Thursday, June 4, 2015

Go Cavs

TigerBlog wants to warn you. He really has nothing to say today.

It happens. Every now and then.

Hey, let's face it. Graduation was two days ago. There is only one athletic event remaining for the academic year, and that's the NCAA track and field championships, to which Princeton will send six athletes and which does not start until a week from today.

So, yeah, there's not a whole lot of Princeton Athletics to be talked about today. Oh wait. He just thought of something. He always does.

Before he heads down that path, he does want to tell you about this interesting married couple he met yesterday. What makes them interesting is the geography of their respective childhoods.

She grew up in Miami Beach. She left in 1982 because she couldn't stand the heat and humidity.

He grew up in Fort Fairfield. That is not Fort Lauderdale.

No, that would be Fort Fairfield, Maine. It is essentially the end of America, right before Canada.

It's a town of potato fields, and a golf course, the man said, on which you can hit your tee shot in the United States and putt on that hole in Canada.

And it gets cold. Very, very cold. TigerBlog looked it up. In the winter, a typical day starts below zero and, if you're lucky, gets to 15 or so above.

Has any married couple ever grown up in more diverse climates? 

And where did they meet? Pittsburgh, of course.

So that's those two.

What else?

TigerBlog watched a rerun of "Quincy" the other day.

He wrote about "Quincy" here a long, long time ago, back in 2009. For those who don't remember, he'll summarize what he wrote about the show.

"Quincy" starred Jack Klugman as a medical examiner in Los Angeles. Every episode was basically the same. All the evidence seemed to point one way, but Quincy eventually proved that everyone else was wrong and he was right.

The problem was that the same two people - his boss and the police lieutenant - fought him at every turn because the evidence seemed to support the original theory. Nobody ever gave him the benefit of the doubt, even though he was never wrong.

The episode TigerBlog watched the other day was from 1982. TB likes watching shows from back then and seeing how long the show goes before something comes up that would never, ever happen today.

You know. Like a busy signal. Or a pay phone. Or mailing a letter.

In the episode the other day, Quincy makes a call from a phone that is mounted on a wall. Okay, maybe there are some of those left. Or some phrase or way of speaking that long ago became obsolete.

He also catches the bad guy by telling him that the cigarette (people were smoking in a bar/restaurant) he just put out would be able to identify him, and the bad guy looked at him in disbelief.

Okay, married people from wildly different climates. Old TV show. What else?

The NBA finals begin tonight. TigerBlog is rooting for the Cavaliers.

Why? Two reasons.

First, he'd love to see LeBron James bring a championship to Cleveland. The last championship that city won was in 1964, when Jim Brown led the Browns to the NFL championship. It was two seasons later that the first Super Bowl was played.

The 1964 NFL championship game was played on Dec. 27, 1964. The Super Bowl this past year was played on Feb. 1, just to let you know how times have changed.

If LeBron can pull this one off, it would be an incredible performance. These Cavaliers, especially without the out-for-the-playoffs Kevin Love and the hobbled Kyrie Irving, are not exactly a championship team, except for the presence of LeBron James. It would be awesome to see one player be so great as to carry this team all the way, especially for a city that was cheated out of four years of James' prime - two of which ended in NBA titles and all four of which ended in the finals - when he played for Miami.

The other reason TB is rooting for Cleveland is that its coach is Dave Blatt, a 1981 Princeton grad who played for Pete Carril here.

See? A Princeton connection. Perfect.

Blatt has taken a lot of, you Cleveland fans will pardon the expression, heat for sort of just being there while James actually calls all the shots. TigerBlog doesn't believe that for a second.

He didn't believe it when it was Eric Spoelstra in Miami, and he doesn't it with Blatt. It's not just standing up for the Princeton guy.

It's not easy doing what Blatt is doing. He's running his team with James' huge shadow on everything. He can't do anything without being criticized for either 1) not using James enough or 2) just letting James do everything and therefore being essentially irrelevant.

In reality, Blatt is the one who is sets the tone for the team and establishes the team culture. And doing this with a mega-superstar isn't easy, especially for a coach in his first year in the NBA and, for that matter, in America.

So yeah, Blatt has done a great job.

TigerBlog is rooting for him. He's a Princeton Tiger after all.

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