The Athlete Of The Decade

TigerBlog mentioned John Hummer yesterday in connection with a New York Post story about the divorce of Bill and Melinda Gates. 

If you missed it, you can read it HERE. Again, it's worth it. 

If you want a little more on the Gates divorce, you can read THIS story, which features comments on the legal process of the case from a family law professor at the University of Washington. You know him as BrotherBlog. 

There was another story in which he was quoted in which he was referred to an "expert." It's always good to be known that way. 

Meanwhile, back at Princeton basketball, TB has a few follow ups from yesterday. 

First, he got this great comment from loyal reader Mike Knorr about the Princeton games at UCLA that TB mentioned:

In that Indiana game when Hummer scored 32, I believe Geoff Petrie had 31. Al Dufty was snowed in in Buffalo so the Tigers were down a starter. I remember listening to the game on the car radio. I was in the Navy and my parents were taking me to McGuire AFB to catch a flight to Scotland. About two weeks later I received a cassette in the mail. My father recorded the second half of the UCLA game. I must have listened to it at least ten times. Each time hoping for a different outcome. But alas, that damn Sidney Wicks made that shot every time.

Mike, by the way, is correct. Petrie did have 31 in that game.

In fact, as near as TB was able to figure, that was the only game in Princeton men's basketball history where two players both had at least 30 points.

Looking this up got TB to wondering how many times Bill Bradley played a game at Princeton in which he was not the team's leading scorer in the game. The answer? Three.

Who were the players who did lead the team in scoring in those three games? TB will give you one hint - one player did it twice. Also, he'll give you until the end today to guess.

In the meantime, TB also stumbled onto a story about Bradley from Town Topics of Jan. 1, 1970. In it was a story about the newspaper's choice for Princeton's Athlete of the Decade of the 1960s. It probably comes as little surprise:

In greater retrospect, Bradley is the dominant figure in the history of Princeton athletics, surpassing even the now legendary Dick Kazmaier. This is not merely a matter of opinion: well before the end of the decade which followed "Kazmaier's gridiron exploits, a number of the statistical records he had set had been erased by lesser players who lacked his composite ability. In contrast, not only has no one at the Princeton or Ivy level broken a single record that Bradley set. but the spread between his achievements and the occasional superlative performance by one of the latter-day players is so great as simply to emphasize the sheer magnificence of his achievements. Even in a sport in which scoring at the individual and team level has more than doubled in the past 30 years, it is entirely probable that the best of Bradley's records will last out the current century.

There are a few extraordinary things in that write-up. First, how far away must the end of the century seemed when it was written. 

Second, everything in there is so true. It could have been written today, actually. Certainly all of those records still stand.

The newspaper also included a runner-up of sorts for the top Princeton athlete of the 1960s. Not surprisingly, it was Cosmo Iacavazi, the All-American football player who was also in the Class of 1965. In fact, as great as Bradley was at Princeton, it speaks volumes about Iacavazzi's own career as a Tiger that they both shared the 1965 Roper Trophy.

Also, the trivia answer is:

Art Hyland did it twice: (27 for Hyland, 20 for Bradley vs. Colgate and 27 for Hyland, 26 for Bradley vs. Dartmouth (second game), both in 1962-63)

Don Rodenbach did it once (22 for Rodenbach, 18 for Bradley in the first Penn game of 1963-64).