The Old College Boo

Over breakfast this morning, TigerBlog was listening to a sports talk show discuss fan behavior at last night's NBA Draft and whether it is acceptable to boo, chant and shout reactions to a team's picks.

The argument against is that the fans are booing college players just starting their careers, effectively deciding the player's worth before he's dribbled a ball professionally.

Is it OK? Is it not? Should they just be used to it from all the razzing from student sections across the land?

TigerBlog thinks that part of the thought process behind fans booing at the draft (NFL even more famously) and at the games themselves has to do with money. It's ever more expensive to attend professional sports events, so perhaps fans feel the right to scream their frustrations/insults comes with purchasing the ticket. Maybe it's jealousy over the big bucks those on stage are about to receive. Who knows?

Discussions like this show how different a world Princeton athletics is in. It's hard to think of a time at a Princeton athletic event when fans booed a player in-game. Not during introductions or when a close referee's call goes one way or the other, but actual boos raining down during play. It's a pretty family-friendly place.

Why the difference? Is it because fans don't have to shell out a chunk of the monthly rent/mortgage payment to attend games here? Is it because people know these are college kids and not professionals? Is it different at other schools?

Perhaps another key difference is the relative unknown status college players have when they begin at universities. Sure, a kid may have all kinds of honors from high school or recruiting touts, but who's ever heard of an incoming freshman being dismissed as an awful choice before the first game? Either they play well and are lauded or they don't see much time and are an afterthought.

The need for fans to display their immediate reactions to draft picks probably comes from the same place as a fan's need for instant information. It's been discussed before on TigerBlog how game previews on GoPrincetonTigers.com are some of the highest-viewed stories. People want to have instant information in today's 24-hour news culture. Just as some fans can't wait for the game, they can't wait for the draft picks to get used to their teams and see how it all goes.

Your thoughts?

Have You Mehmet NBA Center Chris Young?

“With the 18th pick in the 2002 NBA Draft, the Orlando Magic select Curtis Borchardt.”

What do those words have to do with a San Diego Padre pitcher, the first Turkish player to win an NBA title and a Hall of Fame basketball coach?

If not for one small decision, possibly everything.

As dozens of young men spend tonight waiting and hoping for their dreams to be realized, TigerBlog took the time to dream of a potential scenario that could have happened six years ago: What if Chris Young had chosen basketball over baseball?

Flash back to the 2001-02 NBA season. The Utah Jazz finished 44-38 that season after using NBA immortals Jarron Collins and Greg Ostertag as starting centers. The previous year, Utah started Olden “The Sheriff” Polynice for 79 games at center. (If you don’t get the reference, Google “Sheriff Polynice")

Suffice it to say, Utah head coach Jerry Sloan was looking for a new option. The 2002 Draft (which is the ugly stepsister of the incredibly better 2003 Draft) featured one star big man in Yao Ming, who went No. 1 overall to Houston. By the time it was getting close to Utah’s selection at No. 19, two more forward/centers had been taken: Nene Hilario and Melvin Ely.

You’re not likely to relive this draft on NBA TV anytime soon.

Utah wanted Stanford center Curtis Borchardt so much that it actually dealt its first-round pick and its second-round pick to Orlando to move up one position and secure the, as Wikipedia called him, “injury-prone” Stanford junior.

It is TigerBlog’s belief that Chris Young’s name would have gone there. While Young didn’t have the pure athleticism of Hilario and Ely, he certainly had the game to be a first-round pick after what would have been four years of college basketball. Not only that, his skill set would have been ideal for Jerry Sloan. He could set a pick, pass the ball and draw a defender out with his shooting ability, which included a capable although unspectacular three-point shot. He could flourish in Sloan’s pick-and-roll offense. He wasn’t as tall as Borchart, but at 6-10 with the ability to block shots and rebound, he could certainly play center in the NBA.

But Young chose baseball and didn’t play his final two years of college basketball. And Utah was so thrilled with Borchart that they signed a reserve from the NBA champion Detroit Pistons named Mehmet Okur two years later. For those unfamiliar with the NBA game, Okur has averaged between 14 and 18 points per game in the last four seasons and has started every game he played during that time. He isn’t your typical low-post center; instead, he scores off pick-and-pops and three-point shots – exactly the kind of game that could have suited Young.

Okur signed in 2004, two seasons after Young could have started a career in Utah. Okur was drafted in 2001, so Young wouldn’t have been eligible for his big free agent deal until 2005, but if you play along with TB, the guess here is that Young would have gotten the big deal from Utah in ’05, Okur would have signed somewhere else and Utah would still be an annual contender in the Western Conference.

For comparison’s sake, Okur made $8.5 million in the 08-09 season, while Young currently makes $4.6 million. That being said, a healthy Young could pitch at least one full contract longer than he probably could as an NBA center, so the money might not be far off in the end.

This is not meant as a criticism of the decision, because Young is a proven starting pitcher in the majors. Whether he would have been a proven NBA starting center, well, that’s left for the dreamers.

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Daily reader Matt Ciciarelli, a former media relations contact for Princeton baseball, recently reminded TB of this former exchange between Chris Young and a reporter after a heartbreaking NCAA baseball loss in 2000:

Reporter: Chris, in the seventh or eighth inning, you looked to be laboring a little. Did the heat and humidity of Houston get to you a little?
CY: Not really. I grew up in Texas and have played ball in the heat all my life. July and August are normally much warmer than tonight.
Reporter: I know, but you grew up in Dallas.
CY (in his standard patient and polite fashion): So, it's still Texas.

Bienvenue, Quebecois

When TigerBlog turned the page on his desk calendar today, this notation appeared below Wednesday June 24:

St. Jean Baptiste (Quebec)

So, 365 miles north of Princeton in the province of Quebec, it's a national holiday. According to Wikipedia (where else would you go for basic info on some unfamiliar topic these days?), June 24 was declared Quebec's patriotic day in 1977, 69 years after Pope Pius X named St. John the Baptist the patron saint of French Canadians. There's your history lesson for the day.

The Wikipedia article goes on to say that the Canadian government then stepped up promotion of July 1, one week later, of Canada Day as the national holiday for the rest of Canada. That's nice too, but what does this have to do with Princeton?

Though the vast majority of Princeton athletes are from the United States, some come from the Caribbean, Mexico, Asia and Europe. Canada, however, is the most popular homeland for foreign Princeton student-athletes.

In all, 36 Canadians are currently on Princeton rosters between 11 teams. Not surprisingly, ice hockey claims 23 of those, with 13 men and 10 women counting O Canada as their true national anthem.

Only two of those Canadians, however, are from Quebec. And although the province has 527,029 square miles of land, more than 60 times the size of New Jersey (thanks again, Wikipedia), both Stephanie Denino '10 (ice hockey) and Emma Bedard '11 (lightweight rowing) are among the almost 2 million people who call the island of Montreal home, and both attended the same post-secondary school.

So, to Denino and Bedard, happy celebrating. The rest of the Canadians will have to wait a week for their big day, and of course, the fireworks and barbecues will come for most of the rest of Princeton's student-athletes a week from Saturday.

Mr. President, The Princeton Website Has Been Updated

Suppose, for a minute, that it's the early evening of Oct. 3. Princeton and Columbia have just finished their football game, and alums of both schools are checking out the Websites of both schools to find out as much about the outcome as they can.

Does that mean that in the White House, President Obama, Columbia Class of 1983, might be checking out goprincetontigers.com?

TigerBlog has often wondered who the most famous and influential people who come to goprincetontigers.com are. Goprincetontigers.com will be 10 years old this October, meaning three Presidents have had a chance to go to the page. All three - Yale Law School grad Bill Clinton, Yale undergrad and Harvard Business School grad George W. Bush and now Obama – have some Ivy League connection. All three are obviously sports fans, especially Bush and Obama.

So maybe they have checked out the site. At least once? You couldn't see some interest on Bush's part on a Princeton-Yale game? Obama is a huge basketball fan whose brother-in-law is one of the leading scorers in Princeton basketball history? Maybe he read TigerBlog's Pete Carril feature? Or maybe the Princeton-Brown basketball recaps when Craig Robinson was still the Bears coach and Obama was winding down after a long day on the campaign trail?

And how about the first lady, Michelle Obama, who herself is an alum? Certainly she's been on our site, no?

Forget just the Presidents. Who else out there has seen goprincetontigers.com? The Website approaches one million page views per month during the peak months during the athletic year and has more than 80,000 unique visitors during those times. TigerBlog is starting to catch on as well. Certainly someone famous out there has stumbled upon it.

There is a huge list of alums in government. Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court justice, is an alum, as is the current nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI, played lacrosse here. Maybe he posted something here on TigerBlog after Bill Tierney and David Metzbower left? Or maybe Buzzy Krongard, former CIA head and lacrosse Hall of Famer, did so?
Donald Rumsfeld played sprint football and wrestled; he has to be a reader. So, too, is the former Governor of Maryland Robert Ehrlich, a football alum.

There are a ton of Princeton alums in the entertainment world. How about Dean Cain? He's definitely a reader. TigerBlog remembers covering games when Cain was an All-America defensive back at Princeton (and running into him on campus after he'd become Superman on TV) and being impressed with how down-to-Earth he was (and probably still is). Cain was also a volleyball player here at Princeton and a huge Glenn Nelson fan; he definitely read Craig Sachson's piece on the longtime Tiger volleyball coach.

But what about his college girlfriend Brooke Shields? Does she read our site? David Duchovny has often said he played basketball and baseball at Princeton (records indicate he never lettered in either). He must be a loyal reader. How about Wayne Rogers, who played Trapper John in the series M*A*S*H? Trapper supposedly played football at Dartmouth; certainly the person who played him must be a goprincetontigers.com reader.

Ethan Coen is a Princeton grad. Maybe between takes of filming, among others, "No Country For Old Men," Coen checked out some Princeton stuff. Of course, he couldn't have done so during the filming of "Fargo," since that was the pre-goprincetontigers.com years. Maybe he called the Tiger Sportsline?

TB knows that John McPhee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, is a loyal reader. How about the other great Princeton alums in literature and media?

Meg Whitman surely has two tabs open at once, one on ebay and one on goprincetontigers.com. What about the other Princetonians in business?

Or maybe we have a loyal reader who's not even a Princeton alum. It could be anyone. Bernie Madoff? The Pope? Bill Simmons? James Earl Jones? Sylvester Stallone? Anyone.

Actually, it got TigerBlog to thinking. If TB could pick five famous people to read goprincetontigers.com and TigerBlog each day, which five would it be?

* LeBron James - would make a good commercial. LeBron wakes up, checks out goprincetontigers.com and then goes on with his day
* George H.W. Bush - anyone who celebrates his 85th birthday by jumping out of an airplane is okay with TigerBlog
* Robert DeNiro - yeah, we're talking to you
* Bruce Springsteen - let him appreciate TigerBlog for once, instead of the other way around
* Morgan Freeman - because how great would it be to have Morgan Freeman call you on the phone one day and tell you in that voice how much he likes your blog?

So come on, all you famous goprincetontigers.com readers out there. Let us know who you are.

TigerBlog knows you're out there.

There's A Place For Us

When TigerBlog stumbled upon "West Side Story" on TV the other night, his first thoughts were usually the same when he sees the movie:

1) you could never make a movie like that today; any Hollywood producer would laugh you out of his office. Despite that, "West Side Story" won 10 Oscars and is ranked as the No. 2 musical of all time by the American Film Institute.

2) TigerBlog can't help but think back to the time his high school put on its own production of "West Side Story," in which BrotherBlog played "Doc" because he couldn't sing or dance. Also, TB's best friend then (and now) Corey Zucker played one of the Jets. This was in 1979, TB recalls, and it wasn't until at least 1990 that Corey stopped walking around whistling the tune from the prologue and snapping his fingers to it.

A few days before seeing "West Side Story," TigerBlog saw another favorite movie from awhile ago, the original version of "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three." That movie features the crusty railroad supervisor's great line: "what do they expect for 35 cents, to live forever?" Of course, the New York City subway today costs $2.00.

Anyway, "West Side Story" was released in October 1961; "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" was released 13 years later in the same month.

While the all-male student body at Princeton was looking around Central Jersey for a date to take to see the musical love story that had just been released, the Princeton football team, coached by Dick Colman, was reveling in its 9-3 win over Penn four days earlier. Princeton that year went 5-4 in football, including 5-2 in the Ivy League.

The Ivy League awarded 19 championships in the 1961-62 academic year, and Princeton teams – perhaps distracted by having everyone around humming "Tonight, Tonight" – won only two of them, in lacrosse and tennis. In fact, the best athlete at Princeton that year wasn't a varsity athlete at all but instead a member of the freshman baseball and basketball teams from Crystal City, Missouri named Bill Bradley.

To watch "West Side Story" is to be reminded of the time in which it was released, a time when the country could still be enthralled by an old-fashioned movie musical. It was a time of peace, of suburban expansion, a time when probably fewer than 10% of Princeton students could have picked out North and South Vietnam on a map. Princeton itself was still years away from co-education, and the Civil Rights movement and then the women's movement were just starting to reach their most dramatic moments. John Kennedy (then the President, in a world was more "Camelot" than "West Side Story" at the time) Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were all alive.

Fast forward 13 years, and much had changed. A look at the difference between the two movies, both set in New York, shows that. "West Side Story" depicts a New York City that is completely fictionalized, with empty streets and caricatures of locations. "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" shows realistic street and subway scenes. In "WSS," the gang members wear jackets and ties to a rumble; the costumes and hair in "Pelham" show how the early 1970s were a time of uncertainty, of mistrust of institutions, a time of individual expression.

Even Princeton looked completely different by 1974. Princeton now had women students and its earliest women athletes, a group that TigerBlog often refers to as "pioneers." The Ivy League awarded championships in 24 sports in 1974-75, 22 of which were for men's sports and two of which were for women's sports.

Princeton teams won four championships in 1974-75, including a women's basketball championship that became the first of many women's Ivy titles in school history. The other three championship teams were tennis again, as well as a three-way tie for the men's squash title a co-championship in men's fencing.

It's amazing to sit here now and think about the fact that the Ivy League would award 22 men's championships and two women's championships. Today, there are 33 Ivy League sports, 17 for men and 16 for women. Beyond just that, women's teams in the early days of the 1970s had inferior uniforms, facilities, athletic training, sports information and any other kind of support compared to men's teams.

TigerBlog has interviewed many of those early women athletes, many of whom are proud of their role in the evolution of equality in athletics here and some of whom are angry about what they endured. The idea that Princeton's administration would even undertake that kind of policy today is unthinkable.

Another movie that was on TV last week was "Yankee Doodle Dandy," a 1942 release with James Cagney as George M. Cohan. It's another TigerBlog favorite, but don't get TB started on Princeton athletics back then, though it's a fascinating subject as teams began to reflect the realities of World War II.

No, for today, we'll stick with a movie from 1961 and a movie from 1974. Oh, and TigerBlog has not seen the remake of "Pelham," with Denzel Washington, John Travolta and Tony Soprano, that has just been released, but it can't possibly be as good as the original. Not without Walter Matthau.

From the Home Office in Wahoo, Nebraska

TigerBlog (the Colgate Class of 2001 one) remembers the day well. It was the Thanksgiving week of 1997 and TB was home from college for a few days during his freshman year. It was also a week that the Late Show with David Letterman was in reruns. So, 11:35 rolled around and TB tuned in.

The guests and the comedy shtick are not what TB remembers, but the part that stands out was watching Dave pick Henry, one of TB’s college friends, out of the audience and sign him up to take tractor-trailer driving lessons in downtown Manhattan during the taping of the show. A native New Yorker, Henry did not yet even have his driver’s license, but there he was trying to back the truck into the loading dock at the neighboring building.

Back then TB used to watch Letterman every night. Now, the times have changed. With Mrs. TB and little Miss TB around, TB’s schedule has changed and 11:35 now seems like 3:30 in the morning.

Last week, the story of Letterman and Sarah Palin’s feud took center stage on the news. TB hasn’t watched Letterman in a long time so in trying to catch up on what was going on, TB revisited a bunch of old Top 10 lists and came across April 14, 2009. The Top 10 Questions To Ask Yourself Before Becoming A Somali Pirate.

The whole Somali pirate situation has intrigued TB for some time now. Not enough to take a cruise along the coast of Eastern Africa, but enough to read the stories when they come out and follow what is going on there. So, upon seeing the heading,, TB figured to he’d check out the list.

Then came number three. (You can see the whole list here)

‘Will I get along with Ross Ohlendorf? (Sorry, that's a question to ask yourself before becoming a Pittsburgh Pirate)’

Now that is random. How did they choose Ohlendorf among all the Pirates? Did Ohlendorf know? How’d that happen?

TB went to the source and sent Ohlendorf an email. April 14 was a Tuesday, Pittsburgh’s off-day after playing their home opener a day earlier. Ohlendorf pitched the following day so it was an early night for him. It wasn’t until the next day in he clubhouse that teammate Nate McClouth filled him in on what had happened the night before.

“I was pretty surprised to hear about it,” recounts Ohlendorf. His Dad and some other friends saw it as well and eventually told him over the coming days. He has since seen it on Youtube as well.



As for how it came about, Ohlendorf wasn’t sure. He had just heard that the show’s writers are big Yankees fans and they needed a Pittsburgh Pirate for the sketch and naturally chose the former Yankee.

“Being on the Top 10 was really cool,” added Ohlendorf. It is really cool.

TB’s friend Henry still gets occasional royalty checks from re-airs of clips of his episode. Apparently the last check he got was for 17 cents. Not sure if Ohlendorf will get any royalties from his episode, but he certainly has an interesting story to tell.

A not-so-long summer

When Michael Maag of the track & field team crossed the finish line last Friday night in the 5,000 meters of the NCAA Championships in Arkansas, the 2008-09 Princeton athletic season crossed the finish line with him.

After more than 700 contests between 38 sports, summer started in Princeton Athletics at the end of Maag's run. It started a break of 12 weeks before the women's soccer team plays Hofstra at Roberts Stadium Sept. 4 at 6 p.m. in the first athletic contest of the 2009-10 school year. Men's soccer (at Lehigh) and women's volleyball (at Delaware) will also start that evening.

It seems like a long time, but it's just 78 days from today until the official hibernation of Princeton Athletics ends. Fall sport student-athletes will be arriving on campus only a little bit before their first contest, beginning another school year and slowly descending into the cooler times of fall and winter.

For some schools, however, a 12 week break would feel like an eternity. Consider the five schools still alive in the College World Series, which is the last athletic event on the NCAA calendar. Two of the five teams -- LSU, Arkansas, Texas, Arizona State and North Carolina -- will end their seasons on June 23 or 24, depending on whether the CWS final goes to two or three games.

So, right there is a late start to the summer. Instead of June 12, it's almost two weeks later. But the other end gets trimmed as well for these schools. Of the four whose fall schedules were available, all four have a regular-season women's soccer game on August 21, another two full weeks before Princeton's first athletic event on Sept. 4. That August 21 date doesn't count the Aug. 14 exhibition games against other Division I schools that all four of those women's soccer teams have. There's another week.

Whether it's two months or three, the summer isn't necessarily downtime for coaches, student-athletes or support staff at any school, Princeton or otherwise. Coaches (at least some, and in certain periods of time) travel to see recruits compete on summer teams. Some student-athletes play their sports in the summer, like the baseball players who go to the Cape Cod League or any of the other collegiate summer programs. Others intern in their fields of study in preparation for a life after college, and others enjoy the time away from classes and practice to travel and do the same thing that those who never put on a uniform do.

For the support staff, it's a time of preparation. Those of us here at TigerBlog HQ spend time tending to GoPrincetonTigers.com, turning things over from 2008-09 to 2009-10. There are rosters to be changed, bios to be written for freshmen, bios to be updated for returners, new and innovative plans for our Web site to be implemented behind the scenes. We also take time to refresh from long hockey and basketball seasons spending Friday and Saturday nights traveling from rink to rink and gym to gym throughout the northeast.

So, that's summer around here. It may be shrinking, spring seasons creeping into June and fall seasons into August, two months with "summer" written all over them, but it's something. And it'll be gone before we know it.

Shades of Blue

It's been a week of contemplation for some of Princeton's coaches, and family seems to be the big winner.

Last week, Princeton lost one of its most lauded mentors in any sport when Bill Tierney chose to be closer to three of his four children and take an opportunity in Denver. Just yesterday, the man who many thought would be the obvious choice to replace Tierney, longtime assistant David Metzbower, came to the same realization and opted not to assume the role of the man he'd assisted for almost 20 years at Princeton.

Now comes more unexpected news when Kathy Sell, after five years as Princeton's head women's tennis coach, felt the pull of family ties and decided to head to North Carolina. Her parents and sisters now live in the Tar Heel State.

Clearly, home has been a strong motivator for Sell. She was a Moorestown, N.J. resident before playing collegiately at Duke (making her favorite shade of blue a darker one than most of her future neighbors) and then spending time at the University of Oregon to pursue a graduate degree and begin her coaching career.

Soon, Sell came home and took the job at Princeton, just a short trip up I-295 from Moorestown. Now that home has moved, so too does Sell.

Sell's departure makes it four sports without a head coach as the summer begins in earnest, and all three sports that were eligible have won an Ivy League title in the last couple years. Glenn Nelson, the head coach of men's and women's volleyball, was the first to end his Princeton career just a year after helping the women's team to a 2007 Ivy title (there is no Ivy League men's volleyball), and Tierney's decision came just weeks after his team won an Ivy championship.

Sell's team wrapped up its first Ivy League title since 2000 on April 19, and less than two months later, Sell is gone.

Princeton's women's tennis team had a winning Ivy League record in all five of Sell's seasons and never saw its Ivy winning percentage decline with her as coach. The Tigers went 4-3 in the league in each of her first two seasons, 5-2 in each of the next two seasons and 6-1 in 2009, the team's best record since a 7-0 season in 2000. The team's overall record was above .500 every year, culminating in a program record 18 wins this past spring. Under Sell's leadership, Princeton returned to the NCAA tournament for the first time since that 2000 season and came closer to winning an NCAA team match than it had ever come, losing to Florida International 4-3 on the last singles bout of a sweltering afternoon in Miami last month.

Events like these give us at TigerBlog HQ a chance to reflect on how much has changed in just a handful of years. Since longtime women's tennis coach and Sell's predecessor Louise Gengler retired after the 2004 season, 15 other programs have seen coaching changes. Out of 38 sports, considering all the different personalities involved, that more than 60% of Princeton's coaches are still at their posts five years later says a lot for the draw of being a head coach here. It means that the people behind the title of "coach" have decided to set down roots here, that many have chosen to remain rather than pursue other opportunities.

For the almost 40% that have moved on, certainly there were a variety of reasons why. Family, as we have seen this week, is a big motivator. Perhaps a desire for a different geographical location or a general change of scenery are others.

Whatever the reason, everyone at TigerBlog HQ has the same wish for all those who follow their own path away from Princeton: Whatever your pursuits, good luck.

Goodbye, Metz

TigerBlog spent the morning finishing his story announcing that David Metzbower was going to be the next men's lacrosse head coach at Princeton. When Princeton AD Gary Walters asked TB to come down the hall and meet with him and Metz, it all seemed so simple.

Until the words came out that Metzbower was in fact turning down the Princeton job and instead leaving the University. Metzbower has spent the last 20 years as the top assistant at Princeton under Bill Tierney, the Hall-of-Fame coach who left last week to become the head coach at Denver.

TigerBlog has known Metzbower for every one of those 20 years. He has given his all to Princeton lacrosse, and he is hugely responsible for 19 winning seasons, 17 10-win seasons, 16 NCAA quarterfinals, 14 Ivy League championships, 10 NCAA Final Fours, eight NCAA finals and of course six NCAA championships.

Since the 1990 season, Princeton men's lacrosse is 230-65. Tierney's record in that time is considered 230-65; Metzbower's is recognized as 0-0.

Tierney would be the first to say that that disparity isn't fair or an accurate representation of what the two brought to the program. In fact, Tierney was the first to say it, back on Memorial Day 1998, when he dragged a reluctant Metzbower to the postgame press conference and gave him equal credit for the third straight national title. To say that Metzbower was taken aback by the attention would be short-changing the situation.

Through the years, any time anyone with the program - former players, current support staff, anyone - ever talked about him, the conversation nearly 100% of the time started with a smile, a chuckle, a quick shake of the head and then the utterance "Metz."

TigerBlog remembers the time about a decade ago when Metzbower said that he'd rather be "David" instead of "Dave" in the roster. TB thought it was funny then and even more funny as time went by, since neither TB nor anyone else in Princeton lacrosse has ever once called him either. He's not "Dave" or "David," or "Coach" or "Coach Metzbower" or anything else for that matter. He's "Metz." Sometimes, in less formal circles, he's "Metzy."

When it became apparent that Tierney was leaving, TigerBlog thought back to his own experiences as a way of defining him as a person rather than just as the head coach that people saw on the sidelines. In that same spirit, when it became obvious that Metzbower was the choice to replace Tierney, TB started to think of Metz in the same way.

TB thought back to the biggest disagreement he and Metzbower ever had. It came when games first started to be televised from Class of 1952 Stadium on a regular basis. Metz liked to set the team video camera up right next to the booth, but that's where the TV cameras wanted to go. Before one game, Metzbower put up yellow caution tape where he wanted his camera; TigerBlog took it down for the TV people. It led to the only mildly heated exchange we had in the 20 years we worked together.

Metzbower was the last person in the locker room after the 1998 and 2001 NCAA championships, as he had to go retrieve the video equipment. It was sort of how he viewed his role. Whatever needed to be done, he did. Whatever he could do to complement Tierney, he did.

Tierney isn't exactly a computer genius. Metzbower is. Before a game, Tierney would do the radio pregame show or talk to the TV people; Metzbower would warm up the goalies. They were the perfect combination, the strong personality of the front man and the ego-free assistant.

TB isn't sure which was more difficult to contemplate, Princeton without Tierney or Tierney without Metzbower. Now it's Princeton without either one.

Was it hard for Metzbower to sit back all those years and see all of the acclaim that came to Tierney? He would always say no, that didn't bother him, that didn't matter to him. In similar cases, the assistant has had to say those things, but at the same time it's obvious that the opportunity to be a head coach is a driving force.

TB always figured that Metzbower was to Tierney as Carmody was to Carril, to borrow from the SATs. It's now been proven not to be the case. Carmody was a loyal Carril assistant for more than 15 years who was mostly in the background while the head coach became a Hall-of-Famer, but Carmody was and remains a great lead singer himself.

That was never Metzbower's style. He loved coaching lacrosse, coaching the army of players past and present who today received an email from him apologizing if he's let them down, as if such a thing is possible after all the time he's been here.

Metzbower looked at the opportunity in front of him and contrasted it with what was important to him at this stage of his life. The easy decision would have been to move forward and be the head coach. The tough decision is to walk away, to say "hey, I've been away from my family too long, missed too much time with my wife and two kids." To say "this isn't what I want."

And that's what he said.

TigerBlog remembers the day Tierney told him that Metzbower's wife had had their first child. Stunned, TigerBlog said: "I didn't even know they were expecting." TigerBlog had seen Metzbower pretty much on a daily basis for the previous nine months, but it wasn't and isn't Metz' style to talk about himself. And now, after all the years away from them, he was simply read for a change.

And so a day that began with this release: "David Metzbower, whose unassuming style often masked his role in building and coaching a six-time NCAA champion and 14-time Ivy League champion, has been named the head coach of men’s lacrosse at Princeton University" ... quickly morphed into this one:

"David Metzbower has turned down an offer to become the head men’s lacrosse coach at Princeton and will be leaving the University."

Metz had good reasons for what he's doing, and in typical fashion, he didn't want to waste too many words talking about it. And especially about him.

So TigerBlog will do it for him. David Metzbower is one of the greatest figures in Princeton men's lacrosse history, and Princeton University has been lucky to have him here for the last 20 years.

He'll be missed.

What Does Yav Know Anyway?

When TigerBlog used to cover high school sports back in the day, he used to be fascinated to hear comments about how this reporter hated that school or that reporter loved that coach and that's why the coverage was always so slanted. In reality, it was rarely true or even in some cases completely the opposite.

When TB made the jump from the newspaper to come here to TigerBlog HQ, he made it a point to reach out to the sports editors at the local papers he did not work at to ensure them that there would be no bias towards the paper he'd just left.

TigerBlog took one class in journalism in his life, back when he was either a sophomore or junior in high school. His memory of the class is pretty fuzzy, though he remembers a nice teacher who meant well and who ultimately didn't teach much practical journalism knowledge, save for the main point that journalists are supposed to be objective.

As an aside, most of what TB learned about journalism, he learned while working in the early 1980s at the Trenton Times, learned it from people like Bob Tennent and Harry Chaykun and Bruce Johnson and Jim Gauger and Rick Freeman and especially Harvey Yavener. Those six had about 100 years of newspaper experience by that point; it's a shame that the newspaper business has evolved to the point where most of those guys ended up taking buyouts.

Getting back to the today's point, the subject of objectivity is a fascinating one, and it has so many direct offshoots that apply to today's media.

TigerBlog knows first hand that by simply covering teams on a regular basis, you develop some sort of like or dislike for the team itself, the coaches, the players, their fans. It's natural. The key is supposed to be not showing that like or dislike pubicly in any way. It's a lesson not enough in the modern journalism field remember or learned in the first place.

Still, that's always been a part of writing. Today's issues go so far beyond that issue.

With the explosion of writers (sports, politics, anything) who have made the jump from newspapers or magazines to being on radio or television, another line has been crossed. For starters, there is Yav's message from 25 years ago: "the news is the news; your covering the news is not news." In other words, don't make yourself part of the story. Today, the most famous writers are the story.

TigerBlog took some degree of pride in being an anonymous face at games when he covered them. In fact, TB is pretty sure that Steve Tosches never knew who he was for the entire first season he covered Princeton football. There was something proper about that.

Now, you can't have a story about UConn's basketball coach's being discharged from the hospital without the accompanying "ESPN's Andy Katz reports that Jim Calhoun has left the hospital." Today, some of the most famous people in sports are not athletes or coaches but are instead media members.

Of course, this takes us to the subject of conflicts of interest. It used to be that you wrote for the newspaper and it came out every day and that was that. Now, you're on TV and the radio and write for a few websites in addition to your regular job.

Look at Mark Eckel of the Trenton Times, and lest you think we're about to pick on Mark, keep in mind that he's TigerBlog Jr.'s godfather. In addition to working at the Trenton Times, Mark is also on the radio several nights a week in Philadelphia and a contributor to numerous other sites. Suppose for a minute that Mark learns exclusively that, hypothetically, the Eagles are going to release Brian Westbrook (and they can do this before any game against the Giants that they want). Suppose it's 11 a.m. The paper is already out and isn't coming out against until the next day. Maybe he's going to be on the radio. Maybe he writes for a few football sites. What's his responsility now? He can't possibly hold it for the paper, because the world will know by then one way or another.

Actually, Mark is only tangentially with the paper still, as the Times, like most every other paper, has undergone restructuring. His day job now is as athletic director at Trenton Catholic Academy (formerly McCorristin High or, before that, St. Anthony's High). TCA has made two personnel moves since Mark took over, hiring a baseball coach and a soccer co-coach. Both of these stories got major space in the Trenton Times. Will all high school coaching moves do the same?

How does all this impact Princeton? Our main function used to be to assist other news outlets; now we are a news outlet, with goprincetontigers.com and TigerBlog. This will only grow in the future as we develop more and more internal outlets for content.

What's our obligation now to the media? We want fans to come to our sites for information, for any number of reasons. Some is to control the message. Some is revenue driven, with an ability to show corporate sponsors the number of eyeballs that make it to our site.

TigerBlog remebers a picture taken during the 1994 Princeton-Dartmouth football game in Hanover. It showed David Patterson, the great Tiger linebacker, as he chased down a back through the snow flakes. It's definitely in the top 10 of Princeton pictures TB has ever seen (No. 1, of course, is the one of Mitch Henderson with his arms extended with a despondent Toby Bailey behind him after the 1996 Princeton-UCLA game).

TigerBlog wanted to use that picture on the cover of the 1995 football media guide, which he did. The first time TB saw the picture, though, his thought was that he didn't want another outlet to run the same picture before he had a chance to on his guide. Then he realized how silly that was, because here at TigerBlog HQ, we weren't competing with any other outlets.

How the times have changed.