Home of the Roundball Poets
LOUISVILLE, KY. – Greetings from the South Regional of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. We’re several hours away from tip-off of the Sweet 16 matchup between the No. 15 Princeton Tigers and the No. 6 Creighton Blue Jays, the first time an Ivy program has played a game this deep in the tournament since 2010.
Here are a few tidbits from my first 12 hours in Louisville, the birthplace and home of Muhammad Ali, Churchill Downs, and the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory:
David Blatt, a 1981 graduate of Princeton and head coach of Greek club Olympiacos, took to the website of his present team on Monday to issue a statement regarding the news that he was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
“A few months ago I was diagnosed with PPMS, primary progressive multiple sclerosis. Τhis is a disease that has many forms and manifests itself in different ways to different people” posted Blatt in the opening of his statement. “It is an autoimmune system disease that can and does in many ways change your quality of life and ability to do even the most basic of functions in ways that have always seemed normal to you.”
We’re counting down the top 10 moments in each Ivy school’s history as part of our Ivy League at 60 retrospective. Columbia is next because powder blue is a beautiful color.
The 2000-01 season was not a great one for Columbia basketball as a team, but for Craig Austin, it was one to remember. The junior small forward became the only Columbia player to win sole possession of the Ivy Player of the Year award. (Buck Jenkins shared the award with Jerome Allen in 1993, the award was given out for the first time in 1975.) The Lions were perfectly mediocre in Ivy play, finishing tied for fourth place at 7-7. But Austin’s numbers stood out far and beyond his competitors in league play, especially down the stretch. Austin averaged 18.4 points per game on the season, the only Lion to average double figures, and nearly doubled the point total of the next highest scorer on the team.