In fact, it was a pretty quiet week on the links front except for this ...
The date has been set for the Friends of Dartmouth Football golf tournament. (Sorry for the pun.) Grab your calendar and circle Saturday, June 19. Once again, the event will be held at Hanover Country club. The note I received says more information will be available soon and I'll re-post it here when it is.
There was some debate on the message boards in recent weeks about whether Florida running back Dominick Pierre was heading to Dartmouth or Penn. A story in The Message, the Calvary Christian Academy's newspaper, should put Big Green fans at ease. It begins this way:
With the final stroke of his pen, Ivy League-bound Senior, Dominick Pierre smiled as his friends, family, and coaches proudly applauded. School history was made Wednesday, February 3, when Pierre signed a four-year contract, accepting his position on Dartmouth College’s “Big Green” football team and becoming CCA’s first student to attend an Ivy-League school.Pierre, by the way, is a terrific wrestler. A two-time region champion who has placed third in the state FHSAA Class 1A Tournament the past couple of years, Pierre is bidding for the a state championship against this weekend according to a note in the Miami Herald.
I have no idea if this is accurate, but if you are looking for a mind-boggling piece of college football trivia regarding Dartmouth, click here.
A Columbia Spectator columnist thinks an Ivy League football all-star game would be a good idea. Frankly, I think the Ivies should hold out for the NCAA tournament berth that is ridiculously and unfairly prohibited by the Ivy League presidents, but an all-star game is an option. I think the suggestion of perhaps holding the game at UConn's Rentschler Field makes a lot of sense ... geographically. Unfortunately, Hamden High School might make more sense seating-wise.
And finally, about that trip to NYC ...
We discovered that you can get a nice, clean room with two double beds one block from Times Square for $135 a night. (That may not sound like a lot to you, but remember this is being written by someone who stays in campgrounds to staff the Colgate and Penn football games every-other-year to save money ;-)
Unfortunately, we discovered that you cannot get tickets to sold-out basketball game at Madison Square Garden between the lowly Knicks and Chicago Bulls on the day of the game at a reasonable price. Not from StubHub. Not from scalpers. And not by standing in the cancellation line for 45 minutes. (The latter resulted in finally making it to the head of the line and being told there were two $150 tickets left and 14 additional tickets starting at $300 apiece. It would have been nice if they told us that while we waited in line.
Suffice it to say we had one severely disappointed 15-year-old when we turned and walked back to the hotel to watch the Olympics from Vancouver instead of seeing his first-ever NBA game, which he'd informed all his classmates he was going to see. Adding insult to injury for that certain HHS sophomore, the Olympic coverage was mostly figure skating.) ...
Among other things, while we were in the Big Apple we ...
Went to the Museum of Natural History where I bored the kids with stories about class trips there in elementary school ... Strolled through Central Park in the snow while that certain HHS senior got in her run ... Had dinner in Little Italy ... Were awed by St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, one of the largest churches in the world ... Checked out Rockefeller Center ... Spent $2.49 for a 20-ounce Diet Coke in Times Square ... Cruised through the Columbia campus to finish the kids' collection of Ivy League visits ... Walked across the Brooklyn Bridge while the HHS senior did her running back-and-forth on the graceful span ...
Rode the Staten Island ferry ... Strolled through Wall Street and the financial district ... Visited the Empire State Building – but having gone up to the observation tower a few years ago decided not to fork over the bucks to do it again ...
Were tremendously moved by a visit to Ground Zero and the nearby museum that brought the horror of Sept. 11 home anew ... Toured the United Nations the very next day and were struck by the juxtaposition of visits to the World Trade Center site and the UN on successive days.
A few observations ...
This was a different New York City than I remembered from college days. It was much cleaner and felt much safer. ... Even though I'd read and heard about all the changes on 42nd Street I was astonished at how different it was from what I remembered. ... Ditto for the walk up 8th Avenue from Madison Square Garden past the Port Authority Bus Terminal, a stroll that used to be regularly interrupted by various, um, ladies. ... There were plenty of police officers everywhere we went in Midtown and they didn't seem to have much to do beyond answering questions asked by tourists from Germany or Japan or ... Moose Mountain. ...
About the only down side of the city was the haze of blue smoke that blew in our faces seemingly in front of every building when we strolled down the streets as so many office workers stepped outside to indulge in their habit. Coming from the Upper Valley it was both unusual and unpleasant. ...
The trip finished with a return to the Connecticut train station where we had left the car. Unfortunately, yanking our packs out of the back of it on Monday it seems we nudged a switch that turned on a roof light, and that killed our battery. It took a while but the AAA membership came in handy and after an hour or so delay with were on the road back home.
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