The Rocking Chair

TigerBlog has been at this for awhile.

It was back in September of 1983 when he first wrote a story for a newspaper. He had no experience and no idea what he was doing. He had a friend who worked as a sportswriter who told him that the paper was looking for people to cover high school football and would TB be interested.

Sure, TB said.

He also pointed out that he had never written a story before and would that be a problem? Nope, he was assured.

And so he was off to cover the game between Pennington and Academy of the New Church. It wasn't much of a game. Pennington won easily, breaking the school record for the longest winning streak in school history.

That was TB's start. Or detour, more accurately.

To that point, he thought he might end up in law school after graduating from college. Instead, as his friend said, "when you get the ink in your blood, you never get it out."

From that day on, TB was hooked on writing about sports. He'd spend 11 years in the newspaper business, eventually moving up from covering high schools to colleges.

He'd have great experiences and meet great people at the other schools he covered (Rider, Trenton State College, Mercer County College, Rutgers), but his favorite was always Princeton. There was just something about covering Princeton Athletics that worked for him, which is odd, considering, you know, he went to Penn.

In 1994 Mark Panus, who was at the time the Manager of Sports Media Relations (essentially the SID) told TB, with whom he'd worked for five years, that he was leaving. TB immediately jumped at the chance to take his place, applying and getting the job.

He remembers being asked on his interview where he thought he'd be in five years or 10 years. His answer was clear: working at Princeton still.

And that's how it turned out.

Five years. Ten years. Fifteen years. Twenty years. Twenty five years.

He's almost through 26 years of being employed by Princeton.

By virtue of having passed the quarter-century mark, TB was entitled to choose from a selection of gifts. This is something that you get to do when you are there for 25, 30, 35, 40, etc.

As TB looked through the available items, there was really only one he wanted.

The rocking chair.

Actually, TB has been wanting it for a few years, ever since he passed the 20 mark. And he had to wait until he got to 25. Well, he had to wait til almost 26, since he started shortly after the cutoff from last year.

He chose the chair in February. Then he sort of forgot about it - until it showed up in a very big box the other day.

The first thing he did was take the chair out of the box. The second thing he did was attach the rockers on backwards. The third thing he did was take them off and put them on the correct way.

That little misstep notwithstanding, the chair means a great deal to him. It's a symbol of all of the games, all of the experiences, all of the travel, all of the people he's met - and especially all of the athletes and coaches he's worked with during all of those years.

He can't begin to calculate how many miles he's driven to attend Princeton games - or flown for that matter. He can't even guess how many games he's gone to in those years.

He does know that he's seen Princeton play in eight different time zones. He knows that he's spent a lot of nights on the roads back from so many places, especially Ivy League locations. He knows that some of the very best people he's ever met he's done so solely because he worked for Princeton Athletics.

When he started there, he had no children. Now one is a college graduate and the other is a Princeton student.

It's been an amazing time. It's not what you think of when you think of a normal job and presumably the drudgery that can come with it.

It's been the opposite, a quarter-century of championships, big wins, some excruciating losses and a lot of laughs along the way.

And now he has the chair that represents all of that. He's prouder of that chair than he thought he'd be.

One day, according to the plan, the rocking chair will sit out on the deck of TB's retirement beach house, though not for many more years. When he sits in it, he'll remember where it came from - and the surreal spring when the games stopped.

And he'll cherish it always.