Case in point: quotes from the women's basketball team after its 77-57 loss to Rhode Island, published in the same issue of The Crimson. "I love the way the team played," said Coach Kathy Delaney Smith. "This is the best game we've had working as a team," said junior forward Tammy Butler. These banalities moved Mayer Bick to exclaim--in print--"What was the score again?"

This lack of color is somewhat the fault of our reporters, whose job it is to prod people into exciting and colorful expositions. Too often, athletes face lame reporters; after his perfect game in the 1956 World Series, the first question Don Larsen faced was, "Is this the best game you've ever pitched?"

But reporters can't make athletes say anything they don't want to, and very good writers continually come up stymied.

Rare is the player like former Houston Astros pitcher and Ball Four author Jim Bouton, who once said that "I've been tempted to say into a microphone that I fell I won tonight because I don't believe in God."

And you NEVER hear anyone speak like former Boston Red Sox and Oakland Athletics slugger David Henderson. "I don't see any Stanford guys running around here," he once said of his teammates on the A's. "Look at [catcher] Terry Steinbach. He thinks hockey is a sport."

See? Good, clean fun. But at Harvard? Can you imagine Tomassoni saying "I went through New Haven once and it was closed?" With apologies to Jay Johnstone (who said that about Cleveland)--no.

Take former New York Yankees manager Casey Stengel's famous testimony before a Senate subcommittee:

Senator: "I was asking you, sir, why it is that baseball wants this bill passed."

Stengel: "I would say I wouldn't know but I would say the reason why they'd want it passed is to keep baseball going as the highest baseball sport that has gone into baseball and from the baseball angle--I'm not going to speak of any other sport. I'm not in here to argue about other sports; I'm in the baseball business. It's been run cleaner than any baseball business that was ever put out in the 100 years at the present time."

[Long pause]

Senator: "Well, Mr. Mantle, do you, uh, have any observations with reference to, uh, the applicability of the anti-trust laws to baseball?"

Mickey Mantle: "Uh, well, my views are just about the same as Casey's."

[Uproarious laughter]

Then? One of the most popular figures in sports. Today? Stengel would just be classified as stupid.

The trend in sports these days is toward the colorless. The National Football League has spent the last three years cracking down on touchdown and sack dances. National Basketball Association players brought new meaning to the term "free expression" for a long time, but the league's new trash-talking rules seem designed to send America's most entertaining sport into the doldrums as well. And in the meantime, the Freshman Dean's Office cancels a harmless game of "Assassin" because it's not in keeping with "Harvard's image."