The past three hockey seasons have done little to disprove him. While B.U. has risen to the top and stayed there, Harvard has been wallowing in mediocrity the past two winters, and there's little reason to expect a reversal of these trends in the near future. The Crimson's last stab at the top, in fact, was an ECAC semifinal date with the Terriers in March of '76. Following an 8-4 B.U. cakewalk, O'Callahan capped the evening with another hat trick of a statement: "Harvard's nice, but B.U.'s great." On that night, and in this sport, there was and still is no one to offer a dissenting opinion.
When the Women's Ivy League Swimming and Basketball Championships were contested this winter at Harvard, the athletic competition featured more than just the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Whoever scheduled the tournaments for the second weekend of February, you see, apparently didn't check in with the weatherman beforehand. As a result, coming as they did the weekend after The Storm, the championships also introduced a new element to sporting competition, the torture of traveling.
For openers, Brown, Cornell and Barnard motioned to stay home altogether. They were the smart ones, for the schools that opted to brave Mother Nature got more than they bargained for. "We felt we had to come," said Princeton swim coach Janie Tyler. "It's just that once we did, we had to walk to the Hyatt from Central Square with our luggage because no taxis would pick us up."
Yale and Penn made the journey aboard an Amtrak, on which the teams were locked in a train car the entire trip. As one of the Eli swimmers asked, "Do you know what that's like when you have to go to the bathroom?" And Dartmouth? The Big Green bused southward on the weekend the annual Winter Carnival was being staged in Hanover, an event made even more depressing when, in the words of coach Susan Lutkus, "It took us as long to get from the bus station to the pool as it had from Hanover to Boston." Make that the thrill victory, the agony of defeat and the torture of traveling.
Try this one on for size. Two years ago, the Harvard Classics, then a fledgling basketball squad in search of an identity and not the powerhouse it is today, traveled to the Deer Island Correctional Institute for a game with the local residents. Following the contest, a 74-73 Classics triumph, Adams House inmate Peter Durgerian sat on the visitors' bench blissfully piping a tune on his harmonica.
The referee approached him. "You know," he said, "my son plays good harmonica. He used to have 35 of them, and took them on tours all over the country before they got stolen in some hippie town in Florida."
"You know," Durgerian replied, nodding his head in understanding, "my dad is a pretty good referee." Somebody, obviously, was whistling dixie.
If anything in life is certain, it's death, taxes and the fact that squash players are gentlemen. Two years ago, Jack Barnaby's curtain call as the Crimson's squash and tennis mentor, the Princeton Tigers, undefeated and cocky as hell, invaded Cambridge for their annual squash showdown with Harvard.
On the Friday prior to the match, the Princetonians, who had defeated all of their previous opponents that season by a 9-0 margin, speculated on their chances of performing a similar fete against the Crimson. The latter had fallen two years running to the defending national champs, so one Tiger racquetman thought it only proper, upon arriving at Hemenway Gym, to inquire of his Harvard opponent, "Aren't you scared playing Princeton?" "Oh yeah, terrified," came the reply.
Their cockiness aside, however, the Tigers remained gentlemen. Before the match, what Barnaby described as a "beautiful Tiger blanket" was presented to the retiring Harvard coach in a gesture of appreciation. Barnaby, himself a gentlemen, then proceeded to demonstrate his thanks. Unveiling a team which he claimed "couldn't have carried Princeton's racquets on the court without permission in November," Barnaby sat back and watched a "tremendous win," a 6-3 triumph over the favored Tigers, that allowed Barnaby to retire with the nicest gift of all: national championship number 20 and Ivy League title number 21. Quite gentlemanly of him, wouldn't you say?
In their season-opening tri-meet last fall, the Crimson harriers discovered that the faster team always wins, even when the faster team runs in the wrong direction. It seemed that two miles into the race against the powerful Providence College Friars and the Massachusetts Minutemen, the leaders, most of whom were wearing Friar jerseys, got a bit confused by the course's markings and began running a course of their own design.
"The course wasn't properly lined out," Harvard coach Bill McCurdy said afterwards. "I ran across to a point where I could see the leaders at the three-mile point, and all I saw was three Harvard guys." It's not that McCurdy was disappointed by the sight of three of his runners leading the race, it's just that he knew it was an impossiblity.
Where the Friar harriers traveled was anybody's guess, but when it came to cross the finish line, there were the Providence runners in front, misdirections and all. "It set a historical precedent," McCurdy quipped. "Those guys are so damned good that they ran all the way to Boston, came back, and won anyway. It was sort of a mismatch." You might say that.
In all probability, McCurdy wasn't too suprised by Providence's showing. After all, this was the same Bill McCurdy who once claimed "It might help running an unfamiliar course. When you don't know the course, you don't know you're supposed to get tired." Besides, this wasn't the first time that a McCurdy coached team had fallen to the Friars. On past occasions, McCurdy, always gracious in defeat, had a ready explanation for the Friars' dominance. "They had the Holy Father out there as well as the team," the retired lieutenant colonel of the United States Army Reserve and, by his own admission, "the greatest living coach in any legal sport," claimed after one setback. After another, McCurdy observed that "Providence brings in all those Irish imports so I think our best chance would be an IRA rebellion. It appeals to my devious nature to unite with the IRA. I'd call Kennedy but I don't know whether he'd be sympathetic."
Providence has hardly been McCurdy's lone nemesis these past years. Northeastern and particularly the indefatigable Flora twins, Bob and John, have also proved a pain in the Crimson's respiratory system. McCurdy reserved his choicest comments for them. "You know," he once stated, "I'm a gardener during the summer, and two twins named Flora just put the finishing touches on us." Other well-aimed barbs have included the following: "Something is just not right. I just swear when I see them. Damn their souls. If we had some of that weed spray, I would have sprayed it on them." Knowing Bill McCurdy, he probably would have.