Guest TigerBlog - The Floor Again Belongs To Tad La Fountain

As TigerBlog has said for years, the floor is always open if you have something you want to say. 

Once again, Tad La Fountain of the Class of 1972 has taken TB up on his offer. Tad is a great storyteller, and his pieces are always funny, well-written and informative. This one might be his best: 

Just over 50 years ago, Appalachian Power dammed the Roanoke River at Smith Mountain in Southside Virginia (a region defined as north of the North Carolina border, east of the Appalachian Mountains, south of the James River and west of the fall line) for a hydroelectric project. 

In so doing, they created Smith Mountain Lake – a 32-square-mile body of water with 550 miles of meandering lakeshore (think Maine coastline) with the Blue Ridge and the Peaks of Otter serving as visual punctuation marks. It is scenic, wonderful and…for the most part…virtually unknown north of the Beltway. 

We moved here from Pennington and Princeton seven years ago, when my wife left Stuart Country Day in Princeton and took a teaching job at Chatham Hall – a girls’ boarding school about 35 minutes from the southeast end of the Lake near the Dam. Until she retired this past spring, we split time between her campus home and a house we bought off the 12th green of The Water’s Edge – a 1.1 square-mile peninsula on the Lake with a country club and other amenities. 

It’s not a bad place to hang out. Unless you are – like the writer – a washed-up old tiller wiggler from Barnegat Bay. For the most part, there’s no wind. So you capitulate to the forces at work and end up playing golf like a really good sailor (unfortunately, there’s every reason to believe that I now sail like a really good golfer; these things happen). Occasionally, I string some good shots together, but my 16 handicap masks a terrible reality: standing over the shot, I never know who’s going to show up – Mr. 6 or Mr. 26. Invariably, the post-shot reaction tends to be the same: “Wow, I can’t believe I did that!” 

Of course, inflection and intonation (and often an imprecation) are brought to bear to allow the reaction to match the outcome. One round last spring had a decent tee shot on the opening par 5 – a dogleg right requiring a second shot to a plateau that opens up the approach to the green – that was followed by something that resembled a shankasaurus into the woods. Searching for the ball took a while, and as is often the case, resulted in finding another ball before discovering my own errant shot. 

 I was stunned – the found ball had the logo of the Concord Country Club. I’ve never played Concord, but I’m familiar with it; it’s just north of Route 1 on the Wilmington Pike (Rt. 202) south of West Chester in Concordville and just a hop, skip and a long iron from Westtown School, my alma mater. But my familiarity with CCC was enhanced 50 years ago this spring when a Cannon Clubmate had his reception there when he was married shortly after graduation. Jack Hittson ’71 was a first-term All-America pitcher who went to Wharton instead of professional ball (the other two first-team pitchers [Burt Hooten and Steve Busby] both pitched no-hitters in their careers; Jack became a CEO). 

There were other Cannon members who were stalwarts on that team, including the late Bob Schiffner ’71 (who I believe still holds the highest draft position for a Princeton player, played in the Yankees organization, retired as the CFO of Campbell Soup, and had a son who starred for the Penn basketball team) and team captain Ray Huard ’71 (who was drafted two times). Jack Hittson’s catcher on that team wasn’t All-America or even first-team All-Ivy. In fact, Laird Hayes ’71 made his mark in football – as an official. Mike Pereira, the former VP of Officiating for the NFL and long-time TV rules commentator, cited Hayes for making the best call in the history of professional football – the Manningham Super Bowl reception for the New York Giants. A bang-bang call with enormous implications, and it was made dead on. 

The reason Laird Hayes (or Bill Binder ’72, who caught all the team’s other games that Hayes didn’t catch) didn’t make first-team All-Ivy catcher was that Harvard had a catcher who was first-team All-America and who had been drafted by the pros six times. Pete Varney played professionally, spent some time in the majors, and after coaching at the high school level for a few years, ended up as the baseball coach at Brandeis for 34 years, which is interesting and not a little bit laudable. 

But what Pete Varney will be forever known for is the reception he made as Harvard’s tight end on a throw from Frank Champi for a two-point conversion as time expired allowing Harvard to make up a 16-point deficit in the last 42 seconds of the 1968 Harvard-Yale game. This led to the Crimson’s famous headline “Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29.”