Read George Plimpton '48 and David Halberstam '55, and you begin to understand why sportswriting is more than just boxscores and statsheets.

Good sportswriting is an art, the art of making the unimportant, inconsequential and temporal, seem profound, meaningful and eternal. One moment of pain becomes every person's moment of pain; one moment of glory, a symbol for the ages.

Given that task, sportswriters must necessarily probe into the intricacies of their subjects, scrutinizing every athlete's action and emotion.

And that means writing about losses and mistakes with as much energy and gusto as victories or clutch plays. When the athlete errs, it's the sportswriter's responsibility to explain the "what" and "why," to dissect the moment and explain its significance. To do otherwise, to let an important--albeit unpleasant--moment pass without articulating its meaning, would deny the essence and demean the importance of the entire endeavor.

Sportswriters have a responsibility to tell the story. Then again, is there an equally strong responsibility to tone a story down for the sake of personal feelings or the sake of student-athletes?

Yes, but, in practice, sportswriters who want to keep their readers coming back rarely pull any punches. The problem is that no one can settle on an answer, myself included. There will always be an underlying tension in college sports coverage between a reporter's need to do the job and the need to be considerate and fair to the subject matter.

Here on campus, The Crimson is persistently harangued for being too critical, too negative and too insensitive to the trials of the Ivy student-athlete. But there are two issues here: the perception of Ivy League athletics compared to "big-time" athletics, and the role of The Crimson as a college newspaper.

Many argue that "big-time" players like, say, Michigan sophomore Chris Webber--virtual semi-pros, preparing for a lucrative NBA career--deserve to be scrutinized and their play criticized. By the same token, outgoing men's basketball captain Tyler Rullman, as an Ivy League student-athlete (and more the former than the latter), doesn't deserve as much scrutiny because he's playing at a different level.

This is part of the prevailing logic around Harvard's athletic headquarters in the red brick building at 60 JFK Street. Administrators there contend, moreover, that the only ones worthy of criticism at Harvard are the coaches, because they are the paid professionals.

While I agree that we should never pick on students, we cannot say that coaches or "big-time" athletes are the only ones worthy of scrutiny. Just as Webber must take the heat, so too must Rullman and every Harvard varsity athlete. They're all Division I athletes, representing their school. They choose to play, and by extension accept the pressure that comes with that decision.

At The Crimson, we do avoid blaming students, and we never accuse them of not working hard enough. We do, however, scrutinize performance, because that is what athletics is about. Treating Ivy athletes different than, say, Big 10 athletes demeans the sport, the NCAA and the Ivy League.

But who should do the examining? While not everybody at 60 JFK agrees on the question of special treatment for Ivy athletes, they do seem to agree on the role of The Crimson: a student newspaper, they contend, should seek more to promote school spirit and interest than division and debate.

If a team isn't winning, say it's still trying hard. If a successful team hits a slump, well, it's still trying hard. It's the role of the professional papers, such as The Boston Globe, to scrutinize and attack when necessary. We are students, and these are our fellow students. So we should lay off.

This we cannot accept. We may be students, but we are also journalists, working for an independent corporation, training to do just what The Globe does: Always question, always analyze and never accept anything less than the truth.

So if a team loses, we're damn well going to say why. We are not going to settle for bland, vapid stories that say" at least they gave it the old Crimson try."