Another fine Crimson coach with a more frustrating assignment is Hal Ulen, who for years has paddled about the pool in the Blockhouse (Indoor Athletic Building) attempting to whip a small group of outstanding swimmers into shape and spirit to furnish fairly decent competition for Bob Kiphuth's inhuman Yale machines.
Last year's shining light was sophomore Pete Dillingham, who gave up football for diving, won the Eastern Intercollegiate highboard competition, and placed in the nationals. With his help, Ulen's team swept over eight opponents, but might as well have dog-paddled as the Marshalls, Moores, and McLanes of Old Eli splashed by.
Brick Wall at End
As a result, Dartmouth has become more of a traditional-rival-to-beat than Yale. And future prospects look fine, except for the annual season-ending brick wall.
Among the lesser winter sports, wrestling fortunes blow hot and cold, but they have been blowing warmer of recent date. Captain-elect Johnny Lee climaxed a brilliant season last year by winning the 125-pound National A.A.U. title in Iowa. Although they also fall into the minor sport category, superior squash teams annually arise from the College courts, and last year's team rose as high as the national championship. The individual national champion of this non-spectator cross between tennis and handball was senior Henry Foster, third of a line of Harvard captain brothers, and the runner-up was sensational sophomore Charlie Ufford.
The one major sport with two seasons is track, winter and spring, and here again Yale has been the usual thorn in the Crimson's side. Another annual athletic truism is that Harvard's track teams improve considerably in the spring. Perhaps this is because of an increase of weight events in the warm weather version of the sport. Small, quiet Coach Jaakko Mikkola, a former Olympics javelin star, is a master at tutoring young and strong but untrained men in hurling the javelin, discuss, hammer, and shot.
Upset at Yale
Inexplicably, the track team is one of the most closely-knit and spirited groups of athletes at Harvard. Last spring it finished a good season with a stunning upset of the Eli rivals, and a strong '54 squad promises to supply some sprint and distance men to bolster the 1952 chances.
Sloshing into a Cambridge springtime, the sports fanatic finds more championship material. Bruce Munro still has a strong nucleus of players from the lacrosse squad that last year battled its way to the somewhat nebulous eastern championship. And anyone who tells a Harvard fan that the Crimson crew is not the best in the nation will hear the following argument ...
In faltering in the Compton Cup race (loss to Princeton) and the Eastern sprint championships (second to Yale, easy conquest of Princeton), the Crimson crew displayed none of the exceptionally fine form it had shown in practice timings. The oarsmen lived up to their promise by upsetting Penn and Navy for the Adams Cup (Harvard's tenth straight) and later by breaking the two-mile record on Lake Cayuga.
No Justification
No old crew man in Cambridge could honestly see any justification for favoring Yale over Harvard in their annual race at New London. And, indeed, the Crimson eight easily outrowed the Elis over a gruelling four-mile stretch of the Thames, while Harvard's jayvee, freshman, and combination crews made it a clean sweep. And Yale had already once defeated Wisconsin, winner of the national Poughkeepsie Regatta at Marietta, Q.E.D.
Now that great crew coach Tom Bolles, a magician at shaking up crewmen to find the right combination, has moved upstairs to replace William J. Bingham '16 as Harvard's Director of Athletics, national regatta eyes will be on his successor, former freshman coach Harvey Love. Next spring could tell the story of whether or not Love can match Bolles' wizardry, for it is an established fact that he has the top material to work with.
Finally, with collegiate baseball notoriously uninteresting to the general public--and thus no inspiration to proselytization--Stuffy McInnis turns out some Harvard nines that, depending on the pitching, can show well against the best of competitors.
Graduation has riddled the Harvard squad down the all-important middle, but a fair 1951 bench, plus a couple of remaining outstanding pitchers, can enable McInnis' team to attain a respectable standing in the ten-team Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League next spring. Harvard consistently holds its own in this as well as other strictly amateur sports, and has sent its small share of players into professional baseball.
Take all this as a roundup of a fairly, agreeable sports picture, toss in a world's champion (Dick Button) and a national junior champion (Dudley Richards) figure skater, then multiply the record of an amateur football team by a hundred, and it adds up to a decline in Harvard athletics. That's the formula today.