This story originally appeared on GoPrincetonTigers.com and is being republished with permission. Jerry Price is the senior communications advisor and historian for Princeton Athletics.
Evan Garfein allowed himself a laugh, which for him these days is probably something he doesn’t get a chance to do all that often.
“Four goals,” he said, chuckling. “Four goals and two assists.”
Those were his career scoring totals during his Princeton lacrosse career. Those numbers don’t begin to define what his experience as a Tiger was, of course. Not even close.
“He was a walk-on,” says Bill Tierney, who coached Garfein at Princeton. “He wasn’t from a great high school program, and he wasn’t a great player. But he was tough. He believed in himself. He was a great teammate. And he worked hard. What he’s done in his profession and what he’s doing right now come directly from all of that.”
What is he doing now?
Evan Garfein, a member of Tierney’s first NCAA championship team as a senior in 1992, is now Dr. Evan Garfein. He is a plastic surgeon in New York City who has put himself on the front lines of the fight against the coronavirus, and he is seeing its devastating effects first-hand as he works in an emergency room in the Bronx.
What he’s seeing is not easy to handle.
“We’re at the break point of a wave,” he says, “and we’re about to get wet. I’ve become acutely aware of what’s going on at this hospital now and just how unbelievably infectious this virus is. People who are infected have a super high chance of infecting the people around them. And second is that people get really, really sick from this.”
Garfein’s normal routine as a plastic surgeon includes head and neck reconstructions as a result of cancers or traumas.
“All of that is on hold for now,” says Garfein, who went to Columbia Medical School. “Right now, our first deployment is to the ER in 12-hour shifts. One night shift. One day shift. We’re dividing up time among the plastic surgeons. That’s going to evolve to taking care of patients on the floor and in the ICU. That’s not something I’ve done in 20 years or so, but now it’s all hands on deck.”
To keep himself healthy, he wears masks and eye protection with a lot of hand washing, and being, to use his words, extremely careful. For now, there’s no time to worry about anything other than the number of patients who come his way.
“I have a great deal of faith in the biomedical complex of this country to solve very complex problems,” he says. “We saw that with HIV. I always have hope that marshaling the resources of the United States pharmaceutical and medical industries will be very effective. With HIV, though, it happened over a period of years. Now we have to sort of do that in a period of weeks and months.”
To be part of it as closely as he is takes some pretty special fortitude. Where did he get his? Some of it is just innate. Some of it he learned it as a Princeton Tiger.
“Playing lacrosse at Princeton was a formative experience for me,” he says. “My closest friends, who are still like brothers to me, are all from that team. A lot of who I am can be traced back to those experiences and that time. I was never a guy who starred on the field, but I remember sitting in T’s office once and he said, ‘You know, in 30 years, nobody is going to remember how much you played or didn’t play. It’s the experience. That’s what’s important.’ And he was correct. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything in the world.”
Garfein is a New York City native who went to Horace Mann, which is not a lacrosse powerhouse. When it came time to choose a college, though, he knew he wanted to keep playing the sport.
“In the Ivy League in 1988,” he says, “the two teams on the bottom were Dartmouth and Princeton. I figured that was my best chance to make the team. I was lucky to come along when I did. If I had come along two years later, I wouldn’t have been as fortunate. I knew the only thing I could control, the only thing I could trade on, was hard work.”
The 1988 season was Bill Tierney’s first at Princeton. He inherited a team that had gone 1-14 the year before, and he went to 2-13 that first year, Garfein’s senior year of high school. What did he see in Garfein that made him put him on his roster?
“We needed people,” he says. “We had 32 guys. We needed anyone we could find. And with Evan, we found someone special. He had a lot of toughness.”
The recruits in the class that came in with Garfein were told by Tierney that they would win an NCAA championship, which seemed absurd at the time. The Tigers improved to 6-8 during Garfein’s freshman year and then made the NCAA tournament for the first time in 1990, his sophomore year.
That was followed by the epic 14-13 triple-overtime loss to Towson in 1991 and then the Tigers’ first Final Four appearance in 1992, his senior year. That year, the Final Four was held at Franklin Field in Philadelphia, and Princeton would knock off North Carolina 16-14 in the semifinals on an incredibly hot day to reach the championship game against Syracuse.
By now Garfein had worked his way up to become someone who would get on the field, at least a little. More importantly, he was working in practice on a specific extra man play, one that hadn’t been used all season.
The rules said that teams could only dress 28 for an NCAA tournament game, and Garfein dressed for the semifinal win. He wasn’t sure if he would be able to dress for the final, and he and his coach tell different stories about what happened.
“I went to his hotel room and asked if I was going to dress Monday,” Garfein says. “He said, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ The next day, in practice, we had a skeleton crew. The guys who played a lot in the 100 degree weather weren’t practicing. I was doing a groin stretch and was staring down, with my helmet in front of me on the turf, and T taps me on the shoulder and tells me that I was going to go in with the first extra man unit. I couldn’t believe it.”
For Tierney’s part, he remembers a conversation much earlier than that weekend.
“On the first day of practice in 1992, he came up to me and said that if we make it to the NCAA championship game, could he dress,” Tierney says. “I said, ‘Sure, why not?’ Nobody thought we were going to be there anyway. Then, after we beat North Carolina on the 120-degree turf, we’re walking off and he comes up to me and says, ‘Do you remember your promise?’ I said, ‘No, what promise,” and he reminded me. He was serious. So we went with it.”
Garfein did get to play in the game on the first man-up opportunity. He even took a shot that went wide and was backed up by the Tigers, and on the restart, he threw a risky pass into the middle that resulted in a turnover.
“I’m not sure this part really happened or not, but I’ve always told it this way,” Tierney says. “But he came off the field and said, ‘I guess I’m not going back in, huh?’ He was such a great teammate. He was so important to that team.”
Princeton would win the game 10-9 on Andy Moe’s goal off the face-off for the second overtime. It was the first of six NCAA titles Princeton has won, and it sent the Class of 1992 out the way their coach had said they would go out four years earlier.
For Garfein, he’s never forgotten what it meant to him to step on the field that day.
“I have this great picture of me as I walked out onto the field for the man up,” he says. “It’s a little out of focus, but it’s so special to me. Through the years, I can’t tell you how special it was to me to be out there. And it says so much about T. Here I was, a guy who hadn’t played much. I thought he was going to rotate, some of the guys who didn’t dress Saturday would get to dress Monday. But he put me out there. He didn’t have to do that. I think it was a recognition of my hard work for four years. He totally didn’t have to put me out there. If he hadn’t put me out there, nobody would have said a word. I wouldn’t have. I would have understood.”
Then he paused.
“I’d still run through a wall for that guy,” he said.
These days, he’s up against the wall, trying to hold it up with everything he has. This is not an easy task in the least.
“What he’s doing is heroic,” his old coach says.
Heroes. They’re not always the ones who score the winning goals. They are the ones who are there when you need them most.
These days, Evan Garfein is one of the heroes in a place and time that desperately needs them.