Happy 94th

Today is July 10th.

As is always the case, July 10th is a day to talk about Princeton men's basketball.

Why? Because today is the 94th anniversary of the birth of Pete Carril, who will remain forever one of the most unique people who ever walked onto the Princeton campus. 

And maybe his contributions to the world didn't rival those of Einstein and Oppenheimer and Turing and any of the many others who made Princeton into what it is, but don't let that fool you. 

Carril, the Hall of Fame men's basketball coach who led the Tigers from 1967-1996, brought with him every lesson he learned as the son of a Spanish immigrant who spent 40 years in the steel mills of Bethlehem, Pa.

His way to a better life was the sport of basketball, which he excelled at despite standing 5-7 or so. He played at Liberty High in Bethlehem for a man named Joseph Preletz, though he was known as "Pickles." In the style Pickles preferred, Liberty ran up and down the court, pressed and scored a lot of points.

Carril then played at Lafayette, where his coach his senior year of 1952 was Butch van Breda Kolff. Their meeting in that season — 72 years ago — was the pivotal moment in a basketball tradition at Princeton that endures to this day.

Think about it. 

Butch played for Cappy Capon at Princeton in the 1940s and eventually became the head coach in the early 1960s at Princeton, where he'd coach Gary Walters, who played for Carril and was his American government student at Reading High.

When van Breda Kolf left Princeton for the Los Angeles Lakers, it was Carril who took over for him after one year as the head coach at Lehigh. Carril coached the Tigers until 1996, by which time Walters was the Director of Athletics at Princeton.

Carril's successor was his longtime assistant coach Bill Carmody, who played at Union College for Walters. Carmody's successor was John Thompson III, who was followed by Joe Scott, Sydney Johnson and now Mitch Henderson — all of whom played for Carril at Princeton.

There cannot be another program anywhere that can match that pedigree.

Carril's teams won 13 Ivy League titles and made 11 NCAA tournament appearances, giving March some of its Maddest moments. His 1975 team won the NIT, winning all four of its games when the tournament was still played in a week at Madison Square Garden.

His offensive philosophy, by now immortalized, was a bit different than those of Preletz and van Breda Kolff. His was based on having five players on the court who could all dribble, pass and shoot, meaning he always needed a center who could do all three.

Nobody stood around. The ball and the players were in constant motion, using off-ball screens and cuts — "hard cuts," at that — to catch the defense a step behind and then exploit that for a layup or an open look from the outside, which beginning in the mid-1980s gave his teams three points instead of two. 

He'd tell you that all came from the Boston Celtics and Bill Russell. He'd tell you basketball was a simple game — you pass, cut, shoot, guard your guy and go backdoor once in awhile. He said that a million times. 

Oh, and he hated the term "Princeton Offense."

What separates Carril from being just a great basketball coach, though, were those Bethlehem roots and the work ethic that he learned from his father. He was, TigerBlog has said so many times, completely mismatched for Princeton, and yet he thrived here, largely because he refused to compromise his standards and expectations. 

TigerBlog called him the "conscience" of the University. He was a reminder that no matter what you were given, no matter what advantages you had, they were nothing without hard work, without dedication to the team, without understanding that you had to often put aside your own individual wants for the betterment of the group.

In many cases, it took his players until they were well out of Princeton to really, fully understand the education they had been given. 

It's been 28 years since Carril left his position as the men's basketball coach at Princeton. In that time, the game has changed. The University has changed. The world has changed. 

He never did. He was the same Coach until the day he died, nearly two years ago.

Today is his birthday. 

At Princeton, especially in the world of athletics, that will always make July 10th special.