Basketball: Disappeared with a trace

Hornberger looks up at the interloper. The man cuts a large figure in the doorway of the office, wearing thick, dark-rimmed glasses and black, closely cropped hair — neatness at odds with his slightly disheveled jeans and plain T-shirt. Hornberger has seen this man around Jadwin throughout the year.

“I think [he] may have already been a long-time frequent visitor to the sports information office when I arrived, so I guess you could say I ‘inherited’ him for a year,” Hornberger recalled 30 years later, “I remember him occasionally dropping off prints from men’s basketball games for me to look at.”

Hornberger is not alone in not knowing when the man first came to Jadwin. No one does.

Drifting in, then out

On this particular day, the man does not have any pictures. He doesn’t have much of anything. He politely requests the season’s box scores for the men’s basketball team. Someone retrieves them for him, and he takes them graciously. Then he stays for a little while to chat. After all, he is a friendly guy: quick to smile and to show off his deep, low-key laugh. Then he leaves. He returns a few days later to put some sheets of photocopied notebook paper into three blue binders and return the box scores. Then he leaves again.

At the end of the year, Craig Hornberger said goodbye to Princeton, but the visitor came back. He came back every spring for the next two decades, just as he had every year as far back as any of the staff can remember. Then, in 1998, the man did not show up. Much like his coming, no one seems to know about his going. Theories were idly kicked around at first. But after a few years, most simply assumed the man, who by 1998 was starting to show signs of age, had died.

The record books

Records are kept for many reasons. They immortalize the best athletes and form a tangible history of a program’s excellence and failure. But the best part about records is the sheer weirdness they often document. In the early 1900s, the men’s basketball team not only played but lost to local YMCAs and high schools. The Tigers faced private clubs and military divisions. They once defeated the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company in 1920. Six years later, they lost to Firestone Tire and Rubber.

Records show when the team played games for the military. On Feb. 20, 1912, the Tigers played a game against Dartmouth for the 22nd Regular Army Division in New York City. Records show the first game played in Baker Rink, now the home of championship-caliber broomball: a November 1944 contest against Rider (a close 40-39 loss). Because I’m from Massachusetts, I was particularly excited to see that the team’s win over Harvard on Jan. 14, 1947, took place at the Boston Garden.

The history contained in a record book is undeniable. Everything becomes a little more special, though, when that record book is written on lined paper, in a single person’s handwriting.

Flip forward

It was easy to become engrossed by the record after getting lured in by the oddest trivia. Reading through it, I quickly got caught up in each individual season and oddly attached to players whose careers can be read through in a matter of minutes.

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Take Joseph Nelson Carter ’04, who totaled 86 points in the 1900-01 season and led the team with a 7.2 points-per-game average. Turn the page and you’ll find that he scored a mere 13 points in the entire next season. But another turn of the page reveals that in his senior year, Carter returned to form, scoring 96 points en route to a 7.4 points-per-game average, once again leading the squad. I couldn’t help but feel a small surge of pride for the man, now long-deceased, each one of his points living on in the records.

This experience recurs with almost every season. On Jan. 15, 1955, Harold Haebestad ’55 scored his thousandth point in a win over the Crimson. As the record carefully notes, the prolific scorer is not known simply as Harold, but as “Bud.” It’s impossible not to get caught up in these details, not to feel a thrill of excitement for Princeton’s first thousand-point scorer. The years of Bill Bradley ’65 are simply mind-blowing, as the team’s scoring jumped by hundreds of points.

Turning the pages of the record also creates a kind of college basketball history flipbook. Flip forward: Early leagues like the EIBL began to form, and Princeton students are no longer embarrassed by losing to high-schoolers. Flip forward: The modern Ivy League is formed. Keep flipping, and details slowly change: scores increase; rebounds become stats in 1954, joined by assists, steals and blocks 20 years later; people start making it rain with three-pointers in 1986. By the time 1997 arrives, the record shows the modern collegiate game.

Captured moments

Some of the history that emerges is more somber. The four pages that show World War II also show years of fluctuations in statistics and results. A group of players in this section has two dates next to each name. The annotations reveal that veterans of WWII received degrees for their original class. The first date associated with each name is the date on his degree, his initial graduating year. The second year is the year of his last game after his return from the war. It’s hard not to feel a moment of awe for these members of the “Greatest Generation,” imagining their walking off the court one day and into the trenches the next.

A thing unlike any other

There are extensive record books, and then there is this record book. It immortalizes everyone and documents everything. It draws a picture of every season, every game, every shot and every career. There aren’t records like this. No one has the time or motivation to make them. But the slightly cramped handwriting on each page shows that one extremely diligent person lovingly crafted the entire record.

I saw that the record was digitized and posted by Assistant Director of Athletic Communications Andrew Borders. He didn’t know where the records came from.

“I just decided to scan and post the book since it’s been so helpful to me in looking things up,” he said.

He referred me to Jerry Price, current associate director of athletics.

“There was a guy who came in here once a year and took all the box scores,” Price said. “He came back later and updated these three little binders that we have stored here. His name was Bill Greenfield.”

Finding Bill

A few weeks later, I retraced the steps Bill Greenfield had taken hundreds of times into Jadwin Gymnasium, up to the athletic communications office.

“Robert?” Price said to me when I walked in. “The binders are in the cabinet next door.”

In the squat cabinet next door, I found three shabby binders, fraying on the edges, worn with use, colored an aging blue generally reserved for grandmothers’ upholstery. The pages of the notebooks only hint at the white color they must have had at one point. Most are still attached properly, but many are loose and jut out at odd angles.

There are even more records inside these binders. There are pages recording career statistics for every player, organized by year. There are individual records listing not the first five players in a given stat, but at least the top 15. For scoring there are the top 35, a list about three times longer than your average top-scorers list.

After looking through the binders, I asked if Bill had left any contact information. After musing for a moment, Price reached up onto a shelf and began to flip through a card-catalog of phone numbers.

“Here we go,” he said, pulling out a card, clearly a little surprised. We dialed the number.

Gone without a trace

“The number you have dialed is no longer ...”

The number has been disconnected. The only other information he left, a PO box in Edison, is similarly no longer in use. When he walked out of Jadwin Gymnasium in the spring of 1997, Bill Greenfield had truly disappeared.

“After the 1997 season, he just never came back ... I have no idea what happened to him,” Price said, “I always assumed he had died.”

An enduring legacy

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints keeps excellent death records. Using its database, it’s easy to search for all of the William Greenfields who died in the New York-New Jersey area within five years of 1997. There were a few. William E. Greenfield, who passed away in New York in January 1998, seems likely. But there’s no living descendent information, so although he may very well be our Bill Greenfield, there’s no way to know. He remains an enigma.

Despite the fact that the real Greenfield is gone, the memory of Bill Greenfield still very much exists. A lot of people remember Bill Greenfield.

‘That’s my gear’

“We deal with hundreds of people with weird requests, wanting stuff,” Price said. “But I still see that guy, still remember his name.”

“Bill Greenfield was one of those characters that sports information offices often come across. They hang around because they love sports,” Chuck Yrigoyen, current commissioner of the Iowa Intercollegiate Athletic Conference and Princeton’s sports information director from 1984 to 1989, said in an e-mail.

People who worked at Jadwin still remember vividly his distinctive personality, even though decades have passed since his last appearance.

“A big man who always seemed happy — smile on his face and an easy, deep laugh,” Kurt Kehl, director of the sports information office at Princeton from 1989 to 2002, said.

“He was very meticulous about his stuff, very protective of his stuff,” Price wryly remembered, “ ‘That’s my gear,’ he would say. ‘That’s my gear.’ ”

“He did not have any kind of relationship with the coaches or players from back then, and I don’t remember that he ever hung out with people at the games,” Yrigoyen recalled, “I very much believe he lived in solitude.

“The worst thing about him was that he was a Rutgers fan!” Yrigoyen added.

Pencil and paper

Personality aside, what separates Bill from the other recurring characters in Princeton’s athletic history is his record. Yrigoyen remembered Bill clearly, almost wistfully, for his unique character and his unusual record-keeping hobby.

“He did all those career lists and other information that I can’t even remember,” he recalled, “I just know it was a lot of great stuff. All of it, of course, done in pencil and paper.”

“There was tremendous value in his record-keeping. I referred to it often,” Yrigoyen emphasized. “In fact, I think I can remember one of the first things I did with the research was go back through the [seasons during the tenure of legendary head coach Pete Carril] to see how many times Princeton had been shut out in in-season tournaments.”

“At that time I am almost sure they had never lost all the games of an in-season tournament, which was remarkable considering who they played,” he continued, “[We] beat Wisconsin at Arizona’s tournament in the 1980s [and] beat South Carolina at Georgia’s tournament in 1988-89 ... I think Bill noted all of those in-season tournaments in his records whereas our list of all-time results was harder to navigate.”

A passion project

Throughout every year, Bill worked with pride evident on the pages of his record.

“I remember he would come after every season and we would sit together as he pulled out old sheets from the binder and inserted new ones,” Yrigoyen said. “He didn’t need me for that, but he wanted you to feel the pride in his work as he talked his way through every sheet.”

His pride was very much justified, as his record-keeping created a singular document, a truly one-of-a kind historical record.

“I wish we had this kind of record for the others sports, but we just don’t,” Price admitted.

Bill isn’t here to watch as the team prepares for the NCAA Tournament. One has to wonder what Bill would have written about this season and what notes he would have scrawled. Unfortunately, it will never happen. But as the team gets ready for the Big Dance, it’s adding another chapter to its long, storied history. A history carefully recorded by Bill Greenfield.