Glenn Fine is not much, if at all, large, than a typical Craig Beling lunch. Listed as 5'10" in the basketball program, the nifty guard kept the lowly Crimson hoopsters from coming unglued last winter by quarterbacking the offense and leading the Ivy League in assists. But, c'mon, Glenn, 'fess up about that height listing in the program.
When Sarah Mleczko arrived at Harvard two years ago after devasting interscholastic opponents in four sports at Andover, the Crimson sports editor dubbed her "The Bionic Freshwoman." She's more than lived up to the epithet, establishing herself as one of the top women athletes in the East--if not the nation--in field hockey, squash and lacrosse.
Sue St. Louis arrived on the Harvard athletic scene on year behind Mleczko, but she's a tough person to overshadow. St. Louis tallied 17 goals in leading the soccer team into respectability for the first time, and she hacked around with a lacrosse stick, too.
About 20 very talented and very large athletes are going to descend on The Crimson when they see their names omitted from this admittedly arbitrary list, but as the cartoonist says, that's all, folks.
Miscellaneous Thoughts
It's a pretty fair assumption that a lot of the people reading this piece were all-state in oboe, and not in wrestling. So despite the recruiting-supported and heavily funded intercollegiate program, 60 Boylston St. (that's synonymous for the Athletic Department, since it's located at 60 Boylston St.) offers a strong intramural program, with teams competing by House or freshman dorm affiliation.
Soccer is the only major sport for freshmen this fall, but once you've reached the bigtime (sophomore year), you can suit up for the House football league--that's tackle, with equipment and uniforms, just like high school--but for the absence of the crowds and cheerleaders and the presence of some burgeoning beer bellies.
Maybe the best thing about the Harvard sports program, though, is that you can play most sports here on the intercollegiate level if you're willing to work and you were any good in high school.
Varsity can be tough (in some sports, you had better have been All-State), but Harvard's athletic department merits high marks for its maintenance of a broad slate of these supporting programs. This fall, both men's soccer and football will send forth J.V. and frosh outfits, and all year round opportunities abound for the magginal college jock.
With 6500 high-powered people at this school, though, you find a lot of sports-folks who defy categorization as a varsity, subvarsity, or intramural competitor.
The fanatic fan is one such example. A wide variety of students makes up this classification, but a particularly zesty sample can be found in section 38 of Harvard Stadium on Saturday afternoons, chanting such creative slogans as "Intercept, contracept, stop that ball!" and, "Move to the left, move to the right, stand up, sit down, on my face."
Among others, the band the Crimson Sports Cube--a bunch of talented writers who just happen to be frustrated jocks--can usually be found in the ranks of this group. Favorite meeting places for this rabid group of sports fans are Kirkland House (the jock house), Master's Open Houses (glorified cocktail parties with free booze), and the Harvard Provisional Co., which is a nice corporate title for a little store on Mt. Auburn that provides just one thing--liquor--to the Harvard community. Whether you hand out at the Harvard Pro or not, it's not a bad idea to plan to hand out at Soldiers Field, across the Charles.
You see, sports at Harvard are funny--what with bigtime and small time aspects of intercollegiate sports all mixed together--but you should at the very least check out what's going on.
For all the drawbacks of sports here, I think a lot of athletes--both varsity and intramural--will tell you they've gained just as much in the locker rooms and on the fields as they have in a lot of classrooms.
As for me, I can barely remember some of my courses from fall of freshman year, but I can sure as hell tell you the score of the Yale game: it was 10-7 Harvard, giving the Crimson its first solo Ivy League title, and every undergrad at this school went a little bit crazy that day.
Even the guys who were all-state in oboe.