THE WEEKLY BLOG

On the basketball beat

If you go to a Princeton men’s basketball game, you can expect to see at least two things: a 3-point basket and Jon Solomon. The Tigers have converted at least one 3-pointer in every game since 1986, and Solomon, the founder and editor of princetonbasketball.com and an honorary member of the Class of 1976, has covered Princeton’s last 101 Ivy League games at home and on the road — a streak that dates back to the 2000-01 season.
From the bleachers of out-of-town arenas or his regular seat in the second row of section S4 at Jadwin Gym, Solomon documents the details of each contest on his clipboard and posts stories, audio clips, and photos on his Web site afterward. He has followed the Tigers since childhood, when he faithfully read local newspaper accounts. Back then, Solomon assumed that all writers traveled with the team. Now, on many road trips, he’s the only Princeton reporter waiting outside the locker room. “I like the idea of the old-school beat reporter,” he says. “I take pride in being a constant.” (Away from the gym, Solomon has been a near-constant on the radio, hosting WPRB’s 24-hour Christmas marathon, from Christmas eve to Christmas day, in 19 of the last 20 years.)
For basketball games, Solomon rarely travels alone — his wife, Nicole, and his parents are Princeton fans as well — and he has a few favorite stops in each Ivy League city, from falafel in Providence to Thai food in Ithaca. Watching road games has had its rewards: Solomon says that two of the most memorable games in his Ivy streak took place away from Jadwin. In 2001, Kyle Wente ’03 hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer to top Harvard near the beginning of Princeton’s league championship run, and five years later, Scott Greenman ’06 hit two long-range shots in a double-overtime win at Cornell.
Solomon’s 100th consecutive Ivy game was played at Jadwin Feb. 1, and the Tigers did not disappoint, taking a 7-point lead late in the second half against Dartmouth and holding the Big Green at arm’s length in a 57-53 win. The next night, Princeton again played well in the second half, topping Harvard, 68-54. With a 2-0 league record, the Tigers will continue their Ivy schedule against Cornell (4-0) at Newman Arena Feb. 8. Solomon plans to be there.

Ibsen’s
‘female Hamlet’

Irene Lucio ’08, front, and Rob Grant ’08 rehearse scene from Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” in preparation for a Feb. 8 debut at the Lewis Center for the Arts. Critics have compared the title character to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Click here for more information about the Princeton production.
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

Saturday is for science

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory launched its annual Science on Saturday program last month, and this week, Iain Couzin, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton, will deliver the fifth installment, covering “Collective Motion and Decision-making in Animal Groups.”
The 2-hour lectures start at 9:30 a.m. in the Gottlieb Auditorium on the Forrestal Campus. The program is “geared toward high school students,” according to a University release, but all are invited to attend. This year, selected sessions also will be broadcast live to the “interactive theater” at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City.
For more information, including a complete schedule and links to videos of past lectures, visit the Science on Saturday Web site.

Names in the News

Brooke Shields ’87, star of NBC’s Lipstick Jungle, told Newsday that sees parallels between the women in the show and some of her Princeton classmates. “When I look at the people I went to school with — those who graduated when we graduated - they are all CEOs of major, major companies,” she said. “They were pretty hungry, all of them. In their way, they had passions that were very distinct.” … Former Sen. Bill Frist ’74 tried his hand at acting in a Super Bowl commercial for Coca-Cola that featured him side-by-side with Democratic strategist James Carville. The Associated Press declared Coke a winner in the cola ad wars, but USA Today’s ad-meter ranked the Frist-Carville spot 29th out of 55 commercials. … The New York Giants’ Super Bowl win was sweet for Marc Ross ’95, who joined the team as its college scouting director last spring. Before the game, Ross was quoted in a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story about his team’s powerful offensive guards. … TV commentator and former NFL lineman Ross Tucker ’01 answered questions about the Giants’ upset victory in a Feb. 4 Washington Post online chat. … The soccer magazine 90:00 will run an extended interview with U.S. national soccer team coach Bob Bradley ’80 in February, written by Giles Morris ’97. When asked about what makes a player great, Bradley said: “The yardstick is always the game. You can try as many tricks as you want and if you win games there [are] no issues. The game doesn’t lie.”

Five Princeton athletes to watch

Peter Capkovic ’09 | Men’s tennis
Capkovic, a native of Slovakia, won six of seven matches in Ivy League play as Princeton’s top singles player last spring. His lone loss, to Harvard’s Chris Clayton, came in a third-set tiebreaker.

Katie Lewis-Lamonica ’08 | Women’s lacrosse
Lewis-Lamonica ranked second among Ivy players with 51 goals in 2007. Her 117 career scores have put her on pace to reach the top five on Princeton’s all-time list.

Dan DeGeorge ’09 | Baseball
DeGeorge, the Tigers’ starting shortstop for two seasons, posted a .936 fielding percentage last year and batted .328 in Ivy games to earn second-team All-Ivy honors.

Susannah Aboff ’09 | Women’s golf
Aboff shot even-par or better in four of her 11 competitive rounds during the fall season, leading the Tigers to team wins at the Princeton Invitational and the Nittany Lion Invitational.

Natalie Kim ’08 | Women’s water polo
Kim, an All-Eastern goalie last in 2007, has been a three-year stalwart in the cage for Princeton, which ranked 15th in the CWPA national preseason poll. The Tigers open the season at home Feb. 16 and 17 with four matches in the Princeton Invitational.

Tales of a traveling flag

For the last two years, Denali Barron ’09 has been carrying an orange-and-black checkered flag, “liberated” from a nearby golf course, with an extraordinary goal in mind: take the flag to all seven continents before graduation. With the help of friends and family, she has completed that goal with time to spare, as she explains excerpts from her travel journal, below. A quick guide to the abbreviations: “DB” refers to the author, “TAB” is Tom Barron ’74, and “LH” is Lyra Haas ’09.

July 13, 2006. Uttaranchal, India. Flag crests a new pass, halfway across the world from Colorado. Though swift clouds obscure what are surely spectacular views of the Indian Himalaya, DB anchors Flag among a string of its pious cousins and snaps a picture. Tiny bells, left at 16,000 feet for purposes of luck or prayer, are piled on the ground. Descent from the ridge top follows quickly, for after two weeks of backpacking in the Milam and Ralam Valleys, DB cannot resist the idea of another thatched-roof chai house down the trail.
Dec. 27, 2006. South Georgia Island, South Atlantic Ocean. Flag makes landfall among 300,000 King penguins on Gold Harbour, a mile-long bay on South Georgia Island. The smell of guano and grunts of elephant seals announced this land from several kilometers away. Flag stays very still as a curious bird investigates. Strong sun continues to diminish hanging glaciers that Ernest Shackleton crossed nearly 100 years ago. DB travels in style, returning after a few short hours to the USS Explorer II for tea.
Jan. 12, 2008. Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda, Africa. Two 400-pound silverback gorillas tussle in a bamboo thicket. It’s behavior that one might expect from three- or four-year-olds, but never from these majestic kings of the jungle. Rwanda is full of surprises. Though dozens of birds caw, sing, and warble within earshot, DB and TAB are spellbound: We hear nothing but gorillas breathing, vegetation rustling, one of the silverback’s - playful?! - smacking chest-beats. Other members of our trekking group pale, gape, and giggle in succession. A female with infant looks up, alert, when DB carefully draws Flag from her pocket. Less than a mile from this dense and wild forest, furrowed fields cover every square meter of Rwanda’s thousand hills. In the face of a burgeoning population, resource pressure and extraction, and international instability, can this tiny country save its remarkable National Parkland? Its efforts have been exemplary so far.
Jan. 19, 2008. Princeton, N.J., USA. Six continents accomplished. One to go. Today I, DB, bestow the Flag upon LH ‘09 as she embarks for a semester studying politics in Australia. The condition shall be met, but Flag has many places left to go. Iceland? Turkey? The Galapagos Islands? Even an auspicious Princeton graduation?
William of Orange only knows what will be next.
To read Barron’s complete account, visit PAW Online.

Names in the news

“Time Release,” a percussion concerto by Princeton music professor Steven Mackey, made its New York debut at Carnegie Hall Feb. 9. The piece features the marimba, a resonant type of xylophone, and draws inspiration from Mozart’s piano concertos. … Visiting professor Daoud Kuttab discussed secularism in Turkey and the debate over headscarves in a brief Washington Post online piece posted Feb, 11. … In men’s basketball, six of the Ivy League’s eight head coaches are African-American, The Philadelphia Inquirer noted Feb. 9, including Princeton’s Sydney Johnson ’97 and Brown’s Craig Robinson ’83. “I thought about it on Martin Luther King Day,” Yale coach James Jones told the Inquirer. “I had a meeting with the guys, and I told them I don’t know if I’d be here if not for him.”

Oscar-worthy Tigers: A Weekly Blog quiz

This year’s Academy Awards will be handed out Feb. 24, and for a few Princeton alumni, it could be a memorable evening. Ethan Coen ’79 and brother Joel have been nominated in the Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay categories for their film No Country for Old Men. (The Coens won the 1996 Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Fargo.) In the Best Documentary category, producers Todd Wider ’86 and Jedd Wider ’89 have been nominated for Taxi to the Dark Side, which explores the arrest, torture, and death of an Afghani taxi driver at an American Air Base.
To honor this year’s Princeton nominees, The Weekly Blog is taking a look back at other Tiger stars and the movies that made them famous. If you can name the five films described below, e-mail your responses to us. You could win a vintage Princeton Alumni Weekly poster and have your name mentioned in our next blog post. Answers will be posted Feb. 27.

1. Bo Goldman ’53 won a pair of screenwriting Oscars, in 1975 and 1980, and was nominated in the 1992 Best Adapted Screenplay category for this Al Pacino movie. (Princeton viewers may notice that an early scene was filmed in Holder Courtyard, not a New England prep school.)
2. James Stewart ’32, Princeton’s most memorable leading man, was nominated for Best Actor five times but only won once, for this 1940 film. (The star-studded cast included Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.)
3. Jose Ferrer ’33, Stewart’s onetime Triangle Club colleague, also won Best Actor, 10 years after Stewart, for the title role in this 1950 romance. (Gerard Depardieu played the same character in a 1990 version of the story.)
4. This Oscar-winning 2001 film, based on a biography by Sylvia Nasar, told the story of a Princeton graduate alumnus and Nobel laureate who struggled with schizophrenia. (It was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four, including Best Picture.)
5. Screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. ’36 won two Oscars, 28 years apart (a span that included his refusal to give testimony to the House Committee on Un-American Activities and subsequent blacklisting in Hollywood). The first award was for Woman of the Year, which earned Best Original Screenplay in 1942. The second was for this 1970 war comedy. (It inspired a popular ’70s TV series.)

Bonus question: Katharine Hepburn was nominated for the Best Actress award for her role as the title character in this 1935 film, adapted from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Booth Tarkington 1893. (The movie’s posters called her “Tarkington’s loveliest heroine.”)

Princetonians say ‘Be my Valentine’

Whether celebrating Valentine’s Day with a meal on Nassau Street or touting “Singles Awareness Day,” Princetonians ventured out Feb. 14 to find their crushes. Participants on the University Student Government-sponsored Crush Finder Web site, in operation for the second consecutive year, got an e-mail informing them of their “match” if both students independently selected each other through the site. Campus sororities sponsored a charity drive for cancer at which students purchased “Crush” soda cans that were delivered to the door of the person of their choice. (For $1 and up, the sender could buy anonymity and would only be discovered if the recipient returned to the table in Frist and doubled their secret admirer’s donation.) Also among the Valentine’s Day activities was a USG-sponsored event for the Class of 2009 that featured cookie decorating and a giveaway of boxer shorts emblazoned with the phrase “Be Mine ’09.” By Julia Osellame ’09
At right, Crush cans outside a student’s dorm room on Feb. 14. Photo by Julia Osellame ’09

Gengler ’75, Lapidus ’81 earn tennis honors

Two of Princeton’s most accomplished tennis alumni, Louise Gengler ’75 and Jay Lapidus ’81, will be inducted into the Mercer County Tennis Hall of Fame Feb. 23.
Gengler left an indelible mark on Princeton athletics as both a player and a coach. As an undergraduate, she captained an undefeated field hockey team and played on the University’s first women’s ice hockey team. But her finest moments were on the tennis court, where she was undefeated in dual match play for four years. Gengler returned in 1979 to become the head coach of women’s tennis, leading the Tigers to seven Ivy League titles in 25 seasons.
Lapidus, a Princeton native and prep star at the Lawrenceville School, captained the University’s men’s tennis team and reached the top of the collegiate rankings in 1980. He was a three-time All-American and later played for the U.S. Davis Cup team. For the last 20 years, Lapidus has been the men’s tennis coach at Duke, where his teams have a combined mark of 362-113. From 1996 to 2004, his Blue Devils won 58 consecutive ACC regular-season matches.

Writers who moved the nation

“A rogue Klansman knocked on our door at a motel in Louisiana … [and] cordially invited us to a cow pasture across the road in Mississippi,” said Gene Roberts at a lecture last week, recalling one of many experiences covering issues of race during the 1950s and 1960s.
Under the impression that they were invited to “get the story straight” about the Klan, Roberts and his colleagues ventured out to that Mississippi field. The demonstration they witnessed soon turned so derogatory and threatening that the reporters needed to be escorted out by a V-shaped blockade of robed Klansmen.
Roberts was on campus Feb. 21 to speak about his book, The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation with co-author Hank Klibanoff. The book, a 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner, explains the media’s coverage of the civil rights struggle and includes personal anecdotes from Klibanoff and Roberts, career journalists who covered many of stories about race before and during the civil rights movement.
Roberts, a native of North Carolina, said he came up with survival techniques that included “speaking Southern” to blend in and imitating FBI agents, to help himself “stay alive” when covering charged mob scenes, like the Klan meeting.
“Often, we don’t recognize that the status quo is a problem, and have more difficulty covering that than we do in covering change,” Roberts said of why the press was at first reluctant to explore the race issue. With the increasing prominence of television coverage and a more pronounced media presence in the South, America started to listen.
Roberts, now a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, worked as a reporter for the Detroit Free Press, and The New York Times before becoming the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times. “Gene was part of a time when The New York Times had an enormous influence,” Klibanoff said of Roberts’ reporting on race. “It moved the nation.”
Klibanoff reported for the Boston Globe and worked as an editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer for 20 years. He is now the editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. By Julia Osellame ’09

Intime for kids

From left, Nushelle DeSilva ’11, Whitney Mosery ’08, and Mark Bur ’08 of the Theatre Intime Kids Initiative (TIKI) perform a scene from East of the Sun, West of the Moon during Alumni Day Feb. 23.
Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

Sports shorts

Women’s squash | Repeat champions
Princeton’s Emery Maine ’10 dominated the last two games in a 3-1 win over Penn’s Tara Chawla to seal the Princeton’s second consecutive title at the Howe Cup, the sport’s national collegiate championship, at Jadwin Gym Feb. 24. The top-ranked Quakers were a perfect 15-0 entering the match, but the No. 2 Tigers prevailed, 6-3, thanks to strong performances in the middle of the lineup.

Men’s hockey | No goal, but still a win
Late in the second period of Princeton’s men’s hockey game against Cornell Feb. 23, Cam MacIntyre ’10 ripped a rebound into the back of the net for an apparent goal that would have put the Tigers up 3-1. But the puck popped out of the net as quickly as it entered, and the officials and goal judge did not register the score. Cornell, looking to capitalize, opened the third period with a barrage of shots, but Princeton held firm, thanks largely to goalie Zane Kalemba ’10. “If you didn’t look at the fans and didn’t look at the score, you’d think that he was playing a noontime hockey [pick-up] game,” coach Guy Gadowsky said of his poised netminder. “He has such a calming effect.”
Princeton held on for a 2-1 win, locking up a first-round bye in the ECAC Hockey playoffs. Gadowsky, who had argued for MacIntyre’s goal, would not comment on the call after the game, other than to say he was glad it wasn’t a factor in the final outcome.

Women’s basketball | Cowher nears 1,600 points
Basketball star Meagan Cowher ’08 could become the fourth Princeton woman to reach 1,600 points when she plays the final two home games of her career this weekend against Brown (Feb. 29) and Yale (March 1). With five games left on the schedule, Cowher also has an outside shot of becoming Princeton’s all-time scoring leader. She needs 23.6 points per game - 6.6 points more than her season average - to tie Sandi Bittler ’90’s total of 1,683 points.

Oscar-worthy Tigers: Answers to the Feb. 20 Weekly Blog Quiz

Congratulations are in order for four Princetonians: Ethan Coen ’79, Todd Wider ’86, and Jedd Wider ’89, whose films won Oscars on Feb. 24; and Anthony Cerminaro ’76, who correctly identified all six films from last week’s Oscar quiz. The answers were: 1. Scent of a Woman; 2. The Philadelphia Story; 3. Cyrano de Bergerac; 4. A Beautiful Mind; 5. M*A*S*H; Bonus: Alice Adams.