If it was the third Thursday of the month, as yesterday was, than it must have meant the debut of another excerpt from TigerBlog's upcoming book on the first 50 years of Princeton women's athletics.
As projects go, this one is TB's all-time favorite.
He continues to make considerable progress on the book. The big issue now is how to package everything he's written.
The content varies wildly from subject to subject. Some of very long chapters that focus on general topics, while others are smaller pieces that focus on one individual.
Of course, he'll figure it out. And he's confident that the final product will accomplish his original goal - to tell the stories of how Princeton University went from not having women students to creating the athletic program from the earliest women to building a national model for women's athletics.
To date, he's been happy to share the excerpts.
This month's subject is one of the stand-alone pieces, this one on the great Wendy Zaharko.
You can read it HERE.
One of the best parts of this project has been the opportunity to speak with some of the great women athletes at Princeton from the 1970s, women TB had heard of and knew a great deal about but had never actually spoken to before.
There have been so many of them whose stories he's gotten to hear and write about. Cathy Corcione (Olympic swimmer). Carol Brown (though he'd met her before, he'd never written about her remarkable travels from growing up in a state that literally had a law against high school sports for girls to competing in two sports at Princeton and then winning an Olympic medal). Podie Lynch (the only letterwinner in the first class for women, 1971). Janet Youngholm (another two-sport pioneer). Aime Knox (a great three-sport athlete).
Wendy Zaharko, though, was on a bit of a different level.
It's probably because TB has spent so much time on the squash courts of Jadwin Gym (at least until two knee surgeries and a shoulder that is worse than either of those knees), but the name "Zaharko" has always carried with it a special place in Princeton history.
When TB first spoke to her, what he mostly knew was that she was a three-time national squash champion, an unbeatable force in her playing days. He knew she was a doctor. He knew she lived in Princeton for a long time.
Mostly he knew that anyone who ever talked about greatness in college squash was awed by her name. Zaharko. In her entire college career, she never lost so much as a single game, let alone an entire match.
So that was the background for his conversation with her.
TB thought she'd grown up in Princeton, but it turned out she actually was from Wilmington, Del. TB jokingly asked her if she knew Joe Biden, as if everyone who lived near Wilmington, Del., would know him.
As it turned out, she knew him pretty well. He used to play basketball across the street from her house, and she was in charge of chasing down the ball when it rolled away. She was seven at the time.
She told the story of her early interactions with the then-teenager boy who would grow up to be President of the United States. She also talked about how she had a chance encounter years later on a ski slope where she saw him and told the Secret Service agents around him to mention she was there, only to hear "Wendy!!!!!!' from him before they could let him know.
There is so much more to Wendy Zaharko's story beyond that.
She talked about how she had to come back from major back surgery that had her in a full body cast while at Princeton. She talked about how a conflict with her legendary coach Betty Constable forced her to miss the national championships her sophomore year, or else she would have been a four-time winner. She talked about how the two of them reconciled. She talked about her medical school experiences and her medical career. She talked about the impact Princeton had on all of it.
The chapter on Zaharko is one of TB's favorites. He's just not 100 percent sure yet how to fit into the context of a book.
There will definitely be section on the early pioneers.
Wendy Zaharko was one of them.
Her name remains high on the list of the all-time greatest to compete for Princeton.
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