Weekend Schedule

While it was great to hear Tone Loc (real name - Anthony Terrell Smith) sing "Wild Thing" on the 80s channel yesterday morning, the best part of Sirius for TigerBlog by far is E Street Radio.

Second place, by the way, goes to the Broadway channel.

The best part of E Street Radio is easily that twice a day, the station plays a full Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concert. Springsteen's concerts far surpass any others that TB has ever seen, and the energy still pours through even in the recorded versions.

What's fascinating is how these concerts have changed through the years. The station will play concerts from any decade, and it seems like The Boss got stronger through the years, not weaker. TB has no idea how he still has a voice left after all of these shows.

Also, there are some songs that he's played live before they were released on albums. In fact, TB heard a concert earlier this week from 1978 during which Springsteen played "Independence Day," despite the fact that it wasn't on an album until two years later, when "The River" was released.

The concert from 1978 featured a story that Springsteen told that TB had never before heard. Springsteen, who is still an epic storyteller during his shows, was finishing up "Incident on 57th Street" when he started telling a story about how he traveled into the Arizona desert and came upon a house with a sign that said it was a place of "peace, love, justice and no mercy," and that the owner pointed him down a dirt road with a sign that said "Thunder Road."

Then he played what is without question one of TB's two favorite songs ever (the other is "Born To Run").

Before TB gets into the weekend in Princeton athletics, he also wants to say something about the Temple-Maine field hockey controversy. By now you've heard about this: the teams were playing on a neutral site at Kent State and were scoreless after one overtime when they were told the game had to be stopped because of fireworks for the football game on the next field.

This was at 10:30 or so in the morning, mind you.

The idea that a Division I field hockey game had to be stopped for this reason is appalling of course, and the optics for Kent State have been terrible. TigerBlog has one question though - who is actually to blame for the fiasco.

If Temple and Maine agreed to play a game at Kent State and nobody from Kent State told them they had to be off the field at a certain time, regardless of the game situation, then Kent State deserves more blame than it's received. That's a terrible way to treat two teams of college athletes who come to your school.

On the other hand, if Kent State did tell them in advance and the teams agreed to play the game at that time anyway, knowing full well that there was a time that the game had to end and therefore that it was possible for the exact situation that unfolded to happen, well, then it's not Kent State's fault.

Simple, right? TB would be curious as to which of those two things happened.

Okay, meanwhile back at Princeton, the weekend will include a pair of home matchups for the field hockey team against nationally ranked opponents, beginning today at 4 against No. 20 Albany. Then it'll be No. 17 Penn State here Sunday.

Princeton is ranked No. 5 in this week's poll, which is probably where you should be if you lose to No. 1 by a goal and beat No. 10 by a goal, right?

The other two Princeton teams home this weekend are the women's tennis team, which hosts an invitational all weekend, and the men's water polo team, which is doing the same.

The men's water polo team has four games this weekend, and three of those are against Top 15 teams, beginning tonight against No. 13 UC San Diego at 6:15. Up next would be unranked Johns Hopkins tomorrow (10:30), No. 14 Bucknell tomorrow (6) and then No. 15 George Washington Sunday (3:30).

Princeton, by the way, is ranked 12th. It figures to be a very competitive weekend at DeNunzio.

If you're interested in the entire schedule for the weekend, you can find it HERE.

And, of course, come tomorrow at 5, there will be exactly one week until the opening kickoff for the football team, who takes on Butler next Saturday on Powers Field at Princeton Stadium.