Sports Then and Now

As far as trends go with something happening, it is said that one time could be by chance, two times could be a coincidence, and three times could be a legitimate pattern. Then again, it is also said that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place. So even doing the same thing the second time, either consecutively or in a short time frame, could be a sign that things happen repeatedly not by mistake, but by skill or a method that really works.

The Cornell men’s lacrosse team has been trendy much of this season, especially recently. The Big Red has been playing some back-and-forth games of late in which they have seen their late leads evaporate in both losses and wins. This has made what has seemed at times to be sure Cornell wins interesting, before players like Max Feely, Ryan Hurley, and Ivy League Player of the Year Rob Pannell have made clutch plays to win games.

Go back to their third game of the year on March 6 when the Big Red hosted

Senior midfielder Austin Boykin, shown here in a faceoff against Princeton during the Ivy League Tournament Championship Game on May 9, leads Cornell with a 56.4 percent faceoff percentage (158-for-280), this season.

Army at Schoellkopf Field in Ithaca. Although Cornell won 12-11, they needed overtime to do it. The Big Red lead 11-8 with 10:56 to play in the fourth quarter. Army stormed back with three straight goals to force an 11-11 tie. Hurley scored the game-winning goal with 41 seconds left to play.

Was this by chance? Especially considering Cornell has a young team this year after graduating so many key players last year. This included 2009 Tewaaraton Trophy winner Max Seibald, the aggressive midfielder who lead the Big Red with 120 shots last year. Defender Matt Moyer, who had 33 ground balls last year, was a fixture on defense and joined Seibald as a first team All-American.

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For years, Cornell and Princeton have dominated Ivy League men’s lacrosse. The perennial powers have been facing each other since 1922 and have combined to win at least a share of 44-of-54 Ivy League titles. Recent history has been no different as one of the two schools has won at least a share of the last 16 Ivy League titles including this year’s crown.

Thus, it was no surprise that the two teams played for the inaugural Ivy League Tournament Championship on Sunday May 9 at Schoellkopf Field on the campus of the Big Red. The tournament was comprised of four teams. Top-seeded Cornell played fourth-seeded Brown while third-seeded Yale faced the Tigers, the second seed, on Friday May 7.

Some of the brave 2,942 fans of Cornell and Princeton viewed the game from the unique crescent at Schoellkopf Field on the campus of Cornell.

Those matchups came about following the final weekend of the regular season when the Big Red won at Princeton 10-9 which helped to force a four-way regular season tie at 4-2 in conference play between the four schools. Cornell and the Tigers each went 2-1 against the other three teams while Brown and Yale each went 1-2. The Big Red’s head-to-head victory over Princeton gave them the edge in securing the tournament’s number one seed and thus being the host of the tournament.

Cornell disposed of a pesky Brown team 14-8 in the tournament semifinals on Friday May 7 to avenge a 13-10 home loss to the Bears on April 24. That was preceeded by the Tigers’ 7-6 win over Yale earlier that night. With the Big Red and Princeton facing off in the first ever league tournament championship game, nothing short of a spectacular game was expected and the two teams delivered on that with the Tigers prevailing 10-9 in overtime.

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Regardless if you are a Syracuse or a Cornell men’s lacrosse fan, this was not intended to happen again. It couldn’t of. Or could it?

Syracuse senior Chris Daniello maneuvers around two Cornell defenders to score the game-winning goal just before the final buzzer (Stephen D. Cannerelli).

After the two schools played a thrilling overtime game to decide the 2009 national championship last Memorial Day at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it was like déjà vu all over again. This time in the annual regular season battle that rotates between the home fields of the two upstate New York rivals. Like it was for all the marbles in the title game last year, it was another one-goal thriller with the exception being that a national title was not at stake and no overtime was needed.

Barely.

Orange senior attack Chris Daniello scooped up a ground ball off a save by Big Red freshman goalie A.J. Fiore, a local product of Ithaca High School, just seconds after a point blank shot by Syracuse senior attack Cody Jamieson was saved by Fiore. After snaring the ball parallel to the Cornell cage, Daniello fired a shot that just beat the final buzzer to give Syracuse another thrilling win over the Big Red, 8-7, on Tuesday April 13 at Schoellkopf Field in Ithaca, NY. Read the rest of this entry →

Phil Mickelson dominated the final round to win the 2010 Masters.

With all the hype entering the Masters about Tiger Woods, it turns out that the final glory went to Phil Mickelson, the era’s other great player, who has also spent this year dealing with off-the-course issues.

While Tiger has been dealing with issues brought on by his own decisions, Mickelson and his family have spent the year dealing with the indiscriminant foe of cancer.

The contrasts between Woods and Mickelson are certainly glaring, but this is a time to celebrate the greatness of the lefthander and not to continue the now familiar lament against the talented righthander.

For years, Mickelson has dealt with the criticism that even with three major titles he had never reached his full potential. Indeed, every time it has seemed that he was poised to break through and serve as a true nemesis for Woods, he would do something to derail his chances.

That is why it seemed very improbable that Mickelson would be a serious contender at the 2010 Masters.

After being a clear number two to Woods for the last several years, Mickelson was only a shell of his former self for the first part of 2010. Read the rest of this entry →

In this series we’ve talked about how tennis in the early days (late 19th and early 20th century) was a game for elite members of society. Dwight Davis, a Harvard student and tennis innovator was wealthy enough at the age of 20 to purchase from his own funds an enormous sterling silver ‘pot’ to serve as trophy for the Davis Cup. Fred Perry was the son of a leading member of the British Parliament, and self-made 1930s-style British millionaire. An exception – Don Budge was an unassuming middle class kid who learned to play tennis in a public court in Oakland California. (If you’ve never been to Oakland, it is where the docks associated with San Francisco Bay are actually located. Few would confuse Oakland, California, with … San Francisco.).

No elite athlete in tennis’ long history probably had a loftier pedigree than that of Baron Gottfried Alexander Maximilian Walter Kurt Freiherr von Cramm. He usually dropped the ‘Baron’ and the ‘von’ when interacting with his peers – asking people to call him ‘Gottfried Cramm.’ He was the third son of Baron von Cramm, a title inherited by his eldest brother, Aschwin in 1936 associated with a Saxon region of Germany in what is now the county of Lower Saxony (created by the British after WWII).

In the 1980s, the late Jack Kramer listed Von Cramm as one of the 21 greatest tennis players of all time. And Von Cramm played perhaps the greatest tennis match in history in 1937 in front of the British King at Wimbledon, representing of all things, Nazi Germany in a Davis Cup final (WWII broke out in 1939). He was devastatingly handsome, he was blond, he was athletic, he was aristocratic (ever the gentleman on court). Though he was everything the Aryan race was supposed to be (and his wins are listed next to a Nazi flag on websites such as wikipedia [see Fred Perry]), von Cramm was anything but a Nazi. Read the rest of this entry →

It was 36 years ago this week that Hank Aaron became the all-time home run king.

Given how much emphasis sports put on championships, it may seem a little strange that the most significant home run in Major League Baseball history was not hit during the month of October, but instead was struck in early April by an aging player on a team that wouldn’t come close to reaching the postseason.

Such was the case 36 years ago this week, on April 8, 1974, when Hank Aaron forever cemented a place for himself in baseball lore with his record breaking 715th home run.

Every die-hard sports fan has a number of moments that are forever etched in their subconscious memory – to the point that even years after the fact they can recall not just the special moment, but also where they were and what they were doing at the time.

Though I was only six-years old, the night when Aaron set the home run record is one of those moments for me.

My family was paying special attention to the record because we had family friends who were from Atlanta and thus big fans of Aaron and the Braves. “Hammerin’ Hank” had tied the record during the season opener in Cincinnati and there seemed to be little doubt that he was going to set the record during the home opener, which was being shown on national television by ABC. However, for a while there was some doubt whether we would be able to see it.

It was a stormy Monday night in my hometown of Keysville, Virginia, thanks to a powerful early spring thunderstorm that brought lightning, thunder and heavy rains. There was no such thing as cable television in our town in 1974 and because we were about 75 miles from the closest television station, even with having an antenna on the roof we never really had crystal clear reception. The general practice at that time was also to unplug the television during electrical storms so that the TV wouldn’t get zapped. Read the rest of this entry →