Lovett And Halpern

TigerBlog is a fan of those 1970s sports Twitter feeds, the one that have old pictures of the players whom TB grew up watching.

He has his favorites, but even seeing the ones he couldn't stand makes him smile and takes him back. Also, if you want to know what the greatest way to ever watch NFL highlights has been, click HERE and you'll see.

The best game in that package is the one between Chicago and Oakland. Before the invention of FieldTurf, games on natural grass often turned into mud bowls like the one those two teams played.

Of course, there was also the old-fashioned artificial turf that you can see in some of the games. If you're not sure what it was like, it wasn't that much different than playing on very old carpet - or cement. 

For TigerBlog, watching the show requires several pauses to check out rosters from early 1970s, to remind himself of who No. 81 was or where that quarterback went to college.

Also, if you do watch, you can see a play in the Saints-Packers game that TB has never seen anywhere else. There was a blocked field goal that turned into a first down for the team whose field goal was blocked. 

The player who caught the pass, by the way, was No. 66 Ray Nitschke, a Green Bay linebacker who is as frightening a football player as has ever played the game.

It's also fun to see stadiums that no longer exist. TB was a big fan of watching football games with baseball lines and dirt patches for bases on them.

For some of the teams in the league, their uniforms are still essentially the same. For others, they've evolved way past where they were in those years, and, if you ask TB, they have not evolved for the better.

Look at the Eagles' highlights in that show. If you're an Eagles' fan, you wouldn't rather see your team still dressed in those unis? The same is true with the Rams.

Green Bay's uniforms haven't changed. The one that Nitschke was wearing is very similar to this one:

Your daily dose of #OrangeJ21CE!!#Princeton2Pro pic.twitter.com/q2J2QeWmiy

— Princeton Football (@PrincetonFTBL) September 29, 2020

The player in the picture is, of course, Princeton's own John Lovett, who is now a tight end/fullback/whatever they need him to be for the Packers.

Lovett was the 2016 and 2018 Bushnell Cup winner as the Ivy League's Offensive Player of the Year. He missed the 2017 season due to a shoulder injury, and the Bushnell Cup winner that year was another Princeton quarterback, Chad Kanoff.

Lovett may not be as frightening as Nitschke, but he certainly is intimidating. He wasn't so much a quarterback at Princeton as much as a wrecking machine, a physical force that just overwhelmed the league. The result was a record-setting offense, wins in the final 13 games in which Lovett played, two Ivy League championships and a perfect 10-0 record his senior year.

He earned a Super Bowl ring while on injured reserve, was released in the off-season and is now in his first year with Green Bay. He was released at the end of training camp and then brought back to the practice squad, from which he was activated the first two weeks. At that point Green Bay either needed to sign him to the active roster or risk losing him on waivers before he could be returned to the practice squad, and Green Bay, seeing his value, put him on the active roster.

Lovett can throw, catch and run. So far in three games, he's done none of those things. What he has done is block and add a power dimension to the offense for a team that is 3-0.

Again, winning seems to follow Lovett around.

Speaking of winning, congratulations to Jeff Halpern, who became the latest Princeton alum to be a member of a Stanley Cup winner.

Say Hello To Lord Stanley!

Jeff Halpern '99 & @TBLightning Are #StanleyCup Champions!#PrincetonPros pic.twitter.com/Ifit6kQxRf

— Princeton University Hockey (@princetonhockey) September 29, 2020

Halpern is an assistant coach for the Tampa Bay Lightning, who closed out the Dallas Stars - and another Princeton alum, Taylor Fedun - to win the Cup Monday night.

It was a long grind to get there for Tampa Bay. There was the majority of the regular season, then the break when the COVID-19 situation first arose, then the uncertainty of whether or not the season would resume and finally the games and the playoffs in the bubble. 

An asterisk for the Lightning? Quite the opposite. No team has ever had to do more to win a championship. 

Halpern becomes the fifth Princeton alum this century to be part of a Stanley Cup winner. 

5 Cup Champs Since 2007 For The Tigers! https://t.co/xGcJ76jnkq

— Princeton University Hockey (@princetonhockey) September 29, 2020

 

Fairman, Flippen And Myslik

So what is there to talk about today? 

TigerBlog's mistake yesterday?

He referred to the guest room in Princeton Stadium as the Class of 1952 Lounge, when it's actually the Class of 1956 Lounge. It's Class of 1952 Stadium. 

TB apologies to all members of the great class of 1956, including the one-time Princeton Director of Athletics Royce Flippen.

There have been only five people who have held the title of Director of Athletics at Princeton. That's it. Five.

And that's since there first was an AD, back in 1941. So that's five people in 79 years. 

The first was Ken Fairman, from 1941-1970. Flippen was next, from 1973-1979. 

The third was Robert Myslik, who was the AD from 1979-1994. Gary Walters, whose birthday was yesterday, was the AD from 1994-2014. Since then, Mollie Marcoux Samaan as been the Ford Family Director of Athletics. 

For today, TB will share some more about the first three on that list. 

Before 1941, the person who oversaw the athletic department worked for the Dean of the College and was called the Graduate Manager of Athletics. When Asa S. Bushnell left that position at Princeton to become the first commissioner of the ECAC in 1938, Ken Fairman took over as the Graduate Manager. 

The actual Department of Intercollegiate Athletics was formed three years later. Fairman became its first director.

Ken Fairman was certainly an interesting guy. 

Fairman grew up in Syracuse. At Princeton he won eight varsity letters between football, basketball and lacrosse, and he won numerous honors in all three, especially being an All-American in football and basketball.

In addition, Fairman is the one of only three people who have ever won the Poe-Kazmaier Trophy (then just the Poe Trophy) as the top Princeton football player and the B.F. Bunn Award as the top Princeton basketball player. The other two are Neil Zundel (Class of 1948) and George Sella (Class of 1950).

Fairman was an assistant coach at Princeton the year after he graduated, and the one year later he became the head basketball coach. When he moved on three years later to take over for Bushnell, the position of basketball coach went to none other than Franklin C. (Cappy) Cappon.

As TB said, in 1941 Fairman became the AD. In 1942? He left Princeton to become a tank commander in World War II, even earning the French Croix de Guerre.

He came back to Princeton in 1946, and he retired in 1970. 

Other Fairman facts: 1) he was also the mayor of Princeton at one point, 2) he is credited with developing the circular wrestling mat and the circular crease in lacrosse, 3) he was the AD when Princeton started women's athletics, 4) he hired Charlie Caldwell, Dick Colman, Butch van Breda Koll and Pete Carril.

Meanwhile, back at Royce Flippen, did you know that while he was at Montclair High School, Royce lettered 12 times in his final three years, winning four letters each year. He played football in the fall, basketball in the winter and baseball in the spring, and he'd go from baseball to track and field to practice and compete. 

In fact, he was so good at track and field that he was the New Jersey Group IV long champ champion his senior year. He went on to captain the Princeton football team in 1955 to a 7-2 record that included a 6-1 run against teams that one year later would officially be called the Ivy League for the first time.

Other Royce facts: 1) he proposed to his wife on the night before his final Princeton football game, 2) he went to the Harvard Business School after graduation, 3) he was a United States Marine, 4) there is still one coach at Princeton whom he hired - men's track and field coach Fred Samara.

Myslik replaced Flippen in 1979. He also grew up in North Jersey, and he went to Trinity-Pawling before coming to Princeton, where he was a baseball player and a member of the Class of 1961.

Other Myslik facts: 1) he won a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the London School of Economics, 2) he also went to the Harvard Business School, 3) he spent nine years working for a chemical company in Europe (six in Italy, three in England), 4) he hired two Hall of Fame lacrosse coaches (Chris Sailer and Bill Tierney).

And there you have it, today's conversation. 

What will tomorrow have in store? Come back and find out. 

TB will think of something to say. 

Happy 75th

This past Saturday would have been the home opener for the Princeton football team.

It would have been Bucknell at Princeton. TigerBlog supposes the game would have been on Faculty and Staff Day, and he further assumed it would have been an evening kickoff.

The game would have been a rematch of the one a year ago in Lewisburg, where Princeton defeated Bucknell 56-23 on a steamy day.

Kevin Davidson threw an Ivy League-record seven touchdown passes in that Princeton win, while Andrew Griffin tied the Ivy League record by catching four of those.

Both Davidson and Griffin had played smaller roles in their careers prior to last season, when they both exploded into starring roles. By season's end, Griffin was a first-team Academic All-American - Princeton football's first in 21 years - and Davidson was on his way to the Cleveland Browns' training camp. 

Though two weeks of this season, there would in all certainty have been seniors like Davidson and Griffen a year ago, players who waited their turn for three years and then took advantage of it when the opportunity came for them. Through the years those have been some of TB's favorite Princeton athletes, the ones who were loyal to the program, worked hard, stayed with and finally were rewarded with a chance.

There have been dozens - hundreds - across all sports through the years. 

If you are such a player, you have done more than gotten a chance for some playing time. You've learned a lot about yourself, and you've taken lessons that you almost surely will use for the rest of the your life in tough situations. 

That's one of the great values in sports. 

There will always be athletes who come in and from Day 1 are stars. It's not to say that they don't work hard - quite the opposite, most stars are also the hardest workers. It's just that there's always something to be said for the ones who have work just as hard but don't get to show what they can do in the games. 

It would be easy to give up, or to not work as hard.

For Davidson, his situation was even tougher, since he would almost surely have been the starter for two years had John Lovett not gotten hurt and missed what would have been his senior season of 2017. Instead, Lovett came back the next year to win a second Bushnell Cup and lead Princeton to a 10-0 record. 

Davidson then had only one year as a starter, and he led Princeton to an 8-2 record. His name can be found in many places in the Princeton record book, under "career" as well as "individual."

As TB went about his business Saturday evening, he contrasted things to what would have been had there been a game. He would have been in the press box. There would almost surely have been an event in the Class of 1956 Lounge.

And of course, between those two locations, he almost surely would have seen Gary Walters, the Ford Family Director of Athletics Emeritus.

Gary is a part of the fabric of Princeton Athletics. His role in the history of the athletic program is secure.

He first came to Princeton in the fall of 1963, after playing high school basketball for Pete Carril at Reading High in Pennsylvania. By his sophomore year, he was the starting point guard on a team that reached the NCAA Final Four. As a senior, he was on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

He would go on to a career in coaching, television and finance before shifting to return to Princeton in 1994 as the fourth Director of Athletics. He would spend 20 years as the Tiger AD, during which time Princeton teams combined for 220 Ivy League championships, or 74 more than the next-best total in the league during those years.

His legacy includes a great deal more than just on-field success. He was the one who originated the phrase "Education Through Athletics," a core belief that is still about more than just words on a sign. There was so much more than that, in areas like facilities, gender equity and the integration of athletics into the overall educational mission of the University. 

Like his successor, Mollie Marcoux Samaan, Gary very much valued the student-athlete experience and the role athletics played in the education of the student-athletes above all else.

Beyond all the Princeton stuff,  Gary also was a national leader, especially in his role on the Division I men's basketball committee, eventually rising to committee chair.

Today is Gary's birthday. His 75th.

It would have been good to see him at the football game Saturday night. There will be others.

In the meantime, happy birthday to Gary. 

There haven't been many Princetonians who have given more than he has.

Going Back - Two For One On 1,000 Points

TigerBlog was watching "Pardon The Interruption" Wednesday when Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon mentioned that it was the 37th anniversary of the day that Steve Carlton won his 300th game.

TB already knew this, because that was the same day that TB covered his first high school football game. In the newspaper the next day, the story of Carlton's 300th dominated the front page, while TB's story was way in the back. What was that about? 

The PTI guys had another "Carlton" story earlier in the week, and when TB saw "Carlton" on the rundown on the right side of the screen, he wondered if he'd had the date wrong all these years. Nope. As it turned out, Monday was the birthday of Alfonso Ribeiro, who played Carlton on "The Fresh Prince Of Bel Air."

That made TB laugh. Anyway, he's not done with his nostalgia for the week. 

Today he offers this week's edition of "Going Back." This would have been TigerBlog for Feb. 17, 2003:

TigerBlog spent his weekend in Jadwin Gym, though at one point his thoughts drifted about 5,000 miles to the west, to a different basketball venue.

That one would be the Stan Sheriffs Center, located on the campus of the University of Hawaii. That arena plays a big part in what has become an extraordinary set of statistical anomalies.

And you know how much TigerBlog loves a good statistical anomaly.

TB's role this weekend was that of color commentator for the men's basketball games against Brown (an 80-73 loss Friday night) and then against Yale (a very gritty 56-49 win that keeps the Tigers very much in the hunt in the Ivy League race).

The Princeton men are chasing a third straight Ivy title and what would be a sixth in eight years. There have also been seven straight postseason appearances for the men, with four NCAA appearances and three NITs. The men have won four postseason games during this run.

It was a must-win Saturday night for the Tigers, who did so with four players in double figures, led by 15 from Ray Robins, who also had 10 against Brown. Will Venable went all 40 minutes in the win over Yale after going 39 against Brown.

The men are now 11-9 overall and 5-2 at the midway point of the Ivy season, looking up at unbeaten Penn and once-beaten Brown. There is a long way to go before the season ends with the Tigers and Quakers at Jadwin Gym. 

There will be more on the men's basketball team as the week goes along. For today, though, TB promised you a great statistical anomaly, and a great statistical anomaly you will have.

The best game of the weekend in the Ivy League was played in New Haven Saturday night, when the Princeton women defeated Yale 94-92 in three overtimes.

It was two different halves for Princeton that forced OT in the first place. The Tigers led 45-28 at the break, when it seemed like overtime was the last thing anyone would have to worry about. Princeton was on fire from three in the first 20 minutes, shooting 8 for 17 to build that 17-point lead.

And then it vanished. Yale stormed back all the way, knotting it at 78-78. It wouldn't be settled for three overtimes.

But again, where's the anomaly?

Here it is. Princeton seniors Maureen Lane (21 points) and Allison Cahill (24 points) both went over 1,000 point in the game. Two teammates, both of whom reached 1,000 points in the same game.

How often does that happen? That may never have happened before, right?

Well, just a second. In fact, the last time Princeton women's basketball had someone reach 1,000 points, it was also two someones. 

Going back four years, both Maggie Langlas and Kate Thirolf went over 1,000 points in the same game. Has that ever happened? 

Has a college basketball team ever had two players reach 1,000 points in the same game - twice? 

Oh, and where was it that Langlas and Thirolf went over 1,000? It was on the court at the Sheriff Center in Hawaii.

Why is that a big deal? 

Well, that just also happens to be the court where the most recent men's 1,000-point scorer did so. Gabe Lewullis scored his 1,000th point there in the 1998 Rainbow Classic. That made it three straight Princeton 1,000-point scorers who did so on the same court, only it was an away venue.

And the Sherrif Center just happens to be the Division I venue located furthest from Jadwin Gym.

So yeah, those are all great anomalies. 

And, by the way, congratulations to Maureen Lane and Allison Cahill for this incredible achievement. 

TB, for his part, would say that there is a much greater chance that someone comes along and breaks Sandi Bittler's career points scoring record or that Princeton's women's basketball team goes to eight NCAA tournaments in a 10-year stretch than there is that there will be two 1,000-point scorers in the same game ever again.

He will let you know if he's right.

Questions 2 And 3

To the poster who left the comment asking TigerBlog to answer three questions about the emotional effects that certain Princeton events have had on him through the years, TB will be answering the other two at some point.

It's just that they're really difficult questions: 

2. What events have made you angriest or saddest? If that works for you, then proceed to List 3. What events have been most thought-provoking? Not just an emotional experience, but a cerebral one.

Actually, he'll take a shot at those two right now.

What makes an event thought-provoking? Or cerebral?

It has to have a larger issue at stake than just the outcome of a game, TB supposes. Interestingly, at least to TB, this is the tougher of the two questions, and yet it's the one where an answer immediately leapt into his head. 

He'll get to that shortly.

But first, the second question asks about which events have made him the angriest or saddest. 

Angry? Has he ever had actual anger about an event at Princeton?

He can equate sadness with losing a really tough game. That would be easy enough. Which games made him saddest?

Well, there was the 2009 NCAA men's lacrosse quarterfinal game, a 6-4 loss to Cornell at Hofstra. Princeton dug itself an early hole and never came all the way back in one of the most intense, fiercely contested, highly defensive games he's ever seen. Here's what TB wrote about that game:

If the Princeton men's lacrosse team thought its first game against Cornell this year was frustrating, the sequel turned out to be worse.

Princeton had been ranked No. 1 in the country heading into the regular season game at Cornell but lost 10-7. Then the Tigers lost the quarterfinal game. Cornell would lose in overtime to Syracuse in the championship game that year, and, much like in the shortened 2020, Princeton, Syracuse and Cornell were the best teams in the country.

That quarterfinal loss also was the last game Bill Tierney would coach at Princeton. His postgame quote was epic: "Sometimes in athletics, it doesn't work out the way you want." 

That game was excruciating to watch, in that TB kept thinking Princeton would get untracked, but Cornell would never allow it. HERE is what TB wrote after that game.

That Princeton team did have a great note, though. The Tigers went 13-3 in 2009, losing twice to Cornell and twice at Hofstra.

Was he sad after that game? Yes. He knew Princeton had a real chance at the NCAA championship. Was he angry after the game? No. 

Angry implies some sort of injustice has occurred. For angry, let's go to the 2015 NCAA women's basketball tournament.

As you may recall, Princeton went 30-0 in the regular season that year. The reward for Princeton? An eight seed. Eight? For 30-0. That made TB actually angry. 

That's the worst seed you could get. It meant an 8 vs. 9 game (Princeton defeated Wisconsin-Green Bay in that one), which meant the No. 1 seed in the second round - on the No. 1 team's home court. That meant Maryland, who ended the Tiger season at 31-1. 

TB wrote this after the game: "It wasn't a fair draw for the Tigers. What they deserved was to play at home, in Jadwin, as a fourth seed. What they deserved was to get Maryland in the next round, on a neutral court."

That's still true to this day. It was an injustice, and it's why TB was angry about what happened.

As for as an emotional, cerebral experience, he again goes back to men's lacrosse, to the 2004 NCAA semifinals.

Princeton played Navy in that game and lost 8-7. The Tigers had a bunch of chances, but as TB recalls, Navy goalie Matt Russell had an incredible game, including stopping Peter Trombino with seven seconds left. 

What made that game emotional and cerebral? 

That Navy team was made up of players who knew that there was a really, really good chance that they'd soon be going from lacrosse fields to battlefields. And that's what happened. 

Many of those players who took on Princeton that day ended up in Iraq and Afghanistan, and some of them did not come back.

Because of what was happening at the time, that Navy team became the heavy sentimental favorite of any casual fan. That put Princeton as the team that almost everyone rooted against. 

And it was really hard to be a Princeton representative that Final Four. TB definitely wanted the Tigers to win, but he fully understood why everyone else wanted Navy. And one of his top memories of that day? It was watching the Navy players during the national anthem. 

TB thinks back to that game both to answer the question and to remember the memory of Brendan Looney, a midfielder for Navy that day who went on to become a Navy SEAL.

This week marked the 10th anniversary of Looney's death in Afghanistan. 

TB highly recommends reading THIS STORY by Matt Kinnear in Inside Lacrosse from earlier this week.

The Pennington-Academy Of The New Church Game

TigerBlog figured he'd go to law school at some point when he started college.

He got detoured along the way by a fairly random set of events. Try to keep up here:

* BrotherBlog also went to Penn, two years ahead of TB. He had a job in the psychology department as a freshman and sophomore but then moved to the Office of the General Counsel his junior year when the woman he worked for in psychology went there.

* When TB got to Penn, he took BB's job in the psych department. The job was mostly making copies of reading assignments, especially for grad students. This was before the internet, obviously, but also before the copy machine could collate and staple, so TB was the collater and stapler. This usually involved making however many copies were necessary (say, 50 of a 25-page paper) and then laying them down on the floor one page on top of the other. It was tedious.

* TB worked with someone who was a graduate assistant coach on Penn's men's basketball team and a recent grad. Today he is the head coach at the University of Iowa. His name is Fran McCaffery.

* TB became friends with Fran, and his older brother Jack, a longtime sportswriter in the Philadelphia area. At the time, Jack wrote for the Trenton Times.

* At one point, Jack asked TB if he'd like to cover some high school football games for the newspaper. TB said he had no experience in writing, none, but Jack said it didn't matter. And so TB said "sure." That's how he got his start.

So to review, TB got his writing start at a daily newspaper in Trenton despite never having written one word before and, for that matter, never actually having been to Trenton before. He got the job because he was friends with someone whose brother was a sportswriter in Trenton, and he was only friends with that person in the first place because his own brother's random work-study job had gone from the psych department to the OGC's office and he was able to replace him. 

Say, for instance, that BB had stayed for four years in the psych department. Then what? TB wouldn't have met Fran, which meant he wouldn't have met Jack, which meant he wouldn't have gotten the job at the Trenton Times.

TB has thought back to this fairly often in his life. Where would it all have left him? Law school?

Or maybe there would have been a different intervention of fate that would have led him to a completely different world. So where would he have been in 2020? 

College athletics? Probably not. Although maybe. Who knows? After all, TB's undeniably best professional skill is his ability to write. But maybe that never would have come out.

Is it possible that TB is a financial genius and never found that out? Or, if not a banker, maybe a great baker? 

Anyway, he spent six years covering high school sports before moving up to cover colleges with the great Harvey Yavener in 1989. It was from that point that he first started covering Princeton Athletics, and he came to work for Princeton when a job in the Office of Athletic Communications opened up in 1994.

Even then, there was a bit of fate involved. Bob Myslik had left Princeton and Gary Walters had not yet started, so there was no Director of Athletics around to give approval on the hiring. Gary has joked to TB through the years that had he been there, he never would have hired a Penn alum to work in his communications office. Was he serious?

The first game TB covered for the Trenton Times was a high school football game between Pennington School and the Academy of the New Church. It was played on a pristine field in Bryn Athyn, in Bucks County.

TB was right. He had no idea what he was doing. But hey, he pieced it together, even writing a reasonably coherent story that he probably has stored away somewhere. 

He remembers going back to the newsroom after the game, writing the story and giving it to the copy editor, a man named Harry Chaykun, a classic newspaperman himself. TB proudly stood over Harry's shoulder while he read it, and when he was done, TB waited for the judgement. 

None was forthcoming, and so TB initiated the following conversation:

TB: "What did you think?"
Harry: "I'm still awake."

Even now that makes TB laugh. Once he got to know Harry, he realized that was about the biggest praise he'd ever get.

Anyway, everything that has come since professionally for TB started there. All of the great experiences he's had at Princeton, first as a sportswriter and in all the years of working here. All of the great people he's met. All of the legendary athletes he's seen. All of the epic games. All of the championships. All of the travel.

All of it started at Pennington at ANC.

Why bring that up now?

Because that game was 37 years ago today. 

Happy anniversary, fate. Thanks for everything.

The Finals

Well, it went from air conditioning to heat in almost no time around here.

It seems like it was in the 80s and even 90s not that long ago, like a week or so ago. Now it's been into the high-30s at night and hasn't reached 70 during the day for awhile.

Some people like the colder weather. TigerBlog is a fan of summer and warmth. 

In fact, he's in the denial stage, figuring that if he continues to wear shorts then it'll stay warm. That's how it works, right? You wear shorts when it's warm, so if you're wearing shorts, it must be warm.

Sadly, he might have some cause and effect issues mixed in there.

Today is the official first day of fall. It's a different feeling than most - make that all - previous first days of fall for TB.

He's never been a huge fan of when it starts to get cold, but it's also always coincided with the start of a new academic, and therefore athletic, year. That's always been exciting. 

It's not quite the same in 2020, which, by the way, is the most obvious sentence TB has ever written.

With no athletic events on the schedule because of the COVID-19 pandemic, now it's just cold weather on the immediate horizon.

The impact of this up until maybe a week ago is that it didn't feel like early September. It still felt like July, the middle of summer, with the new seasons looming out there on the horizon but not quite here yet.

TB has spoken to several people in college athletics who feel the same way. They've all said the same thing, that it's still July.

As TB wrote yesterday, if you did a poll of the people in the athletic department, he's guessing 100 percent of them would say they would prefer to have the events being played as usual, even if it meant more work. That's why you work in college athletics in the first place.

Of course it's not July. It's September. And that means ... the Stanley Cup Finals? 

In 2020 it does.

TB actually went back to see when the exhibition season began for this season, and it actually was one year and one week ago, to Sept. 15, 2019. The regular season began on Oct. 2, 2019. Now here it is, the Stanley Cup Finals. 

If you had gone back to one year ago today and asked TB to write down 10 possible reasons why the Stanley Cup Finals would have been pushed back until late September, he wonders if he would have come up with "global pandemic." He might have had his first though be "labor issue in the league" and possibly nine blank spaces.

And now here it is. Last night was Game 2 between the Dallas Stars and the Tampa Bay Lightning.

There will be a Princeton winner no matter which team skates away with the Stanley Cup, as Dallas features Taylor Fedun on its roster. Tampa Bay features assistant coach Jeff Halpern. Both of them are former Roper Trophy winners as the top senior male athlete at Princeton, and both won ECAC championships and made NCAA tournament appearances with the Tigers.

Fedun, a 2011 graduate and a mechanical and aerospace engineering major, is third all-time at Princeton in points by a defenseman. He's had a very solid NHL career, first with Vancouver and Buffalo and now with Dallas. In the last two regular seasons with the Stars, he played in 81 games with six goals and 14 assists.

Halpern, who graduated in 1999 with an econ degree, is fifth all-time at Princeton in points. He also had a long NHL career, as well as internationally with the U.S. national team, including serving as captain for the Americans at the 2008 World Championships.

In his 14 years as an NHL player, Halpern scored 152 goals and added 221 assists. Despite being undrafted out of Princeton, Halpern played nearly 1,000 regular season NHL games. 

Now and he and Fedun are going head-to-head for the Stanley Cup.

Princeton has had several winners of the Cup. The list is: 

George Parros '03 (Player) – Anaheim; 2007
Kevin Westgarth '07 (Player) – Los Angeles; 2012
Brent Flahr '96 (Scout) – Anaheim; 2007
Chris Patrick '98 (Director of Player Development) – Washington; 2018

Thinking Football

It was nearly 5 Saturday afternoon when TigerBlog texted his colleague Cody Chrusciel.

In addition to his work in multimedia, Cody, of course, is also the play-by-play man for Princeton football. TB texted him and asked him this:

"Would you rather be doing whatever it is you're doing now or be getting on the bus for the ride back from VMI?"

Cody texted him back in a few seconds and said he'd take the bus.

Now TB has no idea what Cody was doing at the time. Maybe he was doing something tedious.

Or maybe he's like everyone else at Princeton. There are no fall sports, just like the spring was cancelled in mid-March, which means that pretty much anything game-related has not had to be done.

And there's nobody who works at Princeton wants it this way.

And so TB and Cody were on the same page Saturday afternoon. They both would have liked to have been in Lexington, Va., for the Princeton football opener against VMI.

TigerBlog looked back through the Princeton football year-by-year results to see the last time the Tigers played in Virginia. Turns out it was in 2011, when the Tigers were at Hampton. He should have remembered that one.

He did remember that going back a little further, Princeton was in Virginia to play at William & Mary in 1986. Going back way further, Princeton played at the University of Virginia twice in the 1890s.  

That's been it for trips to Virginia.

As TB looked back at the all-time records, he noticed two things that he didn't know or never noticed or something like that.

First, every year from 1954 through 1979, Princeton played nine games - seven Ivy League games and non-league games against Colgate and Rutgers. Also, the overwhelming majority of those games were in Palmer Stadium. 

In fact, all of the Colgate games were at Princeton, and all but the 100th anniversary game in 1969 against Rutgers were at Princeton. Rutgers won that 1969 game, and the Daily Princetonian headline of the game said "Second Hundred Years Begins Worse Than The First."

A year later, Rutgers was back at Palmer Stadium in the final meeting the two original teams. That year, 1980, was also the year that Princeton's schedule expanded from nine games to 10, and the Tigers added Maine to the non-conference schedule along with Rutgers and Colgate.

The other thing that TB noticed from the old schedules was that the 1951 unbeaten Tigers also played a nine-game schedule. Does anyone know which current Ivy League team was not on the schedule and which three teams who would now be considered non-league were on the schedule? 

Keep in mind, the Ivy League didn't actually being officially until the 1956 season.

So who was on the 1951 schedule? It was every Ivy League team other than Columbia, of all teams. 

And the non-league teams? Lafayette, which is no shock. Navy, which is also no shock. The third? 

How about New York University? Who knew? 

Princeton played NYU in 1901, 1910 and 1912, winning all three and shutting out NYU all three times, and then not again until 1951, winning 54-20. 

Why did Princeton play NYU? Well, that story resonates a bit in 2020.

Columbia was originally on the schedule for the 1951 opener, but the game was cancelled a little more than a week before it was to be played. Why? Because two Columbia players were thought to have come down with polio.

Princeton was able to replace Columbia at the last minute with NYU, who had an open date that week. Dick Kazmaier scored three touchdowns in the game to start his run to the 1951 Heisman Trophy.

One year later, after the 1952 season, NYU would drop its football program. 

As for Columbia, it played eight games that season, beginning one week later against Harvard. The entire Lions team was tested for polio, obviously, and no other players tested positive.

It's not quite what 2020 has been, but it's similar.

And one more thing about that NYU game. Remember back in April when TigerBlog wrote about Joe Masi, a backup football player who wrote a poem about getting the game ball after scoring his only career touchdown as a Tiger? It was a very touching poem, and TB wrote about Masi shortly after his death.

You can read that one HERE.

His touchdown came in that game against NYU.

Grant Wahl Was Right

TigerBlog brought up Grant Wahl in yesterday's "Going Back" entry, mentioning how Grant had been a Daily Princetonian writer and an OAC student-worker back in the 1990s.

Then TB saw Grant's tweet that his father Dave had passed away yesterday. To Grant and his family, TB sends his condolences.

Grant, of course, has gone from Princeton to a long career in sportswriter and broadcasting and is one of the leading - or you could probably make that the single leading - soccer writers in the world. 

If you want some extraordinary writing for a college newspaper, or for that matter just extraordinary writing with no caveat, how about this from Grant after Princeton's 10-10 tie with Dartmouth that gave the Tigers the outright 1995 Ivy League football championship:

A glance at each of the sidelines after Sierk's kick revealed much more than than the hollow-gutted ambivalence that normally accompanies such results. There was senior quarterback Brock Harvey, leaping high in the air after his last-second scramble — his third long run in as many weeks — had put Princeton in position for the field goal. Harvey appeared to hang in the air longer than was possible, and when he finally landed he smashed every demon that has dogged him since his first start at quarterback, a loss in last year's opening game to Cornell. There was senior linebacker Dave Patterson, the cool Jack Nicholson with the upraised arms, knowing that the Tiger defense earned the title and "won" this game with an effort that never slackened. And there was the Dartmouth sideline, where the Big Green wilted, their own improbable Ivy title hopes quashed at the very last second, along with those of Penn and Cornell. Some tie. 

As far as I'm concerned, when head coach Steve Tosches called a timeout with four seconds on the clock and Princeton inside the Dartmouth one, his decision didn't break down to "high-percentage field goal versus risky plunge over the middle." Going for the field goal was a gamble: Sierk had missed the same short attempt from the wide hash mark earlier in the season, and as a freshman, he could have crumbled under the pressure. But Tosches knew his personnel and made the right call. Penn was demolishing Cornell, and after last week's loss to Yale, it wasn't as if Princeton was protecting a perfect record, like Nebraska had in 1984 when it went for two against Miami (Fla.) and lost the national championship in the process. 

The Tigers' second goal each season, after an undefeated record, is to win an outright Ivy League tide, and the tie gave them that. So while finishing 0-1-1 isn't something Princeton followers and players will remember with much fondness, in 20 years they won't recall it at all. What they'll remember are Harvey breaking free down the left side, Patterson slamming into a runner in the backfield and a deceptively tricky 18-yard field goal that brought gold rings to Princeton — and Princeton alone — for the first time in 31 years.

That's tremendous, right?  

Now that it's actually 25 years after that, was Grant right? Yes, he was. 

When the 1995 football season comes up, it's always about being the outright Ivy champion and about the incredible drive that Harvey led to set up Alex Sierk's short field goal. The fact that Princeton started 8-0 and then lost to Yale and tied Dartmouth, to finish 0-1-1, never comes up.

More than Sierk's field goal, it was the 22-yard Harvey run to the Dartmouth 1, a play on which he was knocked out of bounds with four seconds left, that is the single most-memorable moment of that championship season.

When TigerBlog was at Virginia for men's lacrosse this past February, the photographer who was shooting the game for the Tigers was a local man named Brian McWalters. At the time, Brian, who has now shot a bunch of events for Princeton and has done a great job each time, asked if there were any fall events in the area that he could work.

TigerBlog immediately said yes, there was, a football game at Virginia Military Institute to start the season on Sept. 19. He told Brian to put it in his calendar, and Brian did just that.

That game would have been tomorrow. Today would have been a travel day, the six-hour drive down to Lexington. Obviously the COVID-19 situation changed all of those plans. 

TB would have loved to have seen the game at VMI's Foster Stadium. The forecast for Lexington for tomorrow is 65 degrees and sunny. It would have been a perfect day for the game.

Instead of looking ahead to that game today, TB is looking back, to 1995, and remembering that championship team, for which he was also the OAC football contact.

And in doing so, he can confirm that Grant Wahl was, indeed, correct.

Going Back - Opening Day

TigerBlog often will write that he has "covered" Princeton Athletics for more than 30 years. 

Actually, this is Year 32 for him with the Tigers. He can't imagine how many Princeton events he's seen in that time, but it's a lot. Maybe he can try to come up with some reasonable guess at some point.

The reason he uses the word "covered" when he talks about how long it's been is because of the fact that he's actually only on Year 27 of being employed by Princeton University. For the five years prior to that, he covered Princeton for the Trenton Times, back in the pre-internet days when getting information from the daily newspaper was a huge thing.

His introduction to Princeton Athletics came as a Penn student, when he logically thought that the Quakers were the good guys and the Tigers were the bad guys. It was during his five years at the newspaper when he first got to know the people at Princeton and realize how misinformed he'd been as an undergraduate.

It was also during those five years that he had the great opportunity to cover things like the men's basketball dynasty from 1989-92, the first two men's lacrosse NCAA championship teams and two Ivy League football titles (1989 and 1992) while also being introduced to women's athletics and the importance of equity. 

In addition, he met and saw compete some of the greatest athletes Princeton has had in so many sports. He even got to meet a women's soccer and hockey player who was a student worker in the Office of Athletic Communications - Mollie Marcoux.

He began his actual Princeton employment in the early summer of 1994, and so it was a few months before there were actually any games. His first game worked as a Princeton OAC staff member was the football game at Cornell on this day 26 years ago, Sept. 17, 1994.

As part of the "Going Back" series, here is what TigerBlog would have been for Tuesday, Sept. 20, 1994, since the Monday blog would have been mostly about the game, as opposed to TB's experience:

TigerBlog was wearing a tie Saturday. 

It was a first for him at a Princeton football game. Actually, for all of the Princeton events he's covered before, he'd only once worn a tie, and that was for the NCAA men's basketball game against Syracuse two years ago in Worcester.

He's been to a lot of Princeton events in the last five years. This time, though, it was much different. And not just because of the tie.

For the first time, TigerBlog was at a Princeton game as an actual employee of the University. It was certainly a much different feel for him.

He's been at Princeton for nearly three months now, but this was the first time he had a game to work. It has been a summer of getting familiar with the aspects of the job that were completely new to him, like how to operate a Macintosh computer. And to use PageMaker, the fancy desktop publishing software on the OAC Macs.

For that, by the way, he needs to thank his OAC colleague Chuck Sullivan, who spent some pretty frustrating moments teaching TB. The best part was when Chuck explained what "apple Z" did, which is to undo the most recent thing you did, only you have to do before you do anything else. As Chuck said "it's like an appeal play in baseball."

TB finished his first media guide - the football guide - and started on the next, for men's basketball. And yeah, he had a bad mistake on the media guide with a giant misidentified picture that he thought was captain Carl Teter, and he's pretty sorry about that one. If he works here for the next 25 years, he'll never forget the horrifying feeling he got when he opened the media guide after 2,500 of them were printed and saw that, no, it was not Teter on Page 1.

On the other hand, he can work here for the next 25 years and still have that be the worst mistake he ever made, so he got it out of the way quickly.

It's a very interesting dynamic to go from sportswriter to athletic communications contact. The people are all the same. The job is different. 

When you cover a team like Princeton, it's not like you're going to having an adversarial relationship with the coaches and athletes. Their stories are just too compelling for the most part.

It's just so much better to do so from the inside.

As for the game Saturday, the first two people TB saw in the Schoellkopf Field press box were Daily Princetonian writers - and OAC student workers - Nate Ewell and Grant Wahl. He jokingly, well, not really jokingly, half-jokingly maybe, asked them what he should be doing.

It was good to start with an away game. This coming Saturday (and the two after it) will feature home games at Palmer Stadium, beginning with Colgate and then with Bucknell and then Brown. TB has his first late-night experience last night with finishing a football game program.

Now he's looking forward to running the press box and all the little things that go along with it, as opposed to simply showing up for the game.

Oh, and one more thing from Saturday. The Cornell percussion made the spontaneous, and as it turned out dangerous, decision to pile on top of the Tiger mascot during the pregame performances, inadvertently injuring Blanch Rainwater, the Princeton student in the costume.

In fact, Rainwater had to be taken to the hospital, though she returned during the game. There were media requests to talk to her, and TB arranged them.

Again, he can work at Princeton for the next 25 years, make that the next 35 years, and he'd guess that it's unlikely that he'll be asked to set up in-game interviews with the mascot. 

But hey, you never know. It's all part of being the OAC contact.

For Day 1, he loved his new perspective. 

Maybe he'll stick it out for awhile.