Ah, but first, TigerBlog starts with an airplane.
TB flew out yesterday morning for his final meeting with the NCAA men's lacrosse rules committee. If you recall when he first wrote about it, well, that was four years ago already.
When it comes to flying, TigerBlog wants to sit by the window. He was there yesterday, in seat 17A, Philadelphia to Indianapolis, on one of those smaller jets that has two seats on each side of the aisle.
The plane took off to the east, which meant it needed to do a sweeping 180-degree turn to head towards Indiana. With how clear the weather was yesterday, the climb afforded the most incredible views of Philadelphia, including going right over University City. From his seat, TB could see all of the Penn campus, especially Franklin Field and the Palestra and the hi-rise buildings where he lived as a junior and senior.
For TB, he considered it "Princeton over Penn." Has a nice ring to it.
He spent the rest of the trip trying to pick out other landmarks along the way, or figure out when the plane crossed from Pennsylvania to Ohio and then to Indiana. As he said, he loves to look out the window.
Oh, and there is also the matter of the airport itself. His flight left at 10:40 in the morning, and yet there were people eating pizza and burgers and cheesesteaks. That always makes him laugh.
Anyway, he landed in Indianapolis 98 minutes after take-off. Then it was an uber to the hotel and a 4:30 start for the meetings.
And that's enough about TB's travels. As he said, today is about the boats, with a little mention of Yav, a legendary Trenton sportswriter for 60-plus years who passed away a few years ago well into his 90s. TB has written about him before.
If you were lucky enough to have known him, then you know you haven't met too many other characters quite like him. If you were even luckier to have been interviewed by him, then you really got the full Yavener experience. TB learned a lot from Yav, especially how to do interviews — to write about the person you need to learn about the person, not just the athlete.
Yav loved all college sports in the area. Somehow, a man who grew up in Newark and lived his entire adult life in Trenton became a huge fan of Princeton Rowing. Well, it's not too surprising. For Yav, it was always about the people as much as anything.
Also, to Yav, the biggest "boat races" were as big as the biggest football games or the NCAA basketball tournament or anything else. The significance is what mattered, not the sport itself.
As such he would have loved this past weekend, when all four Princeton teams competed in their national championship events. He would have talked to a few rowers before the teams left, the open women for Georgia and the NCAA championships and the lightweight women and heavyweight and lightweight men for California and the IRA championships.
He would have walked into the newsroom gushing over the Princeton athletes he'd just talked to for about 45 minutes each. Then he would have written about three times as many words as the newspaper had budgeted and then complained about how badly his stories were chopped (though he'd use much, uh, saltier language than that), but that was just how he was.
The open women finished sixth at the NCAA regatta in both the 1V race and in the overall team standings. You can read more about them HERE.
The men's lightweights and heavyweights also had big performances, with a second-place finish by the 1V and team on the lightweight side and a third-place finish in the 1V and second-place points finish for the heavyweights. You can read about them HERE and HERE.
As for the lightweight women, they did again what they seem to do every year — which is to say that the Tigers won the national championship. That's five straight 1V championships and six straight overall points championships.
You can read about that HERE.
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