Remembering Bob Tignor—uncle, tennis player, Philly sports lover and Princeton professor—as his beloved Tigers try their luck in the Sweet 16

Is there a moment from your sports-fan past that you wish you could take back? When you reacted to a loss in a way that makes you cringe now?

Mine came early, when I was 12. It was the July 4th weekend of 1981, and I was on the couch at a family gathering in Maryland, sitting next to my uncle Bob. (Pictured above, at far right.) We had just finished watching John McEnroe end Bjorn Borg’s five-year winning streak at Wimbledon. This was a crushing, traumatic blow for my sixth-grade self. Borg was my god. I had a Western grip, a two-handed backhand, and an uncomfortably tight pinstriped Fila shirt because of him. McEnroe, who would be my next god, was still vulgarity incarnate in my eyes. Surely, this grasping New York loudmouth couldn’t take the crown away from the beacon of gentlemanly perfection that was Borg? But this, of course, is exactly what happened, and Borg never tried to get the crown back. Nothing, I discovered, is perfect, not even the Angelic Assassin.

Bob, unbelievably to me at the time, was rooting for McEnroe. A professor and an enthusiastic debater, he was never afraid to make his opinion known, or disagree with anyone else’s. He thought McEnroe’s style was more exciting than Borg’s; eventually I would agree with him, but I wasn’t ready for that message yet. After McEnroe’s final forehand volley curled in at match point, Bob tried to make me feel better by putting his hand on my arm, as if to say, “It’s OK, it’s just a tennis match.” Unfortunately, I wasn’t ready for that message, either. I pushed his hand away and resumed sitting with my arms folded in frustration.

I always felt bad about that moment, and was thankful in the ensuing years that Bob didn’t seem to remember it. Up until a year before he passed away, at 89, this fall, we watched a lot more sports together, and we were always on the same rooting side. The Philly side.

Bob was the oldest of five children who grew up just outside of Philadelphia; my father was two years younger. They went to Shibe Park in the 1940s to root for the A’s when that franchise was in Philadelphia, under the management of grand old man Connie Mack, who was in his 80s by then. They went to the fabled 1960 NFL Championship game, in which the Eagles beat the Green Bay Packers, and Chuck “Concrete Charlie” Bednarik sat on a Packers runner as time ran out. They saw the 76ers-Celtics, Wilt Chamberlain-Bill Russell rivalry of the 1960s first-hand. I can still feel the energy that coursed through our living room when Bob and my dad watched the Eagles rout the hated Dallas Cowboys in the 1981 NFC Championship game.

Bob never seemed to lose that fan energy. Last year, I happened to visit him on the night when James Harden made his debut with the 76ers. He was as animated and opinionated as ever. “Ah, come on!” he would call out, raising his arms, whenever he disagreed with a call or was unhappy with a play, neither of which was an infrequent occurrence.

He played sports, particularly tennis and squash, with the same competitive drive. Social tennis wasn’t his jam; even in a friendly match on a family vacation, if he discovered, say, that you didn’t like the ball to be sliced to you, then he would slice the ball to you, every time. Well into his 70s, after he had ruptured his Achilles’ more than once, he wanted to take me on in squash. I’m sure he thought he could still give me a run, and with his will to win alone, he might have.

In his professional life, Bob didn’t fit the normal profile of a sports nut. He was a history professor at Princeton for four decades, an Egyptologist, a liberal, a daily devotee of The New York Times, and an author of several books, including a popular global-history textbook, Worlds Together, Worlds Apart. I can remember, as a kid, the shock of looking through my parents book shelves and coming across that unusual name, “Tignor,” on two or three of the spines. I’d like to think that Bob’s example inspired my own attempt, as a tennis writer, to mix sports fandom with an artistic or analytical pursuit.

At his memorial service last month, colleagues and former students of his took note of his integrity and honesty. There was loyalty in him, too, particularly to his family and his school. As much as Bob loved his Philadelphia teams, he may have been even more faithful to Princeton’s. I went to many football games, basketball games, and squash matches with him at the college, and I can’t remember him ever agreeing with a referee’s call that went against the Tigers. That loyalty held true even when I played tennis against them. In the early ’90s, I came to Princeton with the Swarthmore tennis team for a dual match. Bob surely had better things to do that afternoon, but he sat through every point of my topsy-turvy, sometimes-good, sometimes-awful three-hour match. He was the only person in the stands. When it was over, the first thing he said to me was, “You know, your teammate on the court next to you was really cheating the Princeton player terribly.”

Bob would have been thrilled by the current Princeton men’s-basketball team’s run to the Sweet 16 in the NCAA tournament. He came to the school in 1964; the following year Bill Bradley led the Tigers to their first and only trip to the final four. Bradley was a history major, and Bob was a teacher and adviser of his. Later, when we went to games, Bob liked to sit behind the Princeton bench and watch the team’s longtime coach, Pete Carril, rage and plead his way up and down the sidelines.

I’m happy that I had a chance to watch two Tigers games, one football and one basketball, with Bob in 2021 and 2022. The football game, against Harvard, went five overtimes before Princeton won. (Harvard was likely robbed because of a bad call, but we didn’t mention that afterward.) It was a blustery late-fall day, and Bob seemed happy to be part of the festivities. Near the beginning of the game, a potentially tipsy Princeton fan one row behind us stood up and bellowed, “None of your tricks, Harvard!” No one was sure what that meant, exactly, but Bob got a kick out of it.

Time, and family, flow in funny ways. In 2011, I wrote a book about the Borg-McEnroe rivalry, called High Strung. It was particularly focused on the fateful summer of ’81, and the transfer of power from the Swede to the American. Clearly that day on the couch in Maryland watching the Wimbledon final left a mark on me. My parents gave Bob a copy of my book, and he went to the trouble of having it installed in one of Princeton’s libraries.

A year or so later, we met at a Phillies game, and Bob had something for me in return: A copy of his latest book about Egypt. He seemed happy to show that, even in retirement, he was still working, and still had a voice. The book, which was meant for the general public rather than an academic audience, was good. The best part to me—and hopefully it wasn’t just wishful thinking—was that, every so often, I thought I recognized a little of my writing style in his.

Thanks, Bob, for the inspiration and the example—and for helping me realize that John McEnroe wasn’t the worst thing in the world. I’ll send a couple of “Ah come on!”s to the refs during the Princeton game on Friday in your honor.