Tuesday, February 8, 2022

Sign Here

If you go back 100 years to the 1921-22 men's basketball season, you'll see that Arthur Loeb led the team in scoring with 13.0 points per game.

At the time, that was the school single-season record, by the way. It stood for 21 years, until the great Bud Palmer averaged 13.2 points per game in 1942-43 on a team that included, among others, future coach Butch van Breda Kolff and future Civil Rights legend John Doar.

The second-leading scorer on the 1921-22 team was John Klaess, who averaged 5.2. Next up was Stockton Gaines, the third-leading scorer on the team at 3.2 points per game.

Oh how things have changed.

Right now, Princeton's third-leading scorer on the men's basketball team is Tosan Evbuowman, who averages 15.2. Just ahead of him is Jaelin Llewellyn, who averages 15.3, and then in the top spot at 15.7 is Ethan Wright.

Would you like to know the last time Princeton finished a season with three players who averaged at least 15 points per game? That would be never. 

Wright vaulted into the top spot on the team, and the fifth spot in the Ivy League, with a 53 point weekend that saw him score 26 at Cornell Friday and then 27 more at Columbia Saturday. His performance earned him Ivy League Player of the Week for the third time this season.

All three of Princeton's top scorers are in the top eight in the league. Wright is also averaging 7.3 rebounds per game, which is fourth in the league. He's having an extraordinary season by any account.

As TigerBlog has mentioned several times, Wright's mother is Ellen DeVoe, a member of the Class of 1986 and one of the best players Princeton women's basketball has ever had. DeVoe is mentioned in TB's book on the first 50 years of women's athletics at Princeton, though she and her extraordinary family connection, including her father John DeVoe, a basketball player in the Class of 1956, were not featured prominently.

The book starts out with an apology to DeVoe and all of the other women who have competed at Princeton for not being able to include all of their stories in the book. As it is, there are nearly 100 women featured, out of the more than 4,200 who lettered at Princeton in the first 50 years of women's athletics. He could have written 10 books and not run out of stories.

This past Saturday, before the women's basketball game at Jadwin with the Tiger and Columbia, TigerBlog found himself in the lobby, doing a book signing. To be honest, he had no idea what to expect from the experience, which is something he'd never done before.

As it turned out, it was a lot of fun. The people who came by were great. They were really appreciative of the book and asked a lot of questions about what went into it, how it came to be, how long it took.

TB got to meet some people he'd emailed with before but never seen in person, including a very loyal TigerBlog reader and huge Tiger fan named Mike Knorr. TB also got to meet Priscilla Bostock, who has been reaching out with suggestions of which women's basketball player to include on the podcast. There were also parents of some of the women's basketball players and even the parents of head coach Carla Berube.

What was really challenging for TB was to know what to write in each book. He's seen John McPhee autograph books in the past, and the challenge is to personalize the inscription without going on too long. 

TB also didn't want to write the same thing in each book, so he was trying to mix it up a bit (in the case of Berube's parents, he wrote something like "thank you for your contribution to Princeton Athletics). Some of the people asked him to autograph the book for someone else, including their daughters, which TB thought was great.

One such person was a man who gave him his daughter's name and asked if TB would write "you can do anything," which is based on the book title: "I Can Do Anything," which in turn comes from the Helen Reddy anthem from the women's movement. That was perfect.

In the end, TB signed more than 100 books. He'd like to thank everyone who came by and say that he hopes they all enjoy the book.

Oh, and if you still haven't gotten yours, you can order it HERE.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Loving the book so far! It's amazing how far women's athletics has come in just 50 years!

Anonymous said...

TB: I was sent by my then boss, Sen. Orrin Hatch, to Judge Robert Bork's house to pick up autographed copies of his book. Hatch had purchased a bunch as gifts. Bork told me that he was told that a signed copy is regarded as more valuable with just the author's signature. That does make sense. It certainly saves time! According to Dynasty, a book about the 1949-1964 NY Yankees, Whitey Ford would autograph baseballs in the clubhouse for distribution as "Ed Ford." The Mick, according to the book, who had the most to sign, apparently had the clubhouse guy do
his. Just a few tips for you. Mark Disler '74