June 20, 2008

by Clare Lochary, Lacrosse Magazine Online Staff

When I read a few months back that the Princeton men's lacrosse team was taking a summer trip to Spain and Ireland, I considered called them up and volunteering my services as an embedded reporter, since lacrosse and Ireland are two of my favorite things.

It's best I didn't throw my hat into the ring, because the Princeton powers that be would have laughed at me and explained that the team already had a writer going along - Pultizer Prize-winning author John McPhee. McPhee, perhaps best known for his seminal creative nonfiction magazine work and books like Annals of the Former World and Coming into the Country, is a Princeton writing professor and the team's academic athletic fellow.

Lochary versus McPhee is a serious mismatch, like Presbyterian versus Syracuse bad. He is superior to me in every conceivable way. Princeton's team blog mentions that at age 77, he helped athletic trainer George O'Neil carry equipment to the hotel. I probably would have gestured helplessly to my scrawny chicken arms and then lied about an urgent deadline to avoid any heavy lifting.

McPhee is more of a basketball guy than a lacrosse fan (he wrote A Sense of Where You Are, a 1965 book profiling Princeton senior Bill Bradley, later an NBA star and U.S. Senator), but he likes what he sees. Maybe lacrosse will get lucky enough to have a great writer take a good, hard look at it, to offset the [stuff]storm of uninformed pontificating that we got in 2006.

To read more about McPhee and the Tigers' trip, you can check out the team's Web archive here. There are some interesting tidbits about the English and Irish national teams.

Princeton wasn't the only NCAA team to visit the Emerald Isle this summer. The George Mason women's lacrosse team also to a team trip to Ireland, and also posted some dispatches, which you can read here.

It was something of a farewell tour for the Patriots' 11-year coach Amy Bokker, who accepted the head coaching position at Stanford on June 17. To read more about Bokker's permanent trip west, read the latest Loch-Down about Bokker and her Fresno State counterpart Sue Behme.