This is the first of two articles on Harvard's last boxing team. The second will appear tomorrow morning.

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As their crucial meet with Virginia draws nearer hourly, the boxing room high up in the Indoor Athletic Building is a hive of activity; for on Saturday the team of Coach Henry Lamar and Captain Pete Olney will face Virginia down in Charlottesville. This meet has special interest for Harvard, for this year is the last in which Harvard will take part in intercollegiate competition, and unless the Athletic Council changes its mind, this is the last meet in which a Crimson team will take part.

Looking on during a practice session as the team drills for this meet gives the outsider a feeling of amazement as he watches the intensive boxing between the members of the team, the serious way they approach the meet that above all else they want to win. Practice bouts of up to three rounds, roadwork of one to two miles once, sometimes twice a day, shadow boxing, socking away at the heavy or light bags, or rope work all take their place in the drive to beat Virginia.

It was six years ago when a tall, likeable graduate of Virginia who had turned professional came to Cambridge to try and build up the sport of boxing here: and last year when the Army came to town for a match, the greatest crowd in the history of minor sports filled the Indoor Athletic Building to watch the fun. It was a remarkable tribute to another of Harvard's popular coaching family.

Like most top-notch coaches, Henry Lamar was a star in his sport long before he thought of coaching. For two years in succession before he was out of Virginia he was the National Amateur Champion; in his collegiate boxing at the Charlottesville institution he knocked out most of his opponents, frequently doubled up to box twice in a meet in two different classes. As a professional pugilist he was also a success, and had dropped but one bout when he decided to accept Harvard's offer and take up a more secure if less spectacular mode of life.

By last year he had proved conclusively that he could teach his sport as well as do it; many men joined his beginners class to learn how to use the gloves; and his team was one of the best in the East, for it was they who toppled Virginia from the crown as an undefeated team which they had enjoyed for six years.

Quietly but definitely Lamar coaches these men as they go through their paces. Perhaps Pete Olney is having a practice fight with Dwight Eills; the two men swing freely into each other, going round and round the ring, giving and taking. As collegiate boxing frowns on the practice of pounding a man to pieces from close quarters, the men do not follow up and close in as much as the professionals, but the action is fast, the blows hard. Lamar, looking on with several members of the team, serves as time-keeper and referee, and coaches at the same time--"Get away from there! . . . . Use your right more . . . . Get off those ropes . . . . Break!"

His teams have reputation all their own as boxers rather than sluggers. At the Intercollegiates last year they became known as the "fancy Harvard boxers," and after Larry Crampton, one of last year's greats, had toppled "Pinkie" Haines of Western Maryland to become the Intercollegiate champion in his class, the loser came out grumbling, "Aw gee, whiz, you guys don't fight. You box."

The annual matches with the Coast Guard Academy and Virginia are the tops of the season for Lamar's men. The greeting of the hosts is warm, the competition keen and clean. These two schools have not yet gone in for that practice of getting in ringers, a practice that Lamar feels is rulning Intercollegiate boxing. "Unlike other schools," he says, "Virginia has none of the former amateur boxers which are being grabbed up by most of the other schools. If this were the case everywhere, boxing would rest far more easily in the colleges. The main trouble is this loading up of the teams with amateurs."