Guest TigerBlog: A Memo to “the Grandkids” – The Science of Princeton Athletics

It's a busy weekend for Princeton Athletics. Then again, they all are. 

Princeton has home events in field hockey, men's water polo, men's soccer and women's soccer between now and Sunday night. You can see the whole schedule for the weekend HERE.

Ordinarily, TigerBlog would offer you some context to those games. Today, though, the floor belongs to Tad La Fountain of the Class of 1972. 

TigerBlog has a standing offer to pretty much anyone who has something they'd like to say about Princeton Athletics. Very few people have actually taken him up on this, but as TB just said, the invitation stands. 

Tad has written before, and his pieces are always well-done, thoughtful and reflecting a genuine love of the University. Today's is no different:

It was not unexpected.  But it was still a bit of a shock.  An e-mail to my class from our president, Skip Rankin, explaining that as the “grandparent” class of the incoming Class of 2022, our Class of 1972 is invited to take part in the upcoming Pre-rade.  Fifty years?  But Skip was my lab partner in Chemistry 101-102 our freshman year, and I’m pretty sure that was just a few years ago.  If that were the case, and we were 18-year-old freshmen, that would make us…

Hold it right there.  It might be useful to recall the story about the party in Princeton years ago when a lady from town approached Dr. Einstein and confessed that she simply couldn’t understand how something such as time could be relative.  “Easy,” the good doctor is said to have replied.  “If you sit on a hot stove for a minute, it seems like an hour.  But sit next to a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute.”  There you have it - space-time.  So maybe the past five decades have gone by so fast because we’ve been having so much fun.  Yes, let’s stick with that.

If you’re an incoming Princeton athlete, what can you expect from your “grandparents?”  We did have some accomplished athletes in our class: Hank Bjorklund put on a show as running back and then took his talents to the New York Jets; Emil Deliere was a first-string All-Ivy guard on the football team (winning the Dr. Harry R. McPhee Award for fortitude and determination his senior year) who also finished runner-up in the NCAA 190-lb. weight class wrestling championships.  We have a couple of classmates who wear the white letter sweater of a captain of an undefeated Ivy championship team.  One of us spent 25 years as the editor-in-chief of Golf Magazine.  Sadly, time has robbed us of our football, basketball and baseball captains.

Go back to what would have been our “grandfather” class…if the 50-year previous class tradition had been in place.  The multi-year president of the Class of 1922 was the All-America quarterback of the football team, Donold B. Lourie, who later became CEO of Quaker Oats.  Upon his death, a colleague noted that Lourie knew the first names of over 3,000 Quaker Oats employees – a testament to his interest in people.  His closest friend, classmate George H. Love, later became CEO of Consolidated Coal and Chrysler; like Lourie, Love served as a University trustee.  They donated a dormitory that was part of the New New Quad (and that’s not a misprint) that served as the former home of Butler College in its initial configuration; Love later donated a soccer field that was also called “Lourie-Love” and which was later replaced by its current up-to-date and renamed version (Roberts Field).  But this is not a bad lineage to bring to the party – the Class of 2022 comes from good stock.

As athletes, you will partake in a program that’s focused on “Education Through Athletics” so that you may “Achieve, Serve, Lead.”  Fortunately, you’ll have some help in this.  Primary is one of the most remarkable collection of people assembled – the Princeton coaches.  Like the Princeton faculty, the coaching staff is awesome in both breadth and depth.  There is universal buy-in to the Athletic Department’s mission, and the relationship between coaches and players generally extends long after the mortarboard tassels shift sides. 

But there’s another dynamic at work as well.  Dr. McPhee’s son John McPhee ‘53, probably the preeminent non-fiction writer of the past 50 years, wrote a book several years ago regarding physicist Ted Taylor entitled “The Curve of Binding Energy.”  When you consider the four fundamental interactions – the Strong, the Weak, Electro-Magnetism and Gravity, there’s some applicability to your Princeton experience, and McPhee’s book touches on the first two.  The Weak Interaction is key to radioactive decay and fission – splitting nuclei apart.  But the Strong Interaction is what holds nuclei together, even when the particles involved have similar charges and would otherwise tend to fly apart.  Splitting large atoms, such as uranium and plutonium, unleashes enormous amounts of energy.  But fusing light atoms, such as hydrogen, leads to even greater amounts of energy being made available. 

Your coaches will be taking you and your fellow players and fusing you into a team.  By focusing on your mission of garnering Education Through Athletics and adhering to the prescription of Achieve/Serve/Lead, you can ensure that you will avoid the pitfalls of excessive self-interest that lead to decay and fission.

There’s an electro-magnetic aspect to consider.  In 1574, the Duke of Alva laid siege to a small town in the Netherlands that stood in the way of the Spanish attempt to overrun the continent before taking on England.  For months the town withstood the siege, even as help was kept at bay.  Finally, with the town on the verge of collapse, rescue was delivered by the forces of a German prince – William, the Silent.  The Spanish were repelled and lacking a land base, they had to try to conquer England by sea in 1588.  That effort didn’t go too well.

The rescued town was Leiden.  It became the Crossroads of the Enlightenment; Rene Descartes lived there four different times.  The Dutch Republic became a beacon of tolerance.  A group of dissident Anglicans attempting to purify the Church of England moved there early in the 17th century until they became concerned that their children were growing up Dutch rather than English, so they secured a colony in America in 1620. 

One hundred years after the Armada foundered, a Protestant coup installed Prince William’s great-grandson and his wife Mary on the English throne.  Like his great-grandfather, William was known by the name associated with a small principality in France that William the Silent had inherited at the age of 11; the principality had the same name as its distinctive fruit – orange.

Every Princeton uniform has some orange on it.  When you compete for Princeton, take strength from that radiation of color at 622 nanometers – it is a literal reflection of the strength shown by the rescued residents of Leiden that paved the way for the Enlightenment, the Dutch settlement of New York (which is why both the New York Knickerbockers and the New York Metropolitans have orange in their uniform colors), and the English settlement of New Jersey by many groups, including transplanted Puritans/Congregationalists from New England who became Presbyterians and created the College of New Jersey in 1746.  When the main campus building was built ten years later, it was named in honor of the late King William of Orange of the House of Nassau.

Which gets us to gravity.  You will soon be exposed to Princeton music, including the alma mater “Old Nassau” which has gravitas without being weighty.  Equally loved is “Going Back to Old Nassau” – “When the sons of Princeton gather anywhere, there’s a place they think of, longing to be there…”  If you’re fortunate, the gravitational pull of Princeton will find you for all of your days.

Rest assured that your “grandparents” are all pulling for you.  Welcome to the team!