If you were Bill McCurdy, coach of the Harvard cross-country team, and you were going out for a few beers with the boys, what would you talk about? Certainly not about your present squad, which, despite an abundance of enthusiasm, is rather lacking in the experience department and, as a result, currently suffers from an 0-5 won-lost record.

The tendency would be to escape, if only for a moment, from present realities and journey instead into a more glorious past, into a time when the Flora twins were still nothing more than one-half of the landscape, when the immigration laws imposed a quota upon the number of Irishmen allowed enter Providence, and a time when Lions and Quakers weren't able to run quite as fast as they do now.

For Bill McCurdy, those were times when victories were not quite so hard to come by. This week, many of the people responsible for some of McCurdy's most memorable triumphs returned to Harvard for an executive meeting of the Friends of Harvard Track. It was, to say the least, a time for reminiscing.

"Well, real early in the game," McCurdy began, "when I first came to Harvard--it was '51 or '52, but I don't remember which--I expected to see eggheads with thick glasses. One day we were out in the middle of the course, and I came across a man who had stopped and was kneeling down, looking for his glasses. I believe his name was Leo Carroll, a real intellectual who gave me my first lecture on space travel. Unfortunately, he couldn't find his glasses.

"Then another time, I was out on the course yelling instructions and encouraging the guys as I always do, when one of the runners stopped and came back to me because he hadn't heard what I had said."

Three of the men who returned to Cambridge for this week's meeting, being of relatively recent vintage, evoked special memories for McCurdy, and naturally enough, vice versa.

"They were three of the all-time greats," McCurdy said yesterday in reference to Tim McLoone '69, Keith Colburn '70, and Tom Spengler '71. "In fact, Mc loone was probably the fattest, most out-of-shape freshman distance runner who everturned out to be good. Now he's a great entertainer. You should hear him sing the Yaz song."

In fact, Mc loone is currently an entertainer. He plays the piano for a living, and he remembers his former coach fondly. Admitting to his obesity as a freshman, McLoone returned the compliment in kind.

"We needed McCurdy like a hole in the head," he said. "Now we had an excellent freshmen team. Fifteen guys showed up. The next year, there were only two of us left. I don't want to draw any conclusions for you, but it has to do with the abuse we take."

Spengler and Colburn exhibited equal admiration for the man under whom they served as captain in the autumn campaigns of 1969 and 1970 respectively.

The former came up from Atlanta for the meeting. During an illustrious career, he defeated both Cornell's John Anderson, who later went on to win the Boston Marathon, and Olympic gold medalist Frank Shorter of Yale. About his days of running cross-country at Harvard, his sole comment was "only insane were involved."

Colburn, who ran in the Boston Marathon last year and traveled across the country from Los Angeles just to be here this week, shed a bit more light on the subject. "It was pretty boring back then," he said, "because we used to win all our meets." As for McCurdy, though, "he gets no respect, not even from his own children."

Well, there you have it, characterization of a cross-country coach who has spent a quarter of his life leading the Crimson harriers but who comes out looking like a cross between Napoleon and Rodney Dangerfield.

And if McCurdy comes off as such a tyrant to those who knew him during his winning years, you can imagine what today's runners will have to say about their mentor five and ten years hence. Regardless of their verbal lashings, though, you can be sure of one thing. They'll all come back to see him, tongues-in-cheek notwithstanding.