Injuries Have Hit 6 of Last 7 Football Captains, from MacDonald to O'Donnell

Maybe it's fate. Maybe it's just plain bad luck. But Ken O'Donnell's injury last Saturday which cost the Crimson his services for the rest of the season keeps intact an injury voodoo that has hit every Harvard football captain for six of the last seven seasons.

Besides the Crimson's three most recent captains, the brothers Ken and Cleo O'Donnell and Vince Moravoc, three other captain the other three victims were Don Forte, Joe Gardolla, and Torbie Macdonald. The last three all were Crimson colors before 1943, the year Harvard placed formal football in mothballs for the duration of the war. Only Franny Lee in 1941 escaped jinx.

The loss of Vince Moravec in last year's ill-fated Virginia game is all too recent in the minds of followers of the Crimson. Moravoc led an undefeated Varsity into the battle, but a crushing knee injury ended Vince's playing career and hampered the team for the remainder of the campaign.

In 1946 Ken O'Donnell's elder brother Cleo suffered a broken rib in the second game of the season--a 49-0 slaughter of Tufts and had to sit out Princeton and Coast Guard contests before returning to lead a victory over Holy Cross three weeks later.

Before the "informal" wartime period, the 1942 team was without the services of its captain Don Forte for all but four games. Right and Ferto, whose one-handed pass catch had clinched the 1941 Yale game, chipped his ankle in a pre-season scrimmage and did not play a minute of football until the start of November.

Two years before, the plague struck Joe Gardella, fullback and captain of the 1940 squad. Minor bruises throughout the season had benched Gardella for a day or two, but a severe muscle bruise in the Princeton game sidelined him until the Yale finale, for which the Crimson medical staff doctored him into shape to the surprise of the Elis.

Torbie Macdonald, whose running and passing had made him the 1938 Varsity standout, was only able to perform in three games of the '39 season because of a badly sprained right ankle. Novacaine injections which failed to carry Macdonald through the Penn game, aggravated his foot.