The thrill of a walk-off win

Last weekend, I left Bill Clarke Field a few innings before Princeton scored a walk-off win against Harvard. On Saturday, I got a second chance, as Princeton defeated Penn with a walk-off 3-2 victory. With the score 2-2 in the bottom of the ninth inning, Jake Kernodle hit a grounder to the Penn second baseman, […]

Baseball is in the air at Princeton

Baseball in the Northeast is always dicey early in the year, as winter often lingers well into spring. So it was an extra special treat today to watch the players on the Princeton baseball team scrimmage one another outside, on their home turf. After a stretch of several days without rain and with the temperature poking […]

princeton-Harvard football: a classic matchup

Princeton and Harvard have faced off in football since 1877, and I got to watch the 115th meeting Saturday at Princeton Stadium. The Tigers beat the Crimson 21-14 after scoring what turned out to be the winning touchdown with about a minute and a half left in the game. One hundred years ago, a good […]

Keeping the Tiger team intact

When your season is unexpectedly cut short by a pandemic, what’s a college coach to do? At Princeton, Scott Bradley has turned to virtual tools to keep coaching. Through the university’s athletic fellows program, I’ve had a glimpse of how the head coach and his assistants have managed to keep the team together and inspire […]

The Penn State scandal, the media and irony

This is a vacation week for me, and I’m catching a lot more sports talk on TV and radio than I usually do. There’s plenty of pontificating about the horrifying Penn State sexual abuse scandal, and I’ve heard a number of comments along the lines of, “We’ve built a monster in college football by all […]

An extremely slim connection to Stanford bowl game glory

Congratulations to Stanford for their no-doubts 40-12 victory tonight over Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl. The Cardinal were led by standout quarterback Andrew Luck, a sophomore who must weigh the prestige of a Stanford degree against the lucre of a big-bucks NFL contract. I have the most tenuous of connections to young Mr. Luck, […]

The Big 10, the Big 12, the Pac 10 and our way of life

We all know the recent machinations realigning some of the major conferences in college athletics are all about money. We take cherished “amateur” sports associated with our institutions of higher learning and milk them for every dime. How quintessentially American. I don’t actually have any particular beef with finances driving universities to seek a better deal. […]

No, thanks. I’ll pass on the chips (Fiesta Bowl 2010)

[picapp align=”left” wrap=”true” link=”term=Boise+State&iid=7455313″ src=”6/1/2/4/Tostitos_Fiesta_Bowl_0155.jpg?adImageId=8797792&imageId=7455313″ width=”234″ height=”317″ /] On my television screen, the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl tonight looked more like the Ugly Uniforms Bowl. As one of my Twitter buddies pointed out, TCU players looked like walking eggplants. And although the pants in this photo appear orange, on my screen the Boise State players looked […]

The Rose Bowl – A Midwestern perspective

As a child of the Big Ten Conference, I believed the Rose Bowl was a place of magic, enchantment and, inevitably, frustration and resignation. With piles of snow outside our homes in suburban Cleveland, we’d tune in to the game as the sun was setting in Eastern time. We’d watch in fascination as 100,000 people […]

Hitting the baseball perfecta

Inspired by a few trips to the betting window over the years, I’ve developed a system of rating how good a sports day I’ve had. To hit the daily double, my two favorite teams – the Cleveland Indians and San Francisco Giants – must win. That happens fairly often (although the Tribe didn’t exactly give […]