On The Bench

Joe Bretagna, the second best goalie in Cambridge and reputedly the best toy hockey game player in the world, danced with Joe Cavanagh. American Dream come true, in the Varsity Club. Max Bleakey, the manager, looked impatient so the rest of the team stopped playing pool, filled their pockets with Mars bars, and headed for the bus.

Cooch Owen walked over to the bus with Harry Reynolds. "Hay, Harry, Do you wear jockeys or swing easies?" Harry mumbled, and Coach laughed. Dan DiMichele got on the bus, sat down, and wrote "Brown sucks" on the frosted over window. I got on the bus as inconspicuously as I could. The hockey team isn't too fond of me.

We rolled into Providence at 6 p. m. I wandered into Brown's shiny miniature Madison Square Garden and looked up to see 1500 fans jammed into the student section two hours before the game, munching subs, reading biology, and getting psyched for the game. Harvard has Section 18 and a lot of polite clapping. Brown has 1500 screaming maniacs.

By the time eight o'clock arrived I had a King Kong double burger and a large root beer sloshing around my stomach, and the Brown band, rivalled only by B. C.'s for volume and energy, was playing furiously.

The game was incredibly boring. Apathetic and overconfident, Harvard stank up the ice, and Brown was bad to begin with. Harvard stumbled into the lead but Jest it by the end of the second period. In the third period, Harvard finally rolled over and died, and as the Brown fans crushed their beer cans in ecstasy, the Bruins astonished themselves with the winning goal.

Nobody had much to say on the trip back to Cambridge. Lief Rosenberger finally started talking about the game, saving that Harvard doesn't hit enough. No one was really disagreeing with him. The Brown players had given Harvard numerous cheap shots in the corner and gotten away with it virtually unseathed. As Bretagna told me before we got off the bus. "When a forward comes down the boards, the defenseman usually plays the body. At Harvard, he usually plays the puck."

Harvard can beat anybody, and it can lose to anybody. Unfortunately it has been more inclined towards losing to bad teams than beating good ones, and no one is exactly sure why.

It's true that Cooney Weiland is not known for his fiery inspiration, but many observers felt that Billy Cleary, the heir apparent, could give the Crimson the kick in the ass it needed this season. And although Harvard's lack of hitting is a problem, it's probably more of a symptom than a cause of Harvard's disappointing record.

If there is any definable reason, I think it is the whole attitude towards the hockey program. At Cornell and B. U., the players live and eat together, they take courses that would make Boats and Slapshot 12 look hard, and they live for winning hockey. I'm not trying to say that Harvard hockey players are Rhodes Scholars and concert pianists who don't care about winning hockey games. It's simply that at Harvard athletes are not Gods idolized by the student body. They are exposed to a variety of diversions, and they must at least consider the question of the relative values of athletics and other pursuits.

That produces losses to Vermont and unhappy bus rides back from Providence, but I don't think beating Brown is worth mindless fanaticism and recruiting trips into the Canadian woods. If it takes Cornell's hockey program to win a national championship, then the championship isn't worth winning.