Congrats, Mel

Today is TigerBlog's cousin Paul's birthday.

His father was MotherBlog's brother. Paul is five years older than TB, the oldest of the four first cousins on his mother's side. TB is the youngest of the group.

When he was growing up, TB spent most holidays with Paul's side of the family, with his sister Janet and his parents, Larry and Regina. TB's aunt passed away more than 33 years ago. His uncle passed away about 15 years ago.

MotherBlog was a bit of an amateur painter. In fact, TB can vividly remember her oil paints and easel in the room downstairs in their house growing up. He can remember only a few different paintings she made, including one with a wine-and-cheese theme set against a pathway with a footbridge.

He's wondered from time to time whatever happened to the works she made. Did they still exist somewhere?

As it turns out, MB had left one of them to her brother Larry. When he died, the painting went to Paul, and it was on the wall in his basement ever since. It's a painting of a violin:

That's not too bad, right? It makes him wonder a few things, including how she learned to do it in the first place, since she wasn't an artist at all but instead a nurse.

As for Paul, he's someone TB has always looked up to and someone he shares a lot of great memories with throughout his lifetime. Happy birthday to him.

While TB is on the subject of good wishes, he'd also like to pass along his best to Mel Greenberg, the longtime Philadelphia sportswriter. This is from a Philadelphia Inquirer story:

Former Inquirer sports writer Mel Greenberg is this year’s winner of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame’s Curt Gowdy Award for print media, basketball’s highest national honor for the profession. Greenberg, 74, has covered women’s hoops for nearly 50 years, many of them for The Inquirer. He is the first Gowdy Award winner in its 31-year history to be honored specifically for women’s basketball coverage.

The last sentence is the most important one.

TigerBlog has known Greenberg for a long time, back to his own newspaper days. By then, Greenberg was already legendary for his coverage of women's basketball and his national poll, long before anyone else on a national level paid much attention to the sport. 

TB first met him when TB was also a rarity, a male sportswriter who was covering women's basketball. In fact, there were many nights where they were the only two people courtside for a women's game.

It's easy to see the amount of women's basketball coverage that there is today and think that it has a long way to go to catch up to the men's coverage, and that is true. At the same time, it's grown exponentially in the last few decades, and the person who is responsible for that more than anyone else has been Mel Greenberg.

Since Mel retired from the Inquirer, he has remained active in the women's basketball scene. In fact, he runs a blog, reachable at womhoops.blogspot.com.

Greenberg is a huge fan of the Princeton women's basketball program. Of course, who wouldn't be, what with the success the team has had in the last decade-plus under Courtney Banghart and now Carla Berube. Mel is a frequent visitor to Jadwin Gym and has been for years, and not just when the Tigers are playing Penn, a local team for him.

In some ways, he reminds TB of his old mentor in the newspaper business, Harvey Yavener. He's that kind of sportswriter, one who is interested in the people who are playing the game more than he's interested in making himself part of the story. As Yav would always say: "the news is the news. Your covering the news is not news."

That, of course, is a bit contradictory to something like, say, this blog, but then Yav never would have predicted this is what the next iteration of his profession was to be. It's a whole new world, sportswriting, but it's nice to see the Mel Greenberg's of the world are still relevant.

And, as his latest award suggests, still being honored. It is a much deserved honor for Mel Greenberg, who pretty much single-handedly made women's basketball coverage what it is today. 

Hopefully, Mel will be back at Jadwin this coming year. In the meantime, TB wishes him his heartiest congratulations.