Lorin Maurer, Remembered

 

TigerBlog cannot begin to express properly what he felt the minute he read the email that said that Lorin Maurer had died.

It's not possible, even now, 12 years later, to fully explain it.

Maybe the only time that comes close is 9/11, when he looked up at the clear blue sky on a pristine morning and felt something that was more confusion than anything else, like his brain couldn't process the notion that an airplane had flown into the World Trade Center on such a morning.

That's the best way to describe what he felt when he first saw that Lorin was gone, actually.  

It was confusion, extreme confusion, that resulted in an initial inability to fathom the news. His brain read the words in the email that Gary Walters had sent around and rejected them as impossible.

No chance. 

He read it again. And again. Each time, he had the same reaction. This was not possible.

Just like 9/11, though, it was true. Lorin was gone.

For those who don't know, Lorin Maurer was Princeton's Athletic Friends' Group coordinator prior to her death on this day 12 years ago. There are fewer and fewer people each year at Princeton who do know that, and probably fewer than 20 percent of the people who work in the Department of Athletics now worked with Lorin.

Lorin Maurer was a few weeks past her 30th birthday when she died. She was one of 49 people on a flight from Newark to Buffalo that crashed in icy weather, killing a 50th person on the ground as well.

Lorin was going to Buffalo for the wedding of her boyfriend's brother. It was all so normal. 

She was 30 and in love. Her own wedding couldn't have been that far off. 

Before she left for the airport, she was in a meeting that included TigerBlog. She was antsy, TB recalls, in the way that most people who need to catch a flight are antsy.

Maybe the fact that she was antsy left TB a bit surprised that she still hadn't left yet when he saw her again. It was probably 30 minutes or so later. 

At the time TB's office was on the Jadwin mezzanine. Lorin had been down the hallway a bit, and when she walked past TB's door, she stopped, smiled, didn't speak a word and kept going.

He never saw her again.

Who was Lorin, to those who never met her? She was a sweet young woman. She liked to have fun. She was very close with her family. She gave maximum effort at her job.

She had great friends in the athletic department, people with whom she was much closer than she was with TB. 

Mostly, she just brought a lot of positive energy to Princeton and to the people in her life. Her job required her to interact with members of Friends Groups from all different generations, and they all seemed to like her a lot.

TB remembers one day when he saw Lorin in the lobby of Jadwin, putting table clothes on tables. Why? There was an event coming up soon, and whoever was supposed to put the table clothes on the tables hadn't done it. 

As a result, it fell to her. That's part of the job. Did she complain? Nope. She just took care of it, laughing about it.

When TB goes back to the last time he saw her, it's her smile that he remembers the most. She was always smiling. 

And then she kept going down the hallway.

TB gave it no thought until he saw the email the next morning. Lorin Maurer was dead? It had to be a different Lorin Maurer, right?

It couldn't have been the Lorin Maurer he had just seen the day before. He read the email over and over. He watched TV all morning, hoping for some different outcome of the news.

By that night Princeton had home basketball. The news media descended on Jadwin, looking to speak with people who knew her. It was surreal. 

She should have been at a wedding in Buffalo, not on the news.

She was so alive, so happy, so young, so vibrant And then she was gone.

It didn't make sense then. It doesn't make sense now.

@coachbradley9

TigerBlog isn't sure why Princeton baseball coach Scott Bradley took so long to create a Twitter account.

TB does know that Bradley is off to a fantastic start in the 280-character world.

Bradley's Twitter feed goes back about three weeks, and yet he's already one of the best people TB follows. His tweets go from his experiences as a Major League Baseball player to his basic philosophies, and sometimes a combination of both.

Here are two examples:

Power of Observation!! As teammates with the Mariners Harold Reynolds, Phil Bradley and I watched the opposing team take batting practice before each and every game!! Was amazing what we learned!! @MLBNetwork @Kurkjian_ESPN @CoachYourKids @pgammo pic.twitter.com/J3FKZzwvpI

— Scott Bradley (@CoachBradley9) February 7, 2021

 And this one:

As parents, teachers and coaches do we ever just point our kids in the right direction and let them figure out the way or do will dictate every step???
It is amazing just what our players can figure out on their own if we allow them the freedom use their own instincts!!!!

— Scott Bradley (@CoachBradley9) February 8, 2021

There's more of that, but not a lot more right now on his feed. Presumably much more is on the way. He's clearly off to a great start.

Those are both great tweets.

The first one takes you inside the world of Major League Baseball. It's a grind, with game after game after game. The players need to be physically on top of their games at all times, and the mental toll is also great. 

Plus, simply reading the tweet, you can picture what it would be like to be a Major Leaguer, watching the opponent take BP, long before the first pitch. And then doing it again and again and again and again as the season goes along. 

The second one especially resonates with TigerBlog, having raised two kids. He's developed a philosophy of parenting that can be summed up in three words: "Figure it out." As in, whatever your somewhat grown children ask you, tell them to "figure it out." Anytime you think you're helping them, you're actually not.

One of the best experiences TB has had in all his time at Princeton was his trip with the baseball team to the 2016 NCAA regional in Lafayette, Louisiana. The opportunity to travel with the team and see how Scott Bradley runs his program was awesome.

You can find him on Twitter at @coachbradley9.

And while he's on the subject of baseball today (and what else would you want to talk about with about 20 feet of snow piled up everywhere?), TB would like to send out his congratulations to John Sadak.

If you're a Princeton basketball fan, the name John Sadak takes you back to his days as the play-by-play voice of the Tigers, first the women's team and then the men's. TigerBlog was his first partner for Princeton men's basketball, but he was replaced (TB was the one who did the replacing) with Noah Savage.

Sadak and Savage immediately clicked and were a great team, especially since Savage is much better than TB was. Savage and his current Princeton partner, Derek Jones, are equally a great team, and both have made their way onto ESPN for college basketball games.

As for Sadak, he left Princeton to pursue a full-time Major League Baseball play-by-play job. Along the way he has done a lot of college football and basketball on television, as well as NFL football on the radio. 

The news came out last week that Sadak had been hired to be the Cincinnati Reds television play-by-play man. It's the culmination of a process that speaks to what you need to do in the announcing world, which is basically start with whatever on-air work you can get and go from there.

The National League now features two former Princeton men's basketball play-by-play announcers, with Sadak and Tom McCarthy, the Phillies TV voice.

Like McCarthy with the Phils, Sadak will get TB to root for the Reds. 

Also like McCarthy, Sadak, TB is pretty sure, will always cherish his days with Princeton basketball.

Congratulations to John Sadak, a Princeton alum in his own way. 

It couldn't have happened to a better announcer - and person.

More BHM

There are three defensemen who have come through the Princeton men's lacrosse program who are immediately identifiable with an offensive player on an opposing team because of their epic head-to-head matchups.

All six of the players involved, by the way, were first-team All-Americans at some point of their careers.

First, there is George Baughan. You can't think of Baughan, a current Tiger, without thinking about Cornell's Jeff Teat. 

Then there is Chad Wiedmaier. When you mention Chad Wiedmaier, TigerBlog's first though is of how he battled another Cornell all-time great, Rob Pannell.

More than any other, though, the association of Princeton defenseman and opposing attackman is strongest when it comes to, well, TB doesn't have to tell you if you're been following the Tigers for the last 25 years.

It's definitely Damien Davis against Syracuse's Mikey Powell. 

Now those were classics.

Looking back on it, there were days were Davis had the better of it (holding Powell without a point while scoring a goal himself in an 11-10 Princeton win at the Carrier Dome in 2003) and days were Powell got the better of it (four goals, three assists in an NCAA tournament win). 

Mostly, they battled each other in ways where both had the moments of success, most clearly in the 2001 NCAA championship game.

Powell had two goals and two assists in that one, including the game-tying goal with 16 seconds left to force overtime. Davis stripped Powell of the ball in the overtime, and even before that he was all over the field as the Tigers stood up to the Orange juggernaut that had handed Princeton three straight lopsided losses prior to the final.

TigerBlog, who mentioned yesterday that he wrote a piece about Deborah Saint-Phard for the upcoming women's history book and that the piece will be available this week as part of the Black History Month celebration, caught up with Davis last week to write his story as well. 

Davis started every game of his four-year career at Princeton before graduating in 2003, and TigerBlog was at every one of those games. There aren't many players who have come through the program who played harder and at a higher level every single time he stepped on the field the way Damien Davis did. It was that combination, plus the way he was such a first-class representative of the program at all times, that made him one of TB's favorite players he's seen.

When TB caught up with him last week, the two talked about his days coming up through the Gilman School in Baltimore, his years at Princeton, how he has been involved in bringing lacrosse to kids in the inner-city of Baltimore and how he's doing professionally.

It's always good to talk to him.

You can read the story TB wrote HERE. Fittingly, the main picture is from the 2001 final, with Davis with the ball and Powell behind him, trying to chase him down.

TigerBlog was happy with it. He wasn't ready, though, for something that he would come to read a few days later. 

The story ran Monday. It was sent out on Princeton's social media channels as usual.

Then TB saw a quote tweet that really gave incredible context to what the most important part of the story was. You can see that here:

When I first picked up a lacrosse stick I wanted to be Mikey Powell. One Memorial Day weekend I watched SU/Princeton and saw Damien Davis. This big, strong, athletic defenseman who could take the ball away from Mikey and start a fast break. Best of all he looked like me ✊🏾 https://t.co/yuAXWEFvDD

— Brian (@BrianKnowsLax) February 9, 2021

TB has no idea who Brian is. He has no idea what Brian's lacrosse background is. 

He does know that what Brian said is very powerful. 

When Davis was coming up, there were not many black players, and certainly not many black players on his level. The ability to inspire comes in many forms, and it's easy to overlook the idea that there are kids out there who are looking for someone who looks like they do. 

Ashleigh Johnson, the Olympic gold medal water polo player, said something similar to TB when he interviewed her about her role in Princeton women's athletic history. 

As TB said, it's easy to overlook the importance of having someone who looks like you. If they can do it, you can do it.

That's what Black History Month is all about, the people who came through the doors so that other generations could see that it was possible for them as well.

RIP George Shultz

TigerBlog's first Super Bowl prediction was Kansas City 35, Tampa Bay 17.

He was off by only a whole lot. In fact, since TB said Kansas City would win by 18 and in fact Tampa Bay won by 22, he was way, way, way off.

In an effort to make better predictions, TB will do next year's after the game is over, for greater accuracy.

In the days before the Super Bowl, TigerBlog saw a story that ranked the first 54 Super Bowls in order of how good the game was. The worst was the one between San Francisco and San Diego 26 years ago. San Francisco won 49-26 in a game that wasn't even remotely close.

Back then TB was in the newspaper business, and he wrote that it was an important Super Bowl because no Super Bowl could ever be worse. It's highly probably that the game Sunday found a way to actually do the unthinkable and be worse than the Niners-Chargers game.

It was ever in doubt. The excitement that Pat Mahomes always brings was negated by a makeshift offensive line and a bad foot. Tom Brady was good, but he got a lot of help from his defense and some timely help from the refs (again).

The most amazing part of the game was that Brady, at the age of 43, was able to take a franchise that had one winning season in the last 10 years and was coming off records of 7-9, 5-11 and 5-11 and win the Super Bowl in Year 1.

That's seven Super Bowl wins for Brady, who won six at a place that had never won one before and then won another at a place that had been an afterthought for a long time. Hmmmm. What does that remind TB of (hint - Bill Tierney)?

TB's other prediction for the game did come true. The commercials were pretty universally awful,

Why do these companies spend all of that money on their spots and then have nobody say "hey, this really is bad?" The only ones that are any good are the ones that don't have someone who could be considered a "celebrity." Seriously, when was the last good commercial that had a celebrity in it?

Maybe they spend so much money on the celebrity and the production that they have no money left for a writer?

Anyway, that's the end of the football season.

On the day of the Super Bowl, the news came that George Shultz had passed away at the age of 100.

Here is the first sentence from his obituary:

Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a titan of American academia, business and diplomacy who spent most of the 1980s trying to improve Cold War relations with the Soviet Union and forging a course for peace in the Middle East, has died. He was 100.

George Shultz lived an extraordinary life. He served in the cabinet of two Presidents of the United States, first as Labor Secretary and Treasury Secretary under Richard Nixon and then later under Ronald Reagan as one of the greatest Secretaries of State this country has seen.

He was an artillery captain in the Marine Corps during World War II. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from MIT, and his career also included time as a professor at MIT, the University of Chicago and Stanford. 

As much as anything, he was a loyal Princetonian. 

This was from University President Christopher L. Eisgruber:
When George Shultz ’42 passed away this weekend, not long after celebrating his 100^th birthday, Princeton lost an alumnus who brilliantly exemplified this University’s ideals of learning, integrity, and service to the nation and humanity.   

A member of the Class of 1942, Shultz was a blocking back in the single-wing offense for the Tiger football team, until injuries ended his career. Even then he stayed with the program, helping coach the freshman team his senior year.

Legend had it that Shultz was such a devoted Princeton football player that he had a tattoo of Tiger on his butt. This was, according to one story TB read about Shultz, confirmed by his wife.

James Baker, another Princetonian who followed Shultz as Secretary of State, joked at Shultz' 90th birthday that he would do anything for him other than "kiss the Tiger."

That's great stuff.

With Shultz' passing, this country has lost another member of "the greatest generation." 

Princeton, and Princeton football, lost a giant of an alum.

HERE is the full obit for George Shultz.

 

Black History Month

Welp, it was another Sunday and another snowstorm in the Princeton area.

This wasn't quite like last week, when about two feet of snow fell. This was more like five or six inches or so, and it was the fluffy kind, as opposed to the icy kind.

Still, it's enough already with the snow. And TigerBlog's weather app has more little snowflakes next to Tuesady, Thursday, Saturday and the following Tuesday. What that turns into, who knows, but hey, that's just a lot of winter.

That doesn't even include the fact that the temperatures are going to be plummeting all week. 

Oh, and you know what's really annoying? When you're shoveling the driveway and you get it all done, and then all of the sudden the plow comes down the street and the next thing you know there's a large snow bank between you and the road again.

Of course, it's February, so maybe it shouldn't be all that surprising. It's just that last winter featured no snow at all, and TigerBlog sort of liked it that way.

In addition to being the heart of snow season, apparently, February is also Black History Month. 

Princeton Athletics is in the middle of its celebration. There have been social media posts and recognitions of the contributions of Princeton's black athletes and coaches, and there are plenty more to come as the rest of February rolls along.

TB has contributed to the content with some feature stories. On the women's side, there are four pieces, one for each week of the month. 

The first of those ran last week. The subject was Jackie Jackson, who was a women's basketball player in the 1970s. Jackson was the first black woman to be a captain of a Princeton women's team, and TB is almost 100 percent sure that she was also the first black woman to win a varsity letter.

This week's story will be about Deborah Saint-Phard, the Olympic shot putter who was in the Class of 1987. Saint-Phard is a doctor in Colorado these days. 

TB sent her the piece he wrote to do some fact-checking, and she ended up reading it back to him while they were on the phone. At one point there's a quote from her in which TB added "she said while laughing." As she was reading it back to him, she started laughing again. 

It was a good affirmation that she had laughed the first time.

Saint-Phard is one of the women TB has spoken to during his research for the book he's writing about Princeton women's athletic history. He'd of course heard of her and knew a bit about her accomplishments, but he had never met her and knew nothing about her personally.

That's been one of the two best parts of the project. There's been the part about telling the stories, which has been awesome. And there's the part about meeting people who previously had just been names in record books, which has been equally awesome.

Saint-Phard has been one of his favorites. Her story is tremendous, with the way her family fled the Haitian dictatorship of Papa Doc Duvalier when she was a baby and then all of the travels she had along the way as a kid.

There was her career at Princeton and the special relationship she had with men's track and field coach Fred Samara, who coached her as well. There was the way she reconnected with her native country and ended up on the Haitian Olympic team for the 1988 Games.

There's even the story that made her laugh when she told it to TB the first time and when she read it back to him the second time. That's the story of how she became the Haitian flag bearer at the Opening Ceremonies.

You'll have to read it for yourself later this week.

Saint-Phard went to medical school while training for the Olympic Games and World Championships (she finished in the top 20 in both). She has gone on to be a champion for girls and women in athletics, focusing her care on sports medicine for females.

She's also become more acutely aware of issues related to race and equality, especially as they relate to health care, and even more so in a COVID world. Even something as simple as taking the vaccine was something that she wanted to do as publicly as possibly, in light of historical situations where black people were not able to trust the government's health care policies or where those policies were negatively impacting black people.

Building trust, she said, is incredibly important. 

She even wrote about it in an article that was published in Inside Higher Ed, which you can read HERE.

The article is entitled "At the Intersection of Burnout, COVID and Systemic Racism." 

It's a fascinating piece, written by a fascinating woman, physician and Princeton alum. Being able to tell her story, and all of the others has been an honor for TB.

Girls And Women in Sports

The Super Bowl is Sunday. 

It's the Kansas City Chiefs against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The game is in Tampa, which makes the Bucs the first team ever to play the Super Bowl on their home field.

TigerBlog's prediction for the game: Kansas City 35, Tampa Bay 17. 

His other prediction: None of the commercials will be great.

He'll see Sunday if he's right about either one of those guesses and will get back to you Monday.

And that's enough Super Bowl talk for today. There are more important things to discuss anyway.

For starter, this week featured National Girls and Women In Sports Day. It was the 35th anniversary of the day, which celebrates achievement and participation in sports for girls and women. 

More than that, it encourages that participation. And there are few things better for girls and women than to participate in athletics.

Princeton's usual celebration of National Girls and Women In Sports Day has featured what TB has always found to be an extraordinary sight in the back of Jadwin Gym, with Princeton's women varsity teams surrounded by an army of little kids during what is essentially a clinic. This is followed by a women's basketball game.

Each year that TB has watched it, he's been amazed - and unable not to smile - at the sheer joy that the little kids (mostly girls, but with some boys mixed in) have at being that close to college athletes and being able to participate in the sports that they play.

Actually, it's always been a question for him about who is smiling more - the kids or the athletes.

Either way, there are lots of smiles. And it's just a truly wonderful scene.

This year, of course, has also marked the 50th anniversary of women's athletics at Princeton. TigerBlog, as he has mentioned, it writing a book on those first 50 years.

When women's athletics started at Princeton, Title IX was still just about two years away from being passed into law. There was nothing at all that required equality of opportunity other than a sense of fair play, and that was something that wasn't always associated with girls sports back then.

As TB has spoken with the women who competed for Princeton in the 1970s, he's been happy to hear that most of them have spoken positively about the assistance (or at least lack of resistance) they got from their male counterparts.

Those weren't easy times to be a female athlete though. It took a lot of fortitude to build these programs and create these future opportunities.

One thing that has really resonated with TB is the way that so many of those early women athletes and coaches realized that their success helped the overall process of coeducation tremendously. Without their success, and the high profile that went along with it, women at Princeton would have probably faced a tougher road. 

Those early athletes, and the subsequent passage of Title IX, really set the foundation for the decades of Princeton women athletes who have followed.

TB has sort of pointed to the early 1980s as the birth of the modern era for women's athletics at Princeton. Certainly by the 1990s it was really starting to roll along.

What's most important, though, is the way that opportunities for girls to play sports have increased. When TB talks to most of the early women athletes, their athletic careers either began because they happened to live in a place that afforded them the opportunity (especially suburban Philadelphia) or were delayed because there simply were no teams for them to play with.

Even moving a few decades down the road, there are still a few stories that started with "my older brother and his friends were playing and they let me play because they needed more kids" or something like that.

Today girls sports opportunities are plentiful. In fact, there are travel teams and club teams and strength coaches and everything else that makes up the youth sports culture.

And maybe it's too much too soon, like it is on the boys side as well. But it's still a chance to play.

From that comes so many positives.  

TB has seen it with his own daughter, one of those little kids who used to love to go to the clinic in Jadwin each year and who now is a Princeton varsity athlete herself. 

Her own story is one of how participating in sports helped grow her as entire person. It gave her confidence. It helped build work ethic. It taught her the value of working as a team. 

It gave her self-confidence. 

These are lessons that have served her so well as a Princeton engineering student, and not just as an athlete.

Now multiply that experience out to all of the girls out there who got to play and who continue to pull from those experiences.

The ones who opened those doors all those years ago deserve a huge thank you.

Rock On

TigerBlog was recently asked a pretty interesting question.

Could he name a musical artist who was originally part of a group and then went on to have a solo career after leaving the group and had his or her best music at that point. The question wasn't asking for someone who went on to have a very successful solo career. It was asking about someone who went on to make the best music after leaving the group.

He's struggled to come up a good answer.

John Lennon, for instance, had some great music after The Beatles broke up, but hey, they were The Beatles. The bar was set pretty high. 

Phil Collins had his most successful music after he left Genesis, but hey, it's Phil Collins.

Just kidding. Just kidding. Phil Collins actually isn't a terrible answer. He did have some pretty good solo stuff.

By the way, did you know Phil Collins might actually have done his best work before he ever even heard of Genesis? When he was 13, he played the Artful Dodger on the West End in "Oliver."

So who else could be a good answer to the question?

If you're looking at a more modern artist, there's Beyonce (Destiny's Child), Gwen Stefani (No Doubt) and Justin Timberlake (N'Sync). It might not shock you to know that TB doesn't really know much of either of their music.

Michael Jackson? He's close, but the Jackson 5 songs were either as good or in some cases better than his solo songs. Nothing Simon ever did by himself approached what he did with Garfunkel.

This is a tough one. He's certainly open to any and all suggestions. There has to be someone really, really obvious TB is overlooking, right?

While he gives it more thought, TigerBlog also did some research on what he mentioned about Susie Scanlon.

If you recall, TB recently wrote a piece for the women's history book about Scanlan and fellow Princeton alum Maya Lawrence, who were teammates on the 2012 U.S. Olympic women's epee fencing team that won a bronze medal at the London Olympics.

Scanlan took two years off to train for the Olympics before returning to Princeton in the 2012-13 academic year. She was a key part of the Tigers 2013 NCAA championship co-ed fencing team (and an individual runner up).

How many athletes have ever come back to Princeton to compete for the Tigers after having won an Olympic medal? And how many of those went on to win an NCAA championship afterwards?

To clarify, Caroline Lind won an NCAA championship as an undergrad and then two Olympic medals (both golds, in rowing). TB is looking for the other order. Olympic medal first. Then NCAA title.  

To answer the first question, Princeton has had 113 athletes who have competed in the Olympic Games. Of those 113, there have been 36 who competed as either undergraduates or, in a few cases, before they even enrolled at Princeton. 

Not all of those athletes competed for Princeton, however. For instance, there was Joey Cheek, who won four medals (two golds) in speed skating at the 2006 Winter Games and then graduated from Princeton in the Class of 2011.

In the first modern Olympics in Paris in 1896 alone, Princeton had four members of the Class of 1897 who competed in track and field, winning a combined seven medals.

Since then only two athletes would win gold medals and then compete at Princeton. Those two are Bill Bradley (basketball) and Ashleigh Johnson (water polo).

Only Susie Scanlan, among Princeton athletes, has ever won an Olympic medal and then come back to Princeton and won an NCAA championship.

Scanlan didn't get to that remarkable status accidentally. It took an incredible amount of hard work and self-sacrifice to make it happen. As she told TB her story, Scanlan talked about injuries, discipline, intense training regimens and endless travel to reach the top of the fencing world.

Today she is a Ph.D. student in economics studying at Columbia. She is, of course, no ordinary Ph.D. student.

Given how far back Princeton Athletics go, and given all of the incredible successes that Tiger athletes have had, to be the only one to have accomplished something is amazing.

Snow Running

So yesterday was Groundhog Day.

In honor of the occasion, TigerBlog would like to quote himself:

TigerBlog understands that not every movie made is trying to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards. In that vein, he's never understood the complete disdain so many people have for the movie "Groundhog Day."

TB saw it in the movies when it came out in 1993, and he's seen it about a thousand times since. It's a perfectly harmless, funny, at times charming, certainly inoffensive movie, and yet there are so many people who flat out hate it.

As an aside, TigerBlog was always confused as a kid by Groundhog Day, as six weeks after Feb. 2 takes you to March 16 (or March 15 in a leap year), which is still winter. He never quite understood the whole "six more weeks of winter" thing. Shouldn't it be more like 10 more weeks of winter if the point is that figuratively speaking spring will be late to arrive?

TB was crushed to learn the whole thing is a sham, at least according to a story he read:The ceremony is largely that: Phil's prediction is determined ahead of time by the Inner Circle, a group who dons top hats and tuxedos and decides in advance what the groundhog will predict.

Still, what could be better than Groundhog Day, a small-town tradition that has such a great little Americana feel to it. Something wholesome, something that hasn't been ruined by commercialism or lack of civility or any of the other ills of contemporary society.

As Phil Connors said: This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather.

Sound familiar? TigerBlog has written that before on Groundhog Day. And before that. And before that.

You  know, like the movie. Get it? Subtle, yes.

Before the movie came out, Groundhog Day was all about anticipating spring. Since then, it's become a reference to something that happens over and over and over - you know, like the way Phil kept living the same day over and over. Maybe that's the biggest tribute to the movie, the way it changed an entire meaning of something.

TB thought he offered that to you each year for Groundhog Day. Instead, this is the first time he's done so since 2017. 

Why didn't he do it the last three years? 

Well, the last two years it's because Feb. 2 fell on the weekend. In 2018, Feb. 2 was a Friday, but TB wrote that day a piece that turned out to be one of his favorites. 

It was about how Princeton was playing Yale in basketball that night, with the men in New Jersey and the women in Connecticut. TB went to the women's game, so the first half of the story was about how he needed to find a fill-in to work with Patrick McCarthy on the radio for the men's game. As it turned out, he recruited Patrick's father, Tom, who was Princeton's men's basketball and football play-by-play man early in his long and wildly successful career. 

Having Tom and Patrick have a chance to do a game together was pretty special.

TB, for his part, went to the women's game because TigerBlog Jr., who was then a junior at Sacred Heart, was the public address announcer for the Yale women and TB wanted to see how he did. It was also a special night for him (even if Yale won that game).

Also, speaking of things that happen over and over and over again, there's women's cross country coach Brad Hunt. As TB wrote last week, it appears that Hunt has run at least three miles a day, every day, without missing a day, for 15 years. That's more than 5,500 days.

There was a coaches' Zoom meeting Monday, during the storm, and Mollie Marcoux Samaan asked Hunt if on days like that he ran inside on a treamdmill. Nope, Hunt said. He's outdoors, no matter what.

In fact, he said that running outside in the snow is some of the best running there is. 

That's amazing stuff. That takes a lot of mental fortitude and toughness.

TB is very, very impressed. 

Anyway, yesterday was Groundhog Day. Ol' Punxsutawney Phil apparently saw his shadow, which means six more weeks of winter. As TB said above, that also means an early spring, right? 

It's all very confusing.

Scanlan And Lawrence

TigerBlog Jr.'s first day of high school his freshman year was technically considered a "snow day." 

It actually was a hurricane that caused a postponement, but starting off your high school career with something to be considered a snow day has to be a rarity. TigerBlog told his son it was a sign of good luck.

Perhaps the same thing applies to the start of the "spring" semester at Princeton, which began yesterday with during a genuine major snowstorm in Princeton the last few days. Perhaps it's good luck. 

TB certainly hopes so for all Princeton students. Good luck to every one of you this semester.

TigerBlog prefers when the temperature reaches into the 90s to winter. Even a fan of summer like that, though, can appreciate the beauty of nature that is a major snowstorm.

In fact, TB loves to watch the snow fall, the heavy kind that blankets the ground and leaves nothing around other than sheets and sheets of endless pulchritude in every direction. It's amazingly peaceful to see it, especially when it finally stops and the sun reappears, glistening in all directions.

It's everything else about the snow that's a pain in the butt.

It's the shoveling, though even that can be fun. Mostly, there are two things that TB can't stand about snowstorms: 1) eventually it turns brown and muddy and slushy and gets all over everything and 2) it keeps the ground covered as a reminder that spring is not necessarily right around the corner quite yet.

One of TB's favorite days is when the snow finally disappears, without a trace to be found anywhere. That's when you know the warmer weather is on the way.

TB has spent his entire life in this general area, living essentially in a 50-mile radium (even less if you don't count the first two years of his life in Queens) of Jadwin Gym. As such, he long ago became used to the weather here in the winter.

It's cold. It snows every now and then. It gets warmer.

It's hardly a world of brutal winters. As TB said last week, former NHL player John Scott said that 12 inches of snow in Traverse City, Mich., was hardly a big deal.

TB remembers a few massive blizzards, including from when he was a kid, through his days at Princeton. There haven't been that many of them.

He does not understand how people can live their whole lives in places that get brutal amounts of snow and ridiculously long winters.

As you are probably aware, TB is writing a book on the first 50 years of women's athletics at Princeton.

The most recent piece he completed was about former Princeton fencers Susie Scanlan and Maya Lawrence. The two were never Princeton teammates, with graduating years separated by more than a decade, but they were teammates on the 2012 U.S. Olympic team, winning a bronze medal together in women's team epee.

Scanlan grew up in Minnesota. This was her quote about winters in Princeton versus winters in St. Paul:

"My first winter here," she says, "it got to March and April and I said 'that's it?'"

That's good stuff.

TB had never spoken to Lawrence or Scanlan before he interviewed them for the book. As it turned out, their stories are wildly compelling, and TB loved telling it. In fact, it became one of his favorite chapters of the entire project.

That's been one of his favorite things about this book. Actually, his favorite. It's been the ability to take people whose accomplishments he'd long been familiar with and get a chance to hear the human stories behind those accomplishments. It's been a lot of fun. 

In the case of Scanlan and Lawrence, both of them had to overcome major injuries and setbacks. The world of international fencing is a fairly unique entity, and they both told about the physical and emotional toll it took on them to get to where they did.

Scanlan is part of an extremely small class of Princeton athletes. She came back to compete as a Tiger undergraduate after winning an Olympic medal. Not a lot of Princeton athletes can make that claim.

She can make another claim - she won an NCAA championship (the 2013 national team championship) after she won an Olympic medal.

Forget Princeton. How many athletes anywhere can say that?

The Late Great John Chaney

Perhaps the worst call TigerBlog has ever seen in a basketball game came on Dec. 20, 2004.

The game was between Princeton and Temple in Philadelphia. Princeton trailed by two as the final seconds were winding down. 

Will Venable drove to the basket and put a shot up that was off the window and on its way in, forcing overtime. Then it was swatted away.

Then none of the three officials called the most obvious and easiest goaltending call of all time. No overtime. 

Final score: Temple 48, Princeton 46.

What the heck?

TB will say this: Making that call on that court that night would not have sat well with the home team's coach. Maybe he was just too intimidating a figure to have the whistle blow there?

The winning coach that night was John Chaney, the Hall-of-Famer who turned Temple into a nationally prominent program, especially during a glorious 1987-88 season that saw the Owls reach the No. 1 spot in the national rankings.

Chaney passed away Friday, a few days past his 89th birthday. That game against Princeton in 2004 was the 1,000th of his career.

One of the great things about working in sports, like TB has for more than 30 years, is that you get to see different sides of people you normally only see on TV. Some of them make radically different impressions in person than they do through the media, either for the positive or the negative.

There are figures in sports that TB would have sworn were jerks who turned out to be really nice when he actually met them. There are others who come across as being good guys who clearly aren't when you see them up close.

Then there's the other group, a far, far smaller one. That's the group of people who are such towering figures that when you meet them, you're only emotion is awe.

That was John Chaney. 

There aren't too many people TB has been around in all his time in the sports world who were more simply awesome than John Chaney. Perhaps he needs to define what he means a bit more.

What TB is saying is that there are certain figures who seem to larger than life on TV and then are even more so when you actually meet them. Even John Thompson II didn't bring out the awe in TB the way Chaney did, largely because TB's close relationship with John Thompson III made his father a bit more approachable.

Chaney? 

TB covered a bunch of Temple games when Chaney coached there. He's interviewed him one-on-one and written about him. 

In all that time, he never felt 100 percent relaxed or comfortable around him. It was like being in the presence of a general if you were in the Army. You wanted everything to be buttoned up and shined up, for fear of disappointing the commander.

Chaney was part of what TB would consider to be the most glorious era of Eastern college basketball, and it was driven by the coaches, men who were as much a part of the school's identity as anyone. There were men like Thompson at Georgetown and Rollie Massimino at Villanova and Lou Carnesecca at St. John's and Jim Boeheim (who's shockingly still there) at Syracuse. 

There were others too, at schools who weren't the Big East. People like Speedy Morris at La Salle, for instance.

Two men who were very much part of that were Chaney at Temple and Pete Carril at Princeton.

Interestingly, they never coached against each other. The 1982-83 season was Chaney's first at Temple, after coming over from Cheyney State. His last season was 2005-06.

Prior to that non-goaltending call night in Philly (Joe Scott was the Tiger coach that night), Princeton hadn't played Temple since the 1974-75 season, when Carril was at Princeton. Carril was 2-0 against Temple.

Chaney was 2-0 against Princeton, with the win in 2004 and then another one a year later, in his final season.

TB read a great deal about Chaney after his death from people who knew him a lot better than he did. Pretty much everyone agrees with TB's assessment.

This was a giant of a man, one who did so much for college basketball, for Philadelphia basketball, for opening up educational opportunities, for having such an incredible impact for the better on those who played for him. He was exactly what Princeton wants from its own coaches - he was a coach/teacher/leader/role model.

TB offers condolences to his family and to all of those who were close to him.

John Chaney was, as TB said, awesome.