Back when TigerBlog was just starting out covering college sports back at the newspaper, he had the great good fortune of working for a legendary local sportswriter named Harvey Yavener.
Yav, who lived into his 90s before he passed away two years ago, might have seem like just another grizzled old-time newspaper man. And yes, there were certainly elements to that — he was gruff and surly and a stickler for the journalistic rules that pretty much no longer exist.
What did you expect from someone who was born in 1929? He grew up and lived much of his life in a world that also no longer exists.
Knowing all that, TigerBlog was never sure why Yav became one of the earliest proponents of giving valuable column inches in the newspaper every day to covering women's sports. If you think the discrepancy today between men's and women's coverage is still drastic, you should have been around in the 1970s and 1980s.
When TB first started to work with Yav in the 1980s, one of the first lessons Yav taught him was that the women deserve to be written about as well. As such, much like Yav, TB spent many, many nights as the only writer — male or female — to be at the women's game of a basketball doubleheader or to be at a field hockey or women's lacrosse or softball game.
If anything is Yav's greatest legacy, it's not his interview style (ask anyone he ever interviewed; when they were done, there was no possible question left to ask), the massively long stories he'd write or his tendency to call pretty much every game "the greatest ever played" and any player who happened to have a good night when he was there "the greatest player ever."
No. It's how he elevated women's athletics.
Perhaps it was working for Yav that pointed TB in the same direction. Or maybe it was just how great women's athletics have been since pretty much Day 1 at Princeton.
As you probably know, TigerBlog has written a 500-page book on the first 50 years of women's athletics at Princeton. What? You didn't know?
You can get yours HERE.
TigerBlog is extremely proud of the book. He's also proud that he, as a man, was able to tell the stories of so many great women athletes.
All of this brings him to Sean Gregory, one of the most beloved Princeton athletes TB has ever met. Gregory, whose nickname has always been "Bones," was a member of the great Princeton men's basketball Class of 1998.
The summer before the epic 27-2 season in 1997-98, the men's basketball team took a summer trip to Spain. Gregory asked TB (or maybe it was the other way around) to keep a journal of the trip, and the subsequent product appeared in the 1997-98 media guide (those were printed things that used to be standard, but that's not important right now).
That piece was all it took to convince TB that Gregory was a great writer. Nothing that has happened since has changed TB's mind.
Gregory has spent his career writing sports for Time Magazine. He writes long, well-crafted feature stories, and he's written about some of the biggest names in sports history.
TigerBlog saw the other day that Gregory has been named a finalist for the first Billie Jean King Award. This is from the announcement:
Journalists entered a portfolio of four stories, published in 2023, that include reporting about girls and women’s sports. Entries included live coverage, feature reporting and commentary about high school, college, amateur and professional sports across North America. The contest was administered by APSE through first vice president and contest chair Dan Spears.
There are seven finalists.
- Katie Barnes, ESPN.com
- Candace Buckner, The Washington Post
- Marisa Ingemi, The San Francisco Chronicle
- Sally Jenkins, The Washington Post
- Chantel Jennings, The Athletic
- Meg Linehan, The Athletic
- Sean Gergory, Time Magazine
Bones, as you might have noticed, is the only male in the group. It makes it a bit more special, TB thinks.
TB congratulates Gregory on being a finalist. He's certainly earned it.
And for TB, it also conjures up images of Yav, someone Gregory knew well. It reminds TB of his earliest days covering college sports, when he wondered why he was the only one at so many women's games.
Looking back on it, he knows the answer. It's because it was the right thing to do.
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