Feature Story: An Epic Comeback Turns 25 Years Old

IT DOESN'T TAKE MORE THAN A FEW SECONDS for Ed Corbett's voice to tell his life story, no details necessary. This voice belongs to a man of experience. It's an extrovert's voice. It has a sense of authority to it.
This isn't the voice of a man who spent his life in a boardroom or a country club. It's the voice of a man who spent four decades working for Con Ed — the New York power giant — keeping energy flowing to a city whose blackouts are the subjects of movies and legends and stories that don't all end well.
The voice certainly matches that role. More than anything else, this is a New York voice — Yonkers, to be exact. It's deep and passionate. You talk to him for a few minutes, and you realize this is a voice that has been used a lot in its 71 years. It belongs someone who has to be the kind of guy who will take to anyone, anywhere, about anything. He must have a million friends, and you can't help but think that even though you've never actually met him, you now make it a million-and-one.
In the 15 minutes you speak to him, he never once uses the formal version of anyone's name. Those who names are multi-syllabic are acknowledged by a single syllable. The opposite is true for those with one syllable names. Pete is Petey. Bill is Billy. Bob is Bobby. Gary is Gar.
He says things like "I spoke to Bobby" or "Tell Gar I said hello if you talk to him."
Once you've figured that out, it's not surprising that he refers to his son as "Eddie," not "Ed" or "Ed Jr." or even "Eddie Jr." He's just "Eddie," it seems.
Ed Corbett Jr. has followed in his father's footsteps, though not the ones that kept the lights on in New York City for all those years. No, Ed Corbett Jr. is a college basketball referee, just like his father was, and few have ever been better at it than Ed Corbett Sr.
A high school basketball player at Sacred Heart in Yonkers, he started his officiating career on the CYO level, making $15 per game and doing five games on a Saturday and five more on a Sunday. His resume as a ref grew to include nearly 3,000 games on the collegiate level between 1985 and 2018, including six Final Fours and four NCAA championship games. If there's a Division I gym out there, odds are good that he's worked a game in it. If there's a college coach from the last 40 years in the Hall of Fame, odds are good he's yelled at Ed Corbett Sr.
He's retired now, but he still follows his son's performances carefully — "he texts me a lot during games about plays and things," Ed Jr. says.
"I saw he was doing a real one-sided game," Corbett Sr. says. "I texted him at halftime and told him 'You have to keep reffing like it's 0-0.' The most you'll do is give a 50-50 call to the team that's down, as long as the coach isn't busting your chops too much. You get these games where it's a 25-point lead one way or another. You don't let up though. You never know what's going to happen. Most of the time, nothing does. Every now and then, you get one of those nights. Maybe, maybe you get one every 10 years, if that."
One of those nights was 25 years ago.
Ed Corbett Sr. was one of the refs in the Palestra on Feb. 9, 1999. It was Princeton, unbeaten in the Ivy League, against Penn, unbeaten in the Ivy League. Princeton had won three straight Ivy titles. Penn thought this was the year to end that streak.
It was 3-0 Princeton when Brian Earl hit a three-point shot. That was when normalcy left the building.
First, Penn then went on a 29-0 run. Twenty-nine to zero. A Palestra crowd that was already boisterous became downright deafening with each Quaker score. And vicious. For 16 minutes, it was every Princeton nightmare rolled into one.
Princeton's Chris Young, then a freshman playing in his first-ever Palestra game, finally made the score under "Princeton" move, from "3" to "4" when he made a foul shot with four minutes to go in the first half. The home fans gave a standing ovation.
It only got worse for Princeton after that. It was 33-9 at the half. It was 40-13 with 15 minutes to go.
Final score? Princeton 50, Penn 49. That game, a legendary moment in Princeton Athletics history, is now a quarter-century old.
"I remember," Corbett says, "that the building went from loud to silent. It was wild."
"That was a Top 5 game I've ever been a part of," Young says.
When you consider some of the games he's been a part of, that statement becomes even more powerful.

Chris Young

A LIGHT BUT STEADY RAIN fell most of the day in Kansas City on Oct. 27, 2015. First pitch of Game 1 of the World Series between the hometown Royals and the New York Mets, though, went off as scheduled at 7:07 Central Time. It was after 11 in Kansas City, and past midnight in the East, when the call went out to the home team bullpen.
It was the bottom of the 11^th inning. Kansas City had a chance to win it there, just like in the ninth and 10^th. When the phone rang, the Royals were coming to bat. The voice on the other end said "If we don't score, CY's got it."
"CY" is the same Chris Young who was a Princeton freshman basketball player at the Palestra in 1999. It's the same Chris Young who would score the game-winning basket that night. Now he was in the bullpen getting ready to go into a World Series game.
"I was scheduled for Game 4," Young says. "I was only in the bullpen for an emergency. We tied the game in the ninth on a solo home run, and so it went to extra innings. I knew that the way things were going, at some point I'd be the last pitcher left available. Sure enough, that's what happened."
Young was the seventh KC pitcher in the game. In all he'd go three innings, the 12^th, 13^th and 14th, allowing no runs and no hits while striking out four. When the Royals scored in the bottom of the 14^th, Young was the winning pitcher. Kansas City took the series in five games.
"The most nervous I got was when I was warming up," Young says. "We made two quick outs in the 11^th. I was a starting pitcher. I needed time to be ready. Salvatore Perez drew a walk with two outs, and that gave me another five minutes or so. Before that, I was thinking 'I'm going into the World Series and I'm not even warm yet.' I was very fortunate that he walked. Once I got in the game, the focus was there, and it became about executing like any other game."
Young now has two World Series rings, one as a pitcher in Kansas City and, most recently, as the general manager of the Texas Rangers, the team for whom he grew up rooting in the Dallas suburb of Highland Park. He took over a Rangers team that had never won a World Series, coming agonizingly close in 2010 and 2011, only to fall to the Giants and then the Cardinals, the latter in seven games when at one point the Rangers were one strike away.
The team Young took over lost 102 games the season prior to his arrival and then improved to 68-94 his first year before going 90-72 last year, defeating Tampa Bay, Baltimore, Houston and finally Arizona to win the World Series.
"As a player, winning in 2015 was the ultimate," he says. "It's everything you play for, and in my playing career, it's what I'd hoped I'd accomplish. To be part of that Kansas City Royals team was so special. What we did last year is uniquely different. For me, the joy of this has been about everyone else. This community waited 52 years to win a World Series. To see so many people taking joy in this championship means so much to me, especially since I'm from here and grew up rooting for the Rangers."
As he prepares for the defense of that championship, spring training is just around the corner. He has just gotten off a call with team ownership. His place in Dallas-Ft. Worth athletic history is secure, even as the competitive fire still burns.
The same is true of Princeton. There have been very few Princeton athletes who have ever been as universally loved as Chris Young. Tall at 6-10, he was only imposing on the court or the mound. Off of them, he is one of the most approachable, one of the most easy-going, one of the most likeable athletes who has ever walked on this campus.
There is no Princeton fan who saw him play who can't help but wonder what he might have done in his final two basketball seasons, had he not lost his eligibility when he signed a professional baseball contract after his sophomore year. In all he would pitch for 13 years in the Majors, winning a Comeback Player of the Year Award and being selected for an All-Star Game in addition to the World Series. He even hit one Major League home run.
Wherever baseball has taken him, he has stayed extremely loyal to Princeton. He was determined to graduate with his class, and he did, writing his senior thesis on buses that traveled the Minor Leagues. His wife is a former Princeton women's soccer captain, back when she was Liz Patrick. They have three children, all of whom "are tall," Young says. All three play basketball. One plays baseball.
Could Young have played in the NBA? As hard as it is to second-guess the path he took, there are those who will never stop believing that his career in basketball would have been even greater than in baseball.
Whatever side of that you're on, it doesn't matter. What is true is that he was exceptional at both. Young was the 1999 Ivy League Rookie of the Year in both sports, and he a first-team All-Ivy selection in both the next year. Had he stayed with basketball, he'd likely have reached 2,000 career points and broken the program's career records for blocked shots and rebounds. By the night of Feb. 9, 1999, he'd already established himself as a dominant big man, not only in the Ivy League but also throughout Division I.
"I can't believe that game was 25 years ago already," he says. "It feels like yesterday."

Matt Langel (photo courtesy of Colgate Athletics)

CHRIS YOUNG SCORED THE WINNING BASKET in the game that night, but it came with a little more than two minutes to go. Penn had several chances after that, including on the final possession. The last shot came out of the hands of then-junior Matt Langel — and was no good. The last loose ball fell to Brian Earl, now one of Langel's closest friends, and Earl cradled it as the horn sounded. There was a picture the next day on the Philadelphia Daily News back page where Earl appears to be in tears from the game's emotions.
Today Matt Langel is one of the best young coaches in Division I men's basketball. He has taken his Colgate teams to four of the last five NCAA tournaments and is the only four-time Patriot League Coach of the Year. He also finds himself in a local Upstate New York rivalry with Earl, who is now the head coach at Cornell. Like Young, Langel is also married to a former athlete from his school, women's basketball player Tara Twomey.
"In so many ways, that time in my life feels like it was yesterday," he says when asked about 1999. While Young is focused on his team's upcoming season, Langel is in the middle of his. The Raiders are seeking a return trip to the NCAA tournament and, after some really strong performances, a first win there.
What would he have to say about that game? Would he even agree to talk about it? Would he be bitter? Or has time done its thing?
"The fragility of the whole thing is that a game is never over," he says. "It's one of the most impactful games of my life, and it's not one I ever want to forget."
Like many of the best Ivy League players through the years, and especially in the 1980s and '90s, Langel's final two college choices were Princeton and Penn after he graduated from Moorestown High in South Jersey. In many ways, those were the peak years of the rivalry. Princeton won from 1989-92. Penn won in 1993, 1994 and 1995. Princeton came back with its epic run of 1996-98. After graduation in 1998 claimed such stars as current Tiger head coach Mitch Henderson, future NBA player Steve Goodrich and the late James Mastaglio, it was either team's league in 1999.
"Going back to when I was recruited, it was Penn and Princeton," Langel says. "For someone like me, and a lot of guys who played at the two schools, academics were important and basketball was important, and those two schools really distinguished themselves. I went to Penn after Princeton had been on a huge run. For me and the guys who were there at that time, we were trying to get Penn back to where we wanted to be, where they were. By my junior year, we hadn't gotten over the hump yet. For me it had been two years. For the guys in front of me, it had been three. That was the buildup for that season."
Langel was a first-team All-Ivy selection as a senior before graduating in 2000, and he finished his Quaker career with 1,191 career points. He spent four years as a player in Europe, with stops in Switzerland, Germany, France and the Netherlands, before getting into coaching.
"I didn't know what I wanted to do," he says. "My father was an attorney and he loved his job, but I knew I wanted to do something that wasn't a job you hated and all you could do was wait for the weekends. I remember when I was playing overseas, the people from school I stayed in touch with were all getting $50,000 bonuses and tickets to Knicks games and all that. I didn't want that. Sports is super hard work, but it's what I love to do."
His coaching career started at his alma mater, on the staff of Fran Dunphy, who taught him what it meant to be a college basketball coach. When Dunphy left Penn to take the job at Temple in 2006, Langel went with him. In 2011, at the age of 34, he was hired at Colgate. The Raiders had won more than 10 games only once in the six years prior to Langel's arrival, including seven the year before. He went 8-22 in his first season (2011-12) and then built his program to be the best in the Patriot League. He has won at least 23 games in four of the last five seasons — the only time he didn't was when he was 14-2 in the Covid season of 2020-21. His current team is 16-8 overall and 10-1 and in first place in the Patriot.
"I asked him once after I got into coaching what it was like in the coaches' office the day after that game," Langel says. "Players tend to move on quickly, but there are a lot of sleepless nights in coaching. He said that they watched the tape, saw what we did well and what we did poorly, and learned from it. He said that there was no time to feel sorry for ourselves and that we were going to need to take care of what we could take care of. That was it."

Ed Corbett

"I LOVED WORKING PRINCETON-PENN GAMES," Corbett says. "It's like Army-Navy, UConn-Cuse, Duke-Carolina. It gets the adrenaline going."
Corbett was assigned to the game along with Bob Donato and Rich San Filipo, two other veteran refs. Corbett calls them, of course, Bobby and Richie.
"I was talking to Bobby," he says. "Neither one of us remembers too many of the details, but we remember it was like two different games, one game in the first half and one game in the second half."
The game marked the end of the first trip through the round-robin in 1999. Both Princeton and Penn were 6-0 in the league when they met on that Tuesday night in Philadelphia.
Penn shot 13 for 27 in the first half, including 4 for 12 from three-point range. These are not incredible numbers. Princeton shot 2 for 18 in the first half, including 1 for 12 from three-point range — missing 11 straight threes after Earl's make to start the game. Those are incredible numbers.
The 29-0 run was staggering. If Earl's three-pointer briefly quieted the crowd, the building came back to life quickly. With each successive basket, it got louder, and then louder again, even when it didn't seem like it was possible. By the time it was 29-3, the crowd was frothing. And then Young made his foul shot, and the mock ovation was followed by howls of laughter.
"I don't remember that," Young says. "I do remember that I had a really bad first half."
In fact, Young would shoot 0 for 8 from the field in the first 20 minutes. His two made foul shots were his only first half points. It's likely he never had another stretch in his Princeton career where he missed eight straight shots.
"Everybody was somewhat dejected at halftime," he says. "You go into a huge game against your rival and you look up at halftime and you're down 33-9? Everybody felt embarrassed and dejected. There was no yelling in the locker room. No screaming. No getting mad. We just felt the need to play better basketball. I remember thinking 'hey, we may not win, but we can certainly play better than we have.' Let's face it. When you're down that big, the likelihood of coming back isn't high."
In the officials' locker room, Corbett, along with Bobby and Richie, were thinking along the same lines.
"We figured we'd be out of there in 45 minutes," Corbett says. "We figured it would be an easy second half."
It was anything but. Princeton made one lineup change at the break, inserting freshman guard Ahmed El-Nokali, to go alongside Young, Earl, Gabe Lewullis and Mason Rocca. Princeton also had one positive to take away from the first half: It couldn't possibly shoot as badly again. The Tigers didn't turn the ball over much in the first half and had only seven for the night. It's just that Princeton couldn't buy a basket for the first 20 minutes.
That changed radically after intermission. Even with that, though, it didn't seem too plausible that the Tigers would actually come all the way back. Princeton's first point of the second half was an Earl foul shot that finally got the scoreboard to "10," and the Palestra crowd began a "Double Digits, Double Digits" chant.
"I remember that one," Young says.
Even though Princeton began to right itself offensively, the score didn't get much better. After five minutes, it had actually gotten worse, going from the 24-point halftime deficit to 27, at 40-13.
And then? In a blink, everything changed. Princeton's pressure on defense began to force turnovers and bad shots from the Quakers. Princeton's offense began to click. Earl began to hit his threes, and even Rocca and Young made one from distance. El-Nokali didn't score or even attempt a shot, but he brought presence on defense and helped keep the offense moving.
Penn turned it over 12 times after the break. The key number wasn't the number of turnovers though. It was the number of shots Penn would get. Penn outshot Princeton 27-18 in the first half. Princeton outshot Penn 31-12 in the second half. That's just total shots. As for percentages, Princeton went from .111 in the first half to .484 in the second, going 15 for 31. Penn shot 4 for 12 in the final 20 minutes.
What can't be measured was intensity, especially from Rocca and Earl, who were everywhere. Earl finished with 20 points. Rocca had 13 points, six rebounds and three assists.
"I can't remember the exact point where I thought we could come back," Young says. "I guess when the game got within 12 to 15 points, we could feel the momentum. We could feel how well we were playing, and we had to think it was within reach. I just remember that Mason was great. He turned the momentum of the game around."
Young made a hook shot with 2:14 to go, making it 50-49 Princeton. It gave the big man 11 points for the game, and he shot 4 for 6 after the break. He also fouled out. The game was won with the comeback and with the Young shot, but it would have been for naught had Penn made its foul shots — four of them, all misses — in the final two minutes.
Rocca also missed the front end of a one-and-one, and that gave Langel one more chance to win it. His shot from the baseline looked good, but it hit the rim and caromed away.
"I was distraught," Langel says. "I just stood there. I didn't even go through the handshake line."
"It had been so loud," Corbett said. "And suddenly it felt like there was nobody in the gym."

The Palestra

TO FULLY TELL THE STORY of the 1999 Princeton-Penn game at the Palestra, what happened next has to be included. Three days afterwards, Princeton lost a double overtime game at Yale. Princeton also lost at Harvard in overtime later in the season. Penn rolled through the rest of the league after the loss and took a one-game lead into the season finale at Jadwin. Princeton fell behind again, and this time there was no comeback.
"What we took from that loss was such a big part of our journey as a team," Langel says. "The way Coach Dunphy handled the team, handled me — you learn in victory, and you learn in defeat, and we learned a lot about ourselves from that game."
Penn went to the NCAA tournament, where it lost its first-round game to Florida 75-61. Princeton also made it to the postseason and had a great experience in the NIT, defeating Georgetown at Jadwin Gym in a game where the five players who started the second half at Penn would all play all 40 minutes, and then taking down North Carolina State at the Reynolds Coliseum. The run would end at Xavier in the old Cincinnati Gardens in the quarterfinals.
"I remember the players," Langel says, "more than I remember the details from the game. I stayed close with Gabe. I ran into Mason in the summer when his son was at an AAU tournament game. Brian became one of my best friends, even more so after playing years before. I have so much respect for all of those guys."
Penn won the league again in Langel's senior year. Princeton won in 2001. Penn won in 2002 and 2003. Princeton won in 2004. Penn won 2005-07. In fact, between 1963-2007, there were only three seasons where the Ivy champ and NCAA rep was not Penn or Princeton (1968, 1986, 1988).
So what is the lasting legacy of that Tuesday night in Philadelphia 25 years ago? It's not the biggest comeback ever. The record is actually 34 points, in a game Drexel won over Delaware 85-83 in 2018. The biggest halftime deficit erased was 29 points, five more than Princeton did, and that was done by Duke against Tulane way back in 1950, in a game Duke won 74-72. The record for a second-half comeback is 31 points, again four more than Princeton did that night. That record is shared by Duke in that Tulane game and also Kentucky against LSU in 1994, when the Wildcats won 99-95.
What separates this comeback is that in all of those games, points came with frequency. In the Princeton comeback, the teams combined for 99 points; Kentucky had that all by itself. To have a 27-point comeback in a game where the teams combined to score fewer than 100 is ridiculous.
And yet, that's not actually the legacy either. What it really is can be found in what those who competed that night took way from the experience. It's what has stayed with them, wherever they've gone, whether to a pair of World Series titles or to Hamilton, N.Y., and four NCAA tournament apperances.
"I was individually devasted after I missed the shot," Langel says. "What I came to realize is that it's not about you. I talk about it all the time with my teams. It's not about what you did. It's about giving your best effort and learning from what happens. Princeton had won. I needed to go and shake Coach Carmody's hand and be respectful. It's what I want from my teams."
"You never quit fighting," Young says. "You never stop playing. Maybe you can come back. Every now and then those comebacks happen. You never stop giving your best no matter what. And you never get complacent when you're ahead."
It's not a game that will ever be forgotten, even if the details get blurred. Princeton and Penn meet again Saturday night. The Tigers are coming off a trip to the Sweet 16 and are looking for a return trip to the NCAA tournament. Both teams are looking to get into the Ivy tournament, something that didn't exist in 1999.
It's still special whenever it's Princeton-Penn. This one is already sold out. And who knows? Maybe this will be one of "those games," as Ed Corbett called it.
"I was speaking at a referee's camp at Monmouth University two or three years ago," Corbett says. "Somebody brought that game up to me. I said 'hey, that was a long time ago.'"
Yes it was. It's been exactly 25 years, for that matter, come and gone in a blink, leaving memories both vivid and fuzzy to those who saw it, played it, officiated it — and leaving some of them to wonder, to this day, hey, did that really happen?

— by Jerry Price

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