Once Again To Zelda

Well, that was fun.

TigerBlog is referring to the question he asked yesterday about who the man in the picture was.

Here's one more hint:

"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money, or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that held them together, leaving others to clean up the mess they had made."

Only one person got the correct answer, and that came on Twitter. It was from "Tigre Triste," who got it right, or presumably got it right, with a response of "FSF."

If "FSF" stands for "F. Scott Fitzgerald," then yes, that's the correct answer.

As TB said in his four hints yesterday:

1) you've definitely heard of him

2) you are very familiar with his accomplishments

3) he's a Princeton alum

4) he's quite possibly the best-ever at what he did

All of those apply. And for all the times that you've read or studied about him, did you ever see his picture, let alone his picture at Princeton?

TB got a few guesses yesterday as the person's identity. Most of those guesses were Hobey Baker.

Interestingly enough, Hobey Baker and F. Scott Fitzgerald both died on Dec. 21, although 22 years apart. Between the two of them, they lived a total of 70 years, though in many ways both will live forever.

They're also linked in literature.

Fitzgerald's first novel was "This Side Of Paradise," which featured a main character named Amory Blaine and a minor character named Allenby. Amory was Hobey Baker's middle name; the character of Allenby was based on Baker himself.

Fitzgerald spent his childhood moving from Minnesota (St. Paul) to upstate New York (Buffalo, Syracuse) before coming to Princeton in 1913. He tried out for the football team but didn't make it, and apparently he owned a tennis racket.

Of course, his most famous work was the 1925 novel "The Great Gatsby," which tells the story of the ultra-rich Tom and Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby, as told by the upper middle class Nick Carraway. There's not a wasted word in the entire book - not even in the dedication, which is to his wife: "Once Again To Zelda."

Tom, like Nick, is 30 in the book, which is set in 1922. That would make Nick likely a member of the Yale Class of 1914.

This would also mean that he would have been at Yale when Baker was at Princeton.

Were that the case, then the three Hobey Baker vs. Tom Buchanan matchups were definitely defensive minded. Princeton beat Yale 6-3 in 1911 to win the national championship, and then there were two straight ties, with a 6-6 final in 1912 and a 3-3 final in 1913.

Tom is often described by his physical size and prowess in the book. He's also a jerk, which is probably why Nick says this about him: "He was one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax."

Of course, in the real world of Ivy League athletics, it's what you learn during your limited time as an athlete that helps shape you for the rest of your life, not what defines your existence forever, with no way to ever match it.

And it was a fun exercise to give you the picture, and to talk about F. Scott Fitzgerald's world.

He died when he was only 44, and "The Great Gatsby" didn't achieve the status it now enjoys until after his death. He was part of a magical time at Princeton and then when he embarked on his writing career, and his works today all these years later serve as a reminder of what that world was.

As for this world, Princeton and the Ivy League have both announced big decisions on the future in the coming days. TigerBlog has heard every kind of speculation ,and he doesn't have any of the answers yet.

He'll wait it out with everyone else to see what comes next. Whatever it is, Princeton Athletics will still be teaching the same lessons and the same values that it always has, and those lessons and values were essential to all during this past surreal spring.

In the meantime, it's the Fourth of July weekend.

TigerBlog hopes everyone gets to enjoy it, and he hopes that everyone is staying safe.

Who Is The Man In The Picture

To get today started, can anyone tell TigerBlog who the person in this picture is?

Here are a few hints:

1) you've definitely heard of him

2) you are very familiar with his accomplishments

3) he's a Princeton alum

4) he's quite possibly the best-ever at what he did

Any guesses?

TigerBlog will give you a little while to try to figure it out. Or maybe he won't say anything until tomorrow and see if anyone can get it right.

Here's another hint: TB had no idea who he was when he first saw the picture until it was ID'd for him.

Once he figured out who it was, he was definitely fascinated by it.

There. Now you should get it, no problem.

The man in the picture is definitely not Carl Teter, the 1994 Princeton football captain. As TB said yesterday, he made a big error when he put a picture of Teter on Page 1 of the media guide that year, only to realize after it came back from the printer that no, it wasn't actually a picture of Teter.

TB was going to add to that story that he always wrestled with two emotions after sending off a publication to the printer. First, there was the feeling of great relief that it was finally done, especially done on time.

It has to feel a bit like handing in a senior thesis (something TB did not have to write at Penn).

Then there was the feeling of dread when the boxes and boxes of final books (very expensive ones) came back from said printer. It was only a matter of time before someone pointed out a mistake, and correcting them at that point was not very easy.

Thankfully, the picture of Teter that wasn't Teter was the biggest mistake TB ever made. He also had the head shots of two young assistant coaches backwards, so for the whole season in a game program they had their names under the other's picture.

That was always an awful conversation.

Coach: There's a mistake on Page 142

TB: *#%!@!!*@)(%#(%

Coach: Can we fix it?

TB: Nope. It would cost a lot of money

Coach: Well, can it come out of your budget?

There aren't nearly the number of publications now as there used to be. TB can make as many mistakes as he wants here and simply correct him when he sees them.

In fact, if you came here early yesterday morning, you might have noticed that the two tweets that TB embedded didn't actually embed. They were just the HTML code, which looked sort of silly until he fixed it.

Had this been 1994, you would have had HTML code for the whole season. Or something like that.

TB couldn't help but laugh when he got an email yesterday from Bruce Wood, formerly in the Dartmouth sports information office, who said this: "Gotta say, the day the press guides came back was always nerve-racking."

He also told a funny story about how in 1985, a senior lineman had been left out of the Big Green guide, and how from then on that player got any possible publicity they could find for him. That's definitely how it worked.

In other news, an email went out yesterday announcing the additions to the Board of Trustees. TB read through the names and lo and behold, there was a very familiar one.

Her name is Melissa Wu, and she was a cross country/track and field athlete before graduating in 1999.

Here's what the official release said about her:

Melissa Wu is chief executive officer of Education Pioneers. Based in Boston, she leads the national nonprofit that aims to recruit diverse talent into education. Since becoming CEO in 2018, Wu has worked to continue to strengthen initiatives that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. Earlier in her tenure at Education Pioneers, Wu oversaw the launch of Impact Fellowship, a 10-month leadership development program.

Wu previously worked as a partner at TNTP, a national education nonprofit that recruits and trains teachers and advances policies and practices for effective teaching. She also has worked at the Boston Consulting Group, and started her career at the TEAK Fellowship, an academic enrichment program in New York City that prepares low-income students for success.

Wu graduated from Princeton in 1999 with an A.B. in sociology and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Here's TB's unofficial addition to that: She was always, always a breath of fresh air, always with a smile, anytime she came into Jadwin Gym or the Office of Athletic Communications. It's great to see that she's doing well.

As for the man in the picture, TB will have that for you tomorrow. It's a good test.

He is welcoming any and all guesses.

Sorry Carl

TigerBlog is glad to see Carl Teter is doing well.

At least he seems to be, based on this tweet:

All 🌿 Tiger Teammates Who’s Quiet Confidence Paved The Way To Win!

Former @Giants VP of Player Evaluation, @MarcRoss '95, is currently an Analyst @NFLNetwork.

Carl Teter '95, currently VP, TRC Companies. pic.twitter.com/w9ahTRGtbM

— Stephen Verbit (@SVerbit) June 30, 2020

That tweet is part of a series that Verbit, the longest-serving Princeton football coach, has been doing this summer.

TigerBlog hasn't spoken to Teter since Teter graduated back in 1995. Before that, Teter was a captain of the 1994 football team, which was his senior season.

Also back then, TB was in his first go-round as the Princeton football contact for the Office of Athletic Communications. The first major project he ever worked on at Princeton was the 1994 media guide, and he was really pleased with how it came out, especially since he barely knew how to turn a computer on when he first started at Princeton that summer.

In fact, he owes a great deal to Chuck Sullivan, then a Princeton intern and now the longtime communications director for the American Athletic Conference. It was Chuck who taught TB how to use a computer and especially how to do desktop publishing, courtesy of a long-since obsolete program called PageMaker.

The computer on which Chuck taught TB, by the way, was a tiny desktop Mac that at the time seemed to be so daunting and revolutionary and now would just be the junk that nobody knew what to do with and just let it sit in the back of a closet for a few decades.

Anyway, TB was very proud of his 1994 football media guide, until it came back from the printer. That's when it was pointed out to him that the big picture of Carl Teter on Page 1 was, in fact, not Carl Teter.

TB has felt badly about that ever since.

The other player mentioned in Verbs' tweet yesterday was Marc Ross. TB has spoken to Ross a lot of times since his days as a record-setting wide receiver and kick returner for the Tigers.

Marc Ross spent a lot of years helping build Super Bowl winners for the New York Giants, and now he does television with NFL Network, among other things. He'll be an NFL GM one of these days.

Marc retweeted what Verbs posted and also added a comment with it:

Some of the most impactful and lasting memories of my life learned as part of @PrincetonFTBL always grateful for @SVerbit for recruiting me out of @ArchmereAcademy !!!

What Marc said in his comment is pretty spot on when it comes to what Princeton Athletics is hoping for from its alums and their experience. Some of the most impactful and lasting memories of their lives.

You can't ask for more than that.

And while the subject is Princeton football and Twitter, there was also this yesterday:

#TouchdownTuesday
Week 9 - 1995
On the opening play of the game, QB Brock Harvey '96 runs 92 yards for the touchdown! The #Tigers would go on to become 1995 Ivy League champions the next week!#BYB | #OrangeJ21CE pic.twitter.com/qArEN6o6zo

— Princeton Football (@PrincetonFTBL) June 30, 2020

That was the first play from scrimmage in Princeton's 1995 game against Yale. Princeton was 8-0 against a 2-6 Yale team, but the Bulldogs' record was misleading, since their quarterback, Chris Hetherington, had missed most of the year to that point.

TigerBlog remembers a lot about that 1995 game. Mostly what he remembers is that when the Tigers had the ball first and 10 on their own 8 to start the game, TB's colleague Kurt Kehl said that Harvey was going to take the ball on first down and go the distance. And that's exactly what happened. When it did, TB thought Princeton was going to roll the rest of the way.

Hetherington would lead Yale back after that opening setback against Princeton for a 21-13 victory at Palmer Stadium. A week later, Princeton would win the Ivy League's outright championship at Dartmouth anyway.

Hetherington? He'd go on to play nearly a decade in the NFL.

And that's some mid-1990s Princeton football for your July 1.

Oh, and one last thing: Sorry about that whole picture thing, Carl. Good to see you're doing well.

The Year In Review

So TigerBlog was able to get into the eye doctor yesterday, which is good, considering his glasses are broken and essentially unwearable.

The bad news is that his new glasses won't be ready for as much as two weeks, which means that TB will be struggling to see for awhile. This will lead to squinting, which will lead to bad headaches, but hey, you have your own problems.

In other news, TigerBlog mailed two books off to Bruce Wood, the Big Green Alert Guy who wrote a guest entry here a week ago about his interactions with Pete Carril.

To send the books, TB went to the post office. He picked up a large mailing envelope, put the two books inside, sealed it and sent it on its way.

When the envelope got to New Hampshire, interestingly enough, only one book was still inside. The envelope had been taped up but wasn't ripped or anything.

It's just that one book was missing.

What explains this? Seriously. TB has no idea what happened.

He called the post office who said that there was no book in its lost and found and that the package had reached its destination. That didn't really answer any questions.

Hey, but again, you have your own problems.

In still more news, TigerBlog is working on the Princeton Athletics Year in Review for the 2019-20 academic year.

He's done a lot of Year in Review stories, and his favorite part has always been the idea that when any given academic year begins, there's been no way of knowing what the biggest story of that year will turn out to be. 

It's been one of his favorite parts of working at Princeton, knowing that there are 37 different teams and that any one of them in any given year could do something special and warrant being the lead part of the Year in Review.

As you can guess, there was no way in the world that TB could have figured out what the main story of 2019-20 would be when the academic year started. In fact, here's what he wrote for the first sentence:

The 2019-20 athletic year was unlike any that had ever come before it at Princeton University – and Princeton Athletics goes all the way back to 1864.

Even with no championships contested in the spring, Princeton teams won seven conference championships this past year - six Ivy League titles and the ECAC women's hockey championship. The six Ivy champions were: field hockey, women's volleyball, women's basketball, men's indoor track and field, wrestling and women's swimming and diving.

The 2019-20 season will also be remembered for the 500th Ivy League championship in Princeton history. That distinction went to the wrestling team, whose history-making championship also was the program's first since 1986 and the one that ended Cornell's 18-year title run. It came on a spectacular afternoon at Jadwin Gym in February, where the Tigers defeated Cornell in what was very high drama from start to finish.

There were other huge highlights. Among them:

The field hockey team followed up its 7-0 run through the league by reaching the NCAA championship game. The women's hockey team won its first ECAC championship by taking down No. 1 Cornell in overtime. The women's swimming and diving title was the program's first since 2015 and first for current head coach Bret Lundgaard.

The women's volleyball team won its third Ivy title in four years. The men's indoor track and field title was the program's sixth straight.

The women's basketball team went 26-1, won every Ivy League game by double figures and reached the national rankings.

Unfortunately, the 2019-20 athletic year will always be that year, the one when the seasons ground to a halt in March due to the Coronavirus outbreak. The end of athletics in March meant winter teams couldn't compete in the postseason and the spring teams wouldn't get into the meat of their seasons, or even compete at all, in the case of rowing.

For each of the last five years Princeton has won five Ivy League spring championships. The spring is also the season that contributes the most Directors' Cup points on average, and Princeton was ranked 28th without any of the winter championships or spring ones contested.

Also, Princeton 18 nationally ranked teams still competing when the games stopped.

Who will ever know what kind of year this one ultimately would have been? Who knows what successes would have happened in the winter and spring postseasons, even national championship ones perhaps.

It makes the Year in Review an interesting project, that's for sure.

When it came to the lead story a year ago at this time, TB wouldn't have guessed "global pandemic."

Gotta See It

TigerBlog's glasses broke.

He went to clean them off, and snap. Instead of one pair of glasses, he now had two half-pairs of glasses.

TigerBlog can barely see without his glasses. He's not even sure what he's writing right now, since he's trying to get through this without them.

Wait, what did he just write?

TB first got glasses back in the 1990s, when he was in his 30s. He was getting headaches, and he went to an eye doctor. Turned out, his vision was really bad, and the headaches were coming from having to squint to see things clearly.

Since then, whenever he starts to get headaches again, it's sign that he needs to get a stronger prescription.

He's never had contact lenses. He doesn't think he'd be able to touch his eyeball, so why bother. Plus, glasses are so easy. Put them on. Take them off.

Until yesterday, he'd never had a pair that broke. He also doesn't have a backup pair, so getting new glasses is now high on his list of things to do this week.

He does remember when he first wore glasses. They made everything look clear, for starters.

He first got them on the night of a Princeton-Cornell men's basketball game at Jadwin Gym. He remembers this, well, clearly, and not just because he could see.

What really sticks out most for him about that night is that nobody noticed he was wearing glasses. He does remember one person who asked him if he had gotten new glasses, which was sort of an acknowledgement at least that something was different.

That person? Brian Earl, who was then a Princeton player and is, ironically enough, now the head coach of the men's basketball team at Cornell.

Actually, TB's glasses are now being held together by white tape, which 1) makes it at least a little easier to see and 2) makes him look ridiculous. Oh well.

In other news, remember Friday when TB mentioned that the "Top Gun" sequel was going to be released soon and he had seen the trailer? Well, guess what was on TV Saturday night on the IFC channel?

Yes. The original "Top Gun." When TB first got to it, most of the movie was over. Maverick had just decided to attend the graduation, and well, TB doesn't want to ruin it for you if you've never seen it, beyond pointing out that Mav does say "Talk to me Goose" in there.

And now everyone has to wait six more months for the sequel? C'mon now.

If you can watch movies over and over - knowing full well how they turn out - can you also watch games over and over, knowing how they'll turn out too?

TB has watched a bunch of old games of late, mostly old college football games, "old," in this case, defined as pretty much any time in the last 25 years. It's incredible, as TB has said before during this pandemic, how different games from even just a few years ago looked as compared to these days.

The best part of watching old college football game is seeing the players who ended up being impact NFL names. There's always a few in each game.

TB was scrolling through the listings the other day when he came upon a Princeton-Penn men's basketball game. This was on Comcast in Philadelphia, which meant it was going to be a game Penn won.

As suspected, it was. Comcast showed the 2018 game from the Palestra, which Penn won 76-70. As TB has documented a few times, finding a game that Mitch Henderson either played in or coached against Penn where Princeton lost can be difficult.

In fact, this was from January, after Princeton finished a season-sweep over the Quakers:

Princeton head coach Mitch Henderson has an extraordinary record against Penn, as both a player and coach. In fact, the win Friday was his 20th against the Quakers, against eight losses. That's a winning percentage of .714 in games in which he has either played or coached. If you take the rest of the series, all of the games without Mitch Henderson, then Penn leads 122-97, or a winning percentage for Princeton of .443.

Mitch is 15-4 against Penn as a head coach. The only other time Princeton ever won 15 of 19 against Penn in the entire history of the series was back in the late 1950s through most of the 1960s, when Princeton had a run of 21-5, with two 15-4 runs overlapping in there.

As for Penn since 2012, exactly one-quarter of its league losses in that time are against Mitch Henderson-coached teams. That's a pretty good run by Mitch.

As for the game from 2018, TB decided not to watch.

And now, until he gets his glasses fixed, he couldn't see it even if he wanted.

Pete Carril always talked about the importance of being able to "see it." TB hopes to return to being able to do so today.

Talk To Me Goose

Wait, there's a "Top Gun" sequel?

How come TigerBlog didn't know this until he saw the trailer yesterday?

This is either going to be awesome or awful. There is nobody who will see it who will say "eh, it was okay."

TigerBlog saw the original in the movie theater in 1986. He's also seen it about a thousand times since on TV. Well, maybe not a thousand times, but enough times that he can essentially recite it.

In case you're wondering why Tom Cruise is one of the top movie stars ever, consider that the original "Top Gun" cost $15 million to produce and then earned $358 million. That's what Cruise can do to a movie.

The sequel, by the way, cost 10 times as much to make, at $150 million. That's a lot for a movie these days.

The release date for the sequel, officially entitled "Top Gun: Maverick," was supposed to be today, June 26. Instead, it's been pushed back to December because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

What will movies be like post-pandemic? Will people go back to sitting in crowded theaters? Will this movie be released directly to Netflix or Amazon.

Anyway, Cruise was perfect as Maverick. He got ripped off for the Best Actor Academy Award that year, which went to Paul Newman for "The Color of Money." That was sort of a lifetime achievement award, so it's hard to get too mad at that.

Of course, Cruise wasn't even nominated. Nor was the movie, except in one category: Best Original Song, for "Take My Breath Away," which it at least won.

You know what other movie from 1986 didn't get much respect at the Academy Awards? How about "Hoosiers," which was not nominated for Best Picture and didn't get a nomination for Gene Hackman for Best Actor.

Should these be like drafts in the NFL and NBA, where someone goes back a few years later and says what should have gotten nominated, or who should have been chosen where?

TB, for one, is now excited to see "Top Gun: Maverick." Of course it'll be predictable, and the trailer confirms that. But it'll be the good kind of predictable.

The only question: Will Cruise at some point say "talk to me Goose?"

So while the subject is the year 1986, what was going with Princeton Athletics back in 1986?

The Tigers won eight Ivy League championships in the 1985-86 academic year, six on the men's side and two on the women's side. The Ivy champs that year:

men's golf, men's lightweight rowing, men's indoor track and field, men's outdoor track and field, men's swimming and diving, wrestling, softball and women's volleyball.

The 1985 football season was a tough one for Princeton, who came very close to taking the Ivy League championship.

Penn was the 1985 champ at 6-1, followed by a second-place tie between Princeton and Harvard at 5-2. The Tigers defeated Harvard by the rather interesting score of 11-6, a score so bizarre that it got TB thinking he needed to investigate this a little more.

How do you get to 11? Three field goals and a safety? A touchdown, two-point conversion and field goal?

Give TB a second to look this up...

... okay, he's back. It was a lot wilder than TB would have guessed.

In fact, every point in the game came on special teams. Harvard led 6-3 (two field goals to one) late into the fourth quarter, when a bad snap on a Crimson punt looked like it might give the Tigers the ball inside the 10. Instead, the Harvard punter decided to knock it through the end zone for a safety, which was a pretty heads up play considering the score and time (only four-plus minutes to go on a day when the offenses had done little and Doug Butler, one of the Ivy's all-time best quarterbacks, struggled to a 12 for 36 day for 121 yards).

As it turned out, the ball barely made it out of the end zone, as Princeton almost fell on it for a touchdown. Instead, it was now 6-5 Harvard.

All the Crimson had to do was free kick the ball away and play defense one more time. After Harvard chose to kick off a tee instead of punt, Princeton's Rob Urquhart scooped up the ball and took it back 75 yards for the winning touchdown.

Pretty wild stuff, right?

Unfortunately for Princeton, the Tigers had lost 17-0 to Brown earlier in the season and then lost 31-21 in a showdown against Penn the Saturday after the Harvard game. Princeton had led that game 21-0 in the second quarter.

TB remembers it well; he covered that game while still in the newspaper business. That was 35 years ago this fall.

He did not cover the Harvard game that year, which was in Cambridge. He didn't realize it was that crazy until just now.

Guest TigerBlog - Big Green Alert Talks Pete Carril

TigerBlog is always interested in what others have to say about pretty much any issue related to Princeton Athletics. The Guest TigerBlogs are always entertaining, and TB loves to see the perspectives of those who want the floor.

Today's guest entry comes from Bruce Wood, whom you would know as the Big Green Alert guy. Bruce has covered Dartmouth athletics since before TB first came to Princeton, and the two have developed a good friendship over the years. There have been a lot of games they've both covered, both in Princeton and Hanover.

Today's guest entry belongs to Bruce:

The recent TigerBlog column about Pete Carril’s most memorable quotes got me thinking about both the first time I saw the great man on the sidelines and the last.

The first was as a fan on March 13, 1976, when I traveled from New Jersey to Providence, R.I., with a car full of friends to watch the Tigers take on Phil Sellers and the undefeated Scarlet Knights in the first round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. My buddies were all relieved when Rutgers escaped with a 54-53 win over Armond Hill, Frank Sowinski and Barnes Hauptfuhrer. Me? I kept it to myself on the long drive back home but I was a disappointed Princeton fan after the front end of a one-and-one that might have given the Tigers the win rimmed out with four seconds remaining.

Pete and I would chat briefly about that game two decades later.

As the beat writer covering Dartmouth sports for the Valley News I was on press row at Jadwin Gym on Feb. 23, 1996 for what would be the final Princeton-Dartmouth game of Carril’s storied career. With players like Sea Lonergan, Brian Gilpin and Kenny Mitchell, this was one of the best Big Green teams I would write about, but once again on this Friday night it was simply no match for the NCAA-bound Tigers led by Steve Goodrich, Sydney Johnson, Gabe Lewullis and Mitch Henderson. I remember like it was yesterday the tremendous difficulty Dartmouth had putting the ball in the basket that night and giddy Princeton fans chanting as halftime approached, “No double figures. No double figures.”

Dartmouth escaped that ignominious fate to close out the half with 16 points but never challenged in a 65-39 loss.

After getting lost briefly in the bowels of Jadwin Gym after the game I made it to the press room and asked Carril about shutting down a usually potent Dartmouth offense. He wasted no words explaining what we had all just seen. “They have defendable players,” the old coach said, “and we defended them.”

I was on deadline and unlike TigerBlog I’ve never been a fast writer. But while I needed to grab a desk and get to work on my story that would have to wait. I had always regretted as a grad student in journalism at Penn State not standing and applauding after the final class with the best professor I ever had, who was retiring that spring. While I wasn’t about to publicly clap for Carril, who I knew was approaching the end of a long road, I wanted to tell him quietly and privately how much I appreciated everything he had taught us about the right way to play basketball.

So I pulled him aside and thanked him the way I wished I had that journalism professor years earlier.

Before I ducked out of the room I told Pete that I was at the 1976 Princeton-Rutgers tournament game and given how the bracket broke I’ve always believed his team would have taken the Scarlet Knight’s path all the way to the Final Four that year.

Carril sighed and said, “I’ve always thought so, too.”

Not a classic Carrilism, but one I’ll never forget.

 

 

The MacBean Family

Jeff MacBean was a very consistent and tenacious midfielder for the Princeton men's lacrosse team in the 1990s.

He was a key member of two NCAA championship teams, assisting on the game-winning goal in overtime in the 1994 final and then finishing his career as a second-team All-American on the 1996 NCAA champion.

MacBean had the good sense to hug Jesse Hubbard after Hubbard's game-winning goal in overtime of the 1996 final. That's because the picture of the two of them ended up on the cover of Lacrosse Magazine, and now all these years later, the magazine is doing a "where are they now" series on people who were on previous covers.

Because of that, the Lacrosse Magazine people reached out to TigerBlog for some information about MacBean's career. MacBean finished his career with 40 goals and 49 assists, not to mention 115 ground balls.

In short, he was the kind of winning player that NCAA championship teams needed.

When TB looked back at the scoresheet from the 1996 final, there were some things he remembered pretty much exactly and others that he'd forgotten. For instance, he did remember that Princeton went up 12-9 after scoring three goals in a seven-minute stretch from late in the third into the fourth and that Virginia tied it with three fourth-quarter goals, in a span of little more than four minutes.

TB did forget that Don McDonough tied Hubbard with a team-best three goals on the day. He did remember that Virginia's Michael Watson was unstoppable, with five goals of his own, to earn Most Outstanding Player honors (TB thinks it was voted on before the OT).

The 1994 and 1996 NCAA finals did have a lot of similarities. Both games were at Byrd Stadium at the University of Maryland. Both times Princeton defeated Virginia. Both games went to overtime.

Both times Princeton won the OT face-off (though UVa fans will doubt that statement to this day). Both times Princeton won on that first OT possession.

Both game-winning goals were scored by Princeton's No. 16 (Kevin Lowe in 1994, Hubbard in 1996). Both of those goal-scorers are now in the US Lacrosse National Hall of Fame.

Actually, so too is Watson, the UVa star. TB has never met Watson, but he's relatively sure that it still bothers him that Princeton won both of those games - especially after outshooting the Tigers 44-33 in that 1996 game. Pancho Gutstein, by the way, came off the bench to make eight saves while allowing five goals in 28 minutes for Princeton to earn All-Tournament honors.

TigerBlog looked on YouTube to see the game-winning goals from those two games, but he could only find the 1994 one. That was the one where MacBean took the ball behind the goal and found Lowe up top, where Lowe had all the time in the world to get his shot off.

It's interesting that Lowe was the goal-scorer and not the feeder, since Lowe is one of the great feeders ever to play.

As for the 1996 game, the assist on Hubbard's goal came from Lorne Smith, himself a first-team All-American midfielder.

Princeton lacrosse has won nine NCAA championships between men and women. Of those nine, more than half - five - were decided in overtime. Princeton is 5-1 in overtime NCAA championships games, including 4-0 for the men.

Think about how much different Princeton men's lacrosse history would have been had those four overtimes gone the other way.

Also, the average margin of victory in Princeton's non-OT NCAA wins is four goals for the women (12-7 over Georgetown in 2002 and 10-7 over Maryland in 1994) and 11 goals for the men, who defeated Maryland 19-7 in 1997 and 15-5 in 1998.

No men's team has ever won an NCAA final by more than 12 goals.

Back at Jeff MacBean, he was not the only member of his family who was a championship athlete at Princeton.

His father Scott was a member of the 1969 Princeton Ivy League football championship team. He was also the first T-formation quarterback in Princeton history, as the Tigers didn't abandon the single-wing until after Dick Colman left following the 1968 season.

MacBean, the father, was a 1969 first-team All-Ivy League selection.

That's a pretty good Tiger father/son duo.

Get The Picture

TigerBlog was talking to Shelley Szwast yesterday.

If you're seen a picture of Princeton men's or women's hockey or men's or women's lacrosse in a home game in recent years, there's an excellent chance it was taken by Shelley.

In fact, during the overlap between the two sports, Shelley is something of a fixture for weekends at a time in both venues. There are even times where three and possibly even all four teams are home in the same weekend.

So what did Shelley say yesterday? That she missed the days of shooting give games in a weekend.

That's how it is for the people who work in college athletics. They get swamped during the year, especially when it's crossover season, but when they certainly have missed it these last few months.

Heck, they miss it during a normal summer.

Shelley is an outstanding photographer, especially for someone who is a photographer as mostly a hobby.

TB has worked with a lot of photographers in his time at Princeton. The person who has taken by far the most pictures of Princeton athletics all these years is Beverly Schaefer. In fact, TB would go so far as to say Beverly has seen more Princeton athletic events than anyone else in the last 20 years.

There have been a lot of really good pictures taken of Princeton games through the years, by many different photographers. Some photographers who have turned out to be great ones - such as Patrick Tewey and Brian McWalters - have just emailed out of nowhere to see if Princeton needed pictures at a certain event.

The photography process has changed a lot since TB first began, but the bottom line is that a great sports photo is still a work of art. The need for quality pictures has also changed dramatically.

Back when TB first started, the main need for pictures was for media guides. Because almost every picture used back then was black-and-white, almost no games were shot with color film.

Oh year. Film. This was before digital photography. When photographers shot games, they'd have actual film to load in their cameras, and when a roll of film was done, it had to be developed.

This required sending the film to a company that the Office of Athletic Communications had a deal with, a company in West Windsor called the Leigh Photographic Group. There was delivery person who would come and get the unprocessed film, and then a few days later a bunch of negatives would appear.

Then it would be up to the OAC contact to go through the negatives and find the pictures that appeared to be usable - appeared to be, that is, because until prints were actually made, there was no way to be 100 percent sure.

So then the next step was to get prints made. And the picture that you thought was perfect on the negative turned out to be blurred, or it wasn't even who you thought it was, or something else that made it unusable. That was frustrating.

Or worse, you had the absolute perfect picture, but it was black-and-white, so you couldn't use it for the media guide cover.

Of course, none of that takes into account that to the picture then had to be sized to a certain percentage to fit a certain space in a publication and then sent over to campus printing to be scanned. TB spent a lot of time riding around between Leigh, Jadwin and campus printing (which was then in the Forrestal campus) in those days.

Today the need for photography can't possibly keep up with the demand, thanks to the advent of social media. The challenges are, as TB said, much different.

These days, and for the last 15 years or so, everything has been digital. The quantity of pictures has skyrocketed, since it's so easy to shoot and then forward them.

The Princeton Athletics Twitter feed started a contest yesterday to choose the best picture of the 2019-20 academic year. The contest will continue for a month, as the 33 pictures that represent all of the programs gets whittled down to the winner.

Make sure you check it out. It figures to be fun.

A (Fathers') Day At The Beach

TigerBlog has been a father for a little more than 23 years now.

Before he gets to that, he has a story from his last few hours before he became a parent for the first time. It was around 3 am, a few hours before TigerBlog Jr. made his first appearance. It was time to head to the hospital, and when TB went to close the garage door, he caught one of his fingers between the pieces that snap together as the door shuts.

It hurt. A lot.

What TB learned is that in a maternity ward, nobody cares about a dad's finger, no matter how swollen it got. There was just no sympathy coming his way.

What the heck?

The first five years of being a parent are the longest. Actually, make that the first two or three years. Each moment in a baby's life needs to be supervised, and that makes each day stretch on for an eternity- broken up only by those glorious times that every new parent cherishes, nap times.

Even laundry with a baby isn't easy.

When you do your laundry, you have big pants, big shirts, big socks. You get the idea. With a baby, you have to fold five onesies for every one of your own t-shirts, and there is no shortage of onesies to wash when you have babies.

TigerBlog had never changed a diaper before he had children. He thinks it took him around 20 minutes to do it the first time, and then about 20 seconds for that diaper to fall off.

By the time he was done, he could change a baby in less than 30 seconds. He had it down to a science.

TB was thinking about what it was like to have little kids yesterday, which happened to be Fathers' Day. He thought about his Princeton colleagues who have their own little kids, and what it's been like for them the last few months.

For those who have grammar school kids, it's been a spring of home schooling, and that couldn't have been easy. For those who have pre-school kids, it was sort of business as usual, minus any kind of child care, which always made for at least a bit of a respite once kids were old enough.

And those who have both? Bless their saintly souls.

TB is glad he never found himself in that situation. He also hopes that it doesn't happen ever again for anyone.

For TB, Fathers' Day 2020 featured a trip to the beach with his daughter, Miss TigerBlog ’22. It's both of their favorite places, or at least one of their favorites, along with lacrosse fields and Broadway theaters.

To get on the beach, by the way, they had to log on to a website at 7 am to grab one of 500 day passes made available.

As they sat there, they happened to pick a spot that was surrounded by little kids. It made TB nostalgic for the days when his own kids were young and they'd go to the beach.

These little kids had boundless energy, and they had parents who didn't. It's a mismatch really, as the parents are just hoping to bring back the same number of kids they brought, even if it's not necessarily the ones they came with (just kidding about that part).

MTB spent most of her time stretched out on a blanket, or in the water. She required no supervision, which allowed TigerBlog to do what he loves, which is to sit in a beach chair, look out at the water, smell the salty air, put his feet in the ocean.

And, of course, reflect. On this day, the main topic was, appropriately enough, fatherhood. Being a father is an amazing thing.

There have been a lot of ups, a few downs (TBJ lost three retainers within two months, for instance) and a whole lot of pride.

His daughter is a member of the Princeton women's lacrosse team. As with every Princeton athlete, she took her own road to becoming a Tiger. In her case, that included her first school experience at the U-League Nursery School, which is across the street from the Jadwin Gym parking lot.

As like any other father of any other Princeton athlete, TB takes a great deal of pride in seeing his daughter compete here. And to have the experience she's having.

TB saw the social media posts from the various Princeton teams wishing all the Tiger dads a Happy Fathers' Day. They were sweet and they were cute, but for TB, they were something much deeper.

He can relate first hand to what it means to be one of those Tiger dads, and it is amazing.