Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which makes the Civil Rights leader the only person ever born in the United States to have a federal holiday named for him or her.
TigerBlog spent a great deal of time in college studying the Civil Rights movement and Dr. King's role in it (he'd also be fortunate enough to meet John Doar, the Princeton basketball alum who was also a huge factor in the movement).
In addition, TB has also been to the national park that bears Dr. King's name in Atlanta, back before it was a national park. The Civil Rights museum there is a must.
The occasion of his birthday first became a Monday federal holiday in 1983. Within three years, the NBA began to play games on the holiday, a tradition that will continue today with nine games. Memphis (where Dr. King was killed in 1968) and Atlanta (his home) are at home each year.
The basketball tradition on the holiday was actually born a few months after the assassination itself. A year ago, TB wrote this on the holiday:
The National Basketball Association first started playing matinee games on Martin Luther King Day in 1986.
The first game to feature NBA players in honor of Dr. King came much earlier, back in 1968, the year in which he was assassinated. In fact, on the day after the assassination, which happened on April 4 of that year, Oscar Robertson began to organize a special exhibition game that would be played outdoors in New York City on Aug. 15.
According to an AP story, that game included players like Wilt Chamberlain, Lenny Wilkens, Dave Bing, Dave DeBusschere, Willis Reed and Walt Bellamy. That game raised $90,000 in support of Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
If you haven't heard of all of those players, then stop what you're doing and look them up. They are among the all-time greats the game has ever seen.
A year ago, the Ivy League began its own version of Martin Luther King basketball. The same is true again this year, as all 16 teams will be playing, with each team to face its traditional Ivy League travel partner.
For Princeton, it means games against Penn. Because of the timing, it also means you can see both.
The women will host Penn at 2 in Jadwin Gym. The men are at the Palestra at 7. Both games are on ESPN+ and NBC Sports Philly, with the women also on SNY in New York.
Each team has played four Ivy League games to date. The only one of the 16 teams to be 4-0 is the Penn women, who bring that record into the game against the Tigers.
Princeton's women opened the league season with losses to Harvard and Columbia but since has beaten Cornell and Brown by an average of 17.5 points. Penn's biggest statement so far is 71-67 win over Columbia the night after the Lions defeated Princeton.
As it usually is, Princeton and Penn enter the game as the 1-2 teams in Ivy women's basketball in scoring defense.
On the men's side, Princeton is tied with Cornell for first at 3-1, with four others at 2-2, including Penn (and Harvard, Brown and Dartmouth). Both Princeton and Penn have a short turnaround after suffering tough losses on the road, the Tigers by two at Brown and the Quakers by four at Dartmouth.
Both Penn and Princeton are averaging just shy of 75 points per game. The Tigers are the league's best rebounding team; Penn is the top free throw shooting team in the league.
Princeton and Penn, of course, have dominated the history of Ivy League men's basketball. They first met on Valentine's Day back in 1903 and have since met at least twice a season every season since.
The league will move past the one-third mark of its regular season with today's games. It'll end the first weekend in March, and then the top four teams in the league will advance to Jadwin Gym for the league tournaments to determine the NCAA tournament bids.
It's already been wild in the league so far, as wild as maybe it's every been on both sides. It's not going to calm down at all as each game is its own challenge.
It makes every matchup special.
Of course, Penn-Princeton is always special in basketball, and always will be.
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