn't quite work out as well as it did for Rocky and Adrian). "Everybody Loves Raymond" had two pretty good Thanksgiving episodes, the one where Marie makes a low-fat dinner and the one where Debra makes fish instead of turkey. As an aside, TigerBlog's Aunt Regina once made Cornish game hens instead of turkey, so he knows how they all felt. And of course, there was the Thanksgiving episode of "Cheers," which has the big food fight at the end.

The Woody Allen movie "Hannah and Her Sisters" starts and ends on two different Thanksgivings. "Miracle on 34th Street" is a Christmas movie, but it does start with the Thanksgiving parade in New York City.

And of course, there is the best of all Thanksgiving movies: "Planes, Trains and Automobiles." It'll make you laugh a lot and cry a little, and it ends on Thanksgiving.

Now, 52 weeks to the day later, TB started out to write about Thanksgiving again, and he would have basically come up with the same stuff word-for-word that he wrote last year, so he figured he'd do a little copy-and-paste and then add something like:
If the day you pay your income taxes or something like that is the worst annual day of the year, then Thanksgiving has to be in the top three or so, along with your birthday and Christmas or something else.

Unless your birthday happens to fall on Thanksgiving, as is the case this year with Stephanie Sutton in the ticket office, who celebrates a big one tomorrow.

Stephanie has worked in the ticket office since just before TigerBlog started covering Tiger athletics. Strictly guessing, she's probably sold around two million tickets for Princeton events.

Every now and then, TigerBlog touches on the theme that Princeton Athletics has a large number of behind-the-scenes people who never get any recognition for their efforts and who don't seek any out. At the same time, Princeton would not be able to field teams and put on events without these people, who work not with any specific teams but rather for the entire athletic department as a whole.

If you come to a game here, you've already dealt with Stephanie or Clare Baxter or Dee Vertucci from the ticket office and probably didn't realize it.

As you watch the game, you see the work of people like Jon Kurian, Ryan Yurko and Phyllis Chase from the business office, Clif Perry, Gary Audet and Gary Mosely from the equipment staff, Brad Cabral, Garfield Brown, Matt Conti, Jay Hulick, Jeff Madill, Paul Merrow, Elysee Nicolas and Jim Ogden on the grounds crew, Greg Paczkowski in aquatics and technology, Mike McLaughlin in aquatics, Dan Joyce in information technology, Adlay Bugg in schdeduling, Craig Sachson, Kristy McNeil, Yariv Amir and Andrew Borders in communications, Scott Jurgens in marketing, Nancy Donigan in awards/compliance, Rob Hayden and Marie Muhvic in fundraising, David Santoro in operations.

The event staff itself? It's just two people - Karen Malec and Steve Kanaby.

You know the name Gary Walters well, but his administrative staff includes less familiar names like Erin McDermott, Inge Radice, Anthony Archbald, Jeff Graydon, Kim Meszaros, Chris Brock, Kelly Widener and Kellie Staples.

Considering that Princeton fields 38 varsity teams with around 1,000 athletes who compete in more than 600 intercollegiate contests a year both on this campus and around the country, that's not a big staff at all.

They're a hard-working dedicated group, and every Princeton coach is the beneficiary of what they do.

TigerBlog is thankful for a great many things this Thanksgiving.

The opportunity to work with this group of people is one of them.