Thursday, August 21, 2025

"When I'm 64"

The Beatles released the song "When I'm 64" on the "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album in 1967. 

The song itself was written more than a decade earlier, when Paul McCartney was 14 and the band had not yet formed. TigerBlog first heard it only a few years after it was released, and he can remember two things: 1) liking it and 2) thinking 64 was really, really old. 

To be 64? It seemed so far in the future as to be unthinkable. 

Why bring this up now? Well, it's because today, BrotherBlog turns 64.  

Happy birthday BB. Have a great one. Oh, and your brother didn't send you a card again, so he'll either have to hope you see this. Ah, he'll call, just to be safe. 

BrotherBlog is a law professor at the University of Washington. He'll probably be at Husky Stadium in nine days for the Washington football opener against Colorado State. 

He's also likely to continue his decades-long tradition of pretending to care when his brother talks about Princeton sports. That's always been pretty nice of him to do. 

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TigerBlog read the story about the football team's incoming class, which you can see HERE. That group will join the returnees as the team begins practice Saturday. 

TB learned some interesting things by reading through the bios, including:

• there is a placekicker from Florida named Vaughn Lennon who set his county record in the 400 hurdles

• there is a linebacker from California named John Teti who comes from a family with a serious rowing connection, with a mother who won two Olympic gold medals and a father who won one Olympic broze. There's also a Princeton connection, as his father Mike Teti coached here and his uncle Paul, a three-time Olympian, won a national championship at Princeton in the heavyweight boat in 1998

• there is a defensive lineman named Konstantin Paschos whose hometown is Dusseldorf, Germany

• there is a linebacker named DJ Walker, whose father Darwin won a national championship at Tennessee and then played eight years in the NFL, including on the 2004 Eagles team that won the NFC title

• there is a defensive lineman named Ethan Brown whose cousin Carlos Basham Jr. current plays for the Carolina Panthers and whose other cousin Tarell Basham played for the Colts, Jets, Cowboys and Titans

•  there is an offensive lineman named Jayden Hadzovic who has five sisters, and the first name of all five starts with an "A" — Alyssa, Aliza, Ariya, Arijana and Alana

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Being in your 60s is no longer old, by the way. There are times, though, when the generation gap can become glaringly obvious to TigerBlog, and this week has provided further proof of that. 

TB has been at field hockey practice this week in advance of the coming season, and he learned something extraordinary there. None of the players he spoke to knew who ... get ready ... Barry Manilow was. 

How in the world is that possible? He even sang a few bars of "I Write The Songs," and ... nothing. 

Oh well. Sometimes you do feel old, and not physically. 

After each practice, the team will gather in a circle to stretch. On game days, when they do this, they go around the circle and talk about what their favorite part of the game had been. 

Yesterday, the question was "what is your favorite kind of music." There seems to be a lot of love these days among the current college generation for country, the Zach Bryan kind, with some other interesting answers mixed in, including "Yacht Rock" and "Show Tunes."

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One player who wasn't there at practice yesterday was Talia Schenck, who was flying back from Paraguay, and the Junior Pan Am Games. Schenck's travels took her from Asuncion to Lima (the one in Peru) and then back to Newark. 

That's nearly 14 hours of flying time, if you're keeping score. 

Perhaps she kept her silver medal with her, instead of checking it. Schenck, with her United States U21 teammates, won the first four games of the tournament before falling 3-0 to Argentina in the final. 

Schenck had four goals in Paraguay.  

Tomorrow is Opening Day for Princeton Athletics for 2024-25, as the women's soccer team hosts Rutgers at 5 on Myslik Field at Roberts Stadium. Admission is free.

Princeton was picked to finish first in the Ivy League's preseason poll, with nine of the 16 first-place votes. The Tigers won the league championship and then the tournament championship last season.  

 

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