The Ill-Fated Postseason Guide

TigerBlog finished yesterday's entry by mentioning that he'd be talking today about how Nate Ewell, then a student worker, earned TB's lifetime appreciation as part of the 25th anniversary of the men's basketball team's extraordinary postseason run in 1996.

Actually, Nate had already earned TB's lifetime appreciation long before that Monday, which happened to be exactly 25 years ago today.

It was the day after the NCAA selection show for men's basketball, and now Princeton knew it was heading to Indianapolis to take on UCLA. For TigerBlog, this meant finishing up the postseason guide, which had to be to the printer that Monday. 

And it meant coordinating media credentials. And it meant making travel arrangements.

It was a very, very, very long day.

In the back of TB's mind the whole time was that he needed to also take care of the usual Monday reporting for the men's lacrosse team, including Ivy League Player of the Week nominations and releases about new rankings and such.

He kept meaning to find time to take care of it, but there just wasn't any. 

Finally, at about 3 or so in the afternoon, Nate walked into his office to say that he, Nate, had taken it upon himself to do all of the lacrosse stuff. 

In fact, TB can still see Nate as he walked to TB's desk. Actually, to that point TB isn't even sure he knew Nate was there.

Then Nate casually said "took care of lacrosse. Ivy and NCAA reporting. Did the game notes for next week. Put the on Fax-on-Demand."

He said it so, so casually. 

By the way, Fax-on-Demand was a cutting age thing in 1996. You'd have a document, and you'd fax it to a number. Then anyone who wanted to get that document from you could access it through his or her own fax machine.

It was THE way to stay current with things like stats, box scores and game notes. Then the internet came along and, well, that was that for Fax-on-Demand. But there was a time there when making sure FOD was updated was one of the highest sports information priorities.

Anyway, that was 25 years ago today. 

TigerBlog was already a huge fan of Nate Ewell before then, of course. Still, that day planted Nate in the Hall of Fame.

The postseason guide was a pretty thorough publication. It had all of the information you'd expect, and in the 1990s, having a long section at the end of newspaper and magazine clips was essential. The hard part was that you couldn't do any of the pieces that involved the opponent because you didn't know who the opponent was until the selection show.

Anyway, TB got his guide done and sent it off to the printers. When he did, he felt like he was finally able to focus on traveling out to Indiana.

Because of the size of the travel party, TB went separately from the team, traveling instead with some others from Princeton's OAC and a handful of media members. Upon arriving at the RCA Dome, the first thing TB did was to check on his postseason guides, which should have been in the media room by then. The regular media guides were there. The postseason ones were nowhere to be found.

Everyone else's were. Just not Princeton's.

What the heck? 

There was no sign of them at all, anywhere. They were to have been printed and then sent out overnight. Only there was one slight problem.

When TB went to track them on UPS, he found out that they had been sent three-day ground, rather than next-day air. This was problematic, since three days later they would have been completely irrelevant.  

Now, if this happened today, it would be inconvenient and conceivably expensive, but there would have been easy solutions. The electronic riles would have been on TB's laptop. The PDF would have been on the webpage.

Back in 1996, the only significance of "PDF" was that the guides needed to be in the media room "Pretty Darn Fast." 

The only way to do this was to have the files, which existed on bulky cartridges, overnighted from the printer to Indianapolis (paying extra for early delivery, of course), and the postseason guides were then reprinted in a local Kinkos. 

By Wednesday's press conferences, they were in the media room.