Eileen Goldfinger took my picture at this Florida beach. 2022. Our grandson Noah likes to take my hats and wear them. I should put this hat in my will for him. My shirt says “Rutgers.”
One of my FDU classmates. The Knights are our mascot, but it didn’t do me much good when I was there trying to get a date. Those commuter girls mostly came to school and then went home. Well, maybe there were a few exceptions. This player has great teeth. FDU used to have a dental school. The hygienists cleaned my teeth for practice. I eagerly volunteered. Getty Photo
Paul Goldfinger Sports Editor at Blogfinger off-shore university school newspaper “The Grovarian Blogster.”
“We got screwed” said the Rutgers coach after his team was not invited to the”big dance”—the NCAA college championship basketball tournament which was just won by Connecticut–a usual powerhouse team.
Actually I didn’t even go to Rutgers, but I liked the shirt.
We don’t talk much about sports at Blogfinger.net, but I do get interested in this tournament this time of year. (2023), and amazingly my school’s team (FDU–they called it that on TV because none of the announcers cared enough to learn what the initials stand for—it’s Fairleigh Dickinson which achieved fame because they actually beat a team, Purdue, that was rated number one in March 2023. If you had bet on the underdog here you could have made a fortune.
This was only the second time that a #16 seed beat a #1.
Do I care? Not much, but I enjoy the hoopla that goes along with sporting events like this or the Super Bowl, I started to care about New Jersey teams in 1976 when Rutgers astonishingly made the final 4. Recently other Jersey teams have excelled including Seton Hall, St. Peters and Princeton.
The main sports story about Rutgers, the Scarlet Knights, is that it has been trying to become famous playing football since they played in the first collegiate game against Princeton. Back then the team with the highest SAT’s were declared the winner. The year was 1869, when Ocean Grove was founded, but the CMA did not have a football team.
So next year some Jersey teams might make the tournament again. Or maybe the FDU girls will show up for basketball or hopefully in the pep band. When I was there in the band there were no coeds participating. They were busy cleaning teeth. And there were no girls teams.
My girlfriend then was an English major and she coerced me to wear a short dress (a mini-toga) in the play “Antigone.” in the part of the Messenger. I did it because, well, how could I say no? And what was my pronoun? If you know this Greek tragedy ( a great name because my performance was one) and I came on stage with makeup (a “mask”) on. On stage was a dead woman lying supine on a pedestal. This was almost as bad as my frat humiliation–wearing raw liver in my pants. Why? Who knows? I have a photo to prove it. (the Greek part.). But the mini-toga didn’t bother me because, after all, our basketball players were a “Cinderella team.”
JESSICA MOLASKEY.