The occasion was the celebration of the life of Pete Carril. The turnout was what you would have expected, which is to say that it was large. Why would it have been any other way?
This was Pete Carril, after all, and so that made it a "drop what you're doing and be there" moment. And that's exactly what happened.
For about an hour before the program began, TB had been in the lobby as they came in, one after another, former players, former coaches, former rivals, former colleagues. They played for him, coached with him, worked with him, wrote about him, broadcast his games.
They got there by car, by train, by airplane. Get there they did.
They were all there.
It struck TB that this had to be have been the largest gathering of Princeton men's basketball alums ever. It was larger than the Reunions pickup games. It was larger than any NCAA tournament game. There were players from the 1950s all the way through the members of the current team.
It had been a long time since TB had seen some of the people he saw there. There were so many of them that he doesn't even know where to start.
Maybe with what Pete's daughter Lisa Carril had so say, first about how he wasn't just a basketball coach but also her dad, and then about how everyone there had come into her father's orbit and been touched by him.
And that explained why a football player like Jason Garrett was there. And former Princeton coaches like Bill Tierney, Chris Sailer, Peter Farrell, Louise Gengler and Rob Orr. Bill Raftery, the former Seton Hall coach and longtime broadcaster, was there. Fran Dunphy, whose matchups against Carril while he was Penn's coach, was there.
TB got to see Bill Carmody for the first time in a long time. It was Carmody who coached with Carril during his final 15 years at Princeton and then took over for him after Carril retired in 1996.
As for the players in attendance, they were brought there by the memory of someone who came into their lives when they were teenagers and impacted them all in a way that probably nobody else in their lives ever had. It wasn't all easy, by the way. As Princeton's current head coach Mitch Henderson, who also played for Carril, would say in his speech: "It's not always easy to be taught well. For Coach, praise was the cheapest form of reward."
By the way, Mitch's speech was excellent. TB will have the entire text of it tomorrow.
It's precisely because Carril was reluctant to heap praise on his players that they did learn from him. And maybe it took them years beyond when they graduated to really comprehend it all, but they were taught well, as Henderson said. There were speakers, both live and on video, who all confirmed that.
In the lobby beforehand and during the program itself, every one had their Carril story, or stories, to tell. They were were funny, and they were poignant. They had life-lessons to them. They all went back decades and decades, and yet they were seared into the memories of those who were telling them.
Chris Thomforde, the center on Carril's first Princeton team in 1967-68, mentioned that he had spoken to Carril in July to wish him a happy birthday. During the call, Carril pointed out to Thomforde a weakness in his defensive game back when he was a player. "I'm 75 and you're 92," Thomforde said he told his coach. "You might want to let this one go." As TB said, it was funny, and it was also poignant. It said a great deal about Carril.
The best teachers, Carril's old friend Marvin Bressler, the Princeton sociologist, would say, are the ones you learn from long after you leave their classrooms. Marv would have smiled at just how true those words were on Friday.
And Carril himself?
As TB watched the program, he found himself looking over his left shoulder, up to the last row of the balcony, where Carril would sit when he'd watch Princeton games long after he was no longer the head coach.
What would he have thought of all of this? He wasn't really a huge fan of telling stories from the old days, even though he himself was a great storyteller, but he would have loved all of the laughing.
And more than anything, he would have loved how many of his guys came back, not because of him, but because of them. He would have loved to see yet another reminder of what being a part of Princeton Basketball meant to them.
And yes, he would have reminded this one of what was wrong with his jump shot and that one how he couldn't dribble with his left hand on the right side of the court.
But it would have come from a place of love, for the sport of basketball — and for the ones who put forth his teachings onto the court those 775 games he coached at Princeton.
Then Jadwin emptied. The players went off to their luncheon. Everyone else went off to where they had to be, including TigerBlog.
Before he left, though, he looked back up to that top row in the balcony. He knew nobody would be sitting there, of course. But he also knew that the man whose seat that used to be will always be a part of the building, just as he'll always be a part of the people he touched there.
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1 comment:
Beautifully written as was the event.
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