Your mother told you the day you unpacked the station wagon outside the dorm in the Yard that these would be the greatest years of your life, so enjoy them.
And if you went to the Beanpot hockey tournament, if you grabbed everything that those first two Mondays in February offered, you found out that Mom was right once again.
The Beanpot. It almost seems as if the event itself has a kind of power of attorney, entering its games as "Exhibit A" in defense of the unique, the spontaneous, the exciting.
But you don't experience the Beanpot if you're a student at Harvard, Boston University Boston College or Northeastern--you grow with it. It is both a microcosm of what sports are and can be, and an ongoing life-cycle of one's collegiate stay.
What happens in the Boston Garden on those first two Mondays in February may well be the only athletic event where the participants and the spectators share all the intangibles.
Here is one onlooker's four-year term with the Beanpot.
February, 1976: Intrigue and Vulnerability--I'd been to the Garden a hundred times before, but you never really know your way around the Causeway Street relic that one writer called "The Sporting Louvre."
There was always some new obstructed seat that you didn't know about, some rattier looking guy outside who you bought peanuts from because you felt sorry for him.
I was a Harvard freshman and a Beanpot freshman. I went because I liked hockey and "everybody went," but I was so skeptical and unsure that I brought some notes for a Government exam in case things got boring.
They didn't. You'd look around, and it seemed like EVERYBODY but the people next to you were rooting against Harvard. Huh? I thought we were always the good guys. Who the hell was B.U. anyway, with that inane "Dum da dum da-da da da, dum da dum, da-da da-da...." chant?
I began to sense what I was up against, and the challenge fueled my interest. Suddenly, what was going on out on the ice--Harvard-B.U., a shot at the finals, bragging rights to the city of Boston, all that traditional Brahmin hype--was important and real.
Harvard lost to B.U. in the opening round, 6-5, when Mike Fidler's gently rolling shot somehow conjured its way past Brian Petrovek. One week later, Harvard beat Northeastern in the consolation, 4-2, and freshman goalie Paul Skidmore led Boston College in a 5-3 upset of the Terriers, but I wasn't there. I was too busy trying to reconcile the simultaneous allure and disappointment of my first Beanpot with a non-honors grade in the Government exam. Typical freshman.
February, 1977: Euphoria--There seemed to be a little more pre-Beanpot thought now that fancy had become ritual. I tried to characterize the participants. Boston University, traditional collegiate hockey power, was The Revered. Boston College, whose blown-dry kiss-me-I'm-Irish throng would fill half the seats in the Garden (the three remaining schools took the other half) was The Beloved. Northeastern, the commuter school on Huntington Ave. that never seemed to park itself in the 9:00 pm finals, had a Sports Information Director known as Jack "6:00" Grinold. The Huskies were The Damned.
Obviously, Harvard was regarded as The Scorned Elite. They had the rest of the world, people figured, so why give them the hockey rights to Boston?
And though nobody was ever handed anything at the Beanpot (with the exception of B.U., who danced around Northeastern in the first round that year, 7-2), occasionally a team would rise above the labels that people like myself were always writing.
On the first two Mondays in February, 1977, the Elite was no longer scorned.
The Crimson ousted Boston College in the opener, 4-2. George Hughes scored the winner on a ten-footer in the last minute which beat Skidmore, no longer a charmed freshman. I walked out of the Garden trying to remember when I had seen Petrovek play better in goal. I would get my answer the following Monday.
The final was 4-3. Freshman Jon Garrity won it late in the final period and Petrovek, dauntless, preserved the victory for the Crimson and MVP trophy for himself. And it all came at the expense of Boston University.
The cathartic joy of winning the Beanpot was double-edged for me, a cool sophomore (what other kind is there?) at the time. It was refreshing to see the "old boys," the kids who everyone thought had all the advantages, climb out of their BMWs and hold their ground against the tough guys from across the Rivah--you know, the kind of guys who say, "What the----are you looking at, punk?" if they think you're staring at them in a bar. The setting was also refreshing. It was fitting that such a great athletic moment for Harvard would take place away from the University and its "convenient" attitude towards sports.
February, 1978: Disillusion--I had my Beanpot gig down now. My brother, a freshman with brother, a freshman with sophomore standing in Beanpot Appreciation, arrived with me at the Garden at 4:30, 90 minutes before the start of the Harvard-Northeastern opener. We played pinball (they still have one of those great old baseball machines in the lobby of North Station, on which Boston Garden sits), copped a few quarter-pounders across the street, watched the scalpers set up shop. Setting the proper example was important when your team was defending champion.
Everyone knew THE Blizzard was coming, but they came to the Beanpot anyway. Over 15,000. When Gene Purdy scored less than two minutes into overtime to vault Harvard past the Huskies, 4-3, severe travellers advisories were already in effect on the highways. I caught the last cab out of North Station, and it cost me $10.00 to make the two mile trip to Cambridge.
Meanwhile, over ten thousand people spent the night in the Garden after B.U. destroyed B.C. The finals were set and would be the same as they year before. Or would they?
Massachusetts and its snowy countenance forced postponement of the tourney finals to March 1. By that time it was apparent that B.U. (the eventual national champion) was much improved, and Harvard, sans-Petrovek, was disoriented to the point of insecurity.
B.U. 7, Harvard 1. The margin of defeat was nothing compared to the three last-minute brawls which punctuated it. I sat there, watching guys I knew squaring off at the blue line, listening to the bitter chants of "Harvard Sucks" ring the Garden rafters, wondering how all of this could be guised in Beanpot garb.
B.U.'s All-American defenseman, Jack O'Callahan, tried to explain the melee a year later. "Harvard was embarrassed. We were beating them pretty badly. If you can't win the game, win the fights, I guess" O'Callahan said.
Never had frustration such poetic license.
February, 1979: Resolution-- One of the biggest self-criticisms of my sportswriting is that often times I have difficulty writing an appropriate story when my team loses.
Beanpot '79, my last as an undergraduate, was a difficult chauvanistic pill to swallow. Harvard, on its way to an 8-17-1 season, lost both games and finished last in the tourney for the first time in 12 seasons. Indeed there was nothing appropriate to say.
I stuck around for the B.C.-B.U. final, ironically the most exciting, most Beanpot-type game of the past four years. The Terriers took the final, 4-3, and Darryl MacLeod, on most days a third-rate forward for B.U., won the Most Valuable Player award.
Four years. Four different finishes. I'd run the gamut of achievement and emotion in front of a packed Garden house each February. My term was up. It was time to load up the station wagon and tell Mom she was right.
Bill Scheft '79 was Associate Sports Editor of The Crimson. He now writes sports for the Albany Times-Union.
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