CBS Reports

I don't know if I can take any more weekends like the last one. It's depressing enough when the Giants lose their fifth in a row to the Cardinals, a team they always beat. Why I remember a year (1964, Y.A.'s last) when they struggled through the season with a 2-12, record, and both wins (you guessed it) were against poor ol' St. Louis. I didn't exactly feel like jumping for joy on Monday morning, either, when I discovered the Rangers had dropped their fourth in a row, to no less an opponent than the Penguins. Ouch! (OK, so I'm a diehard New York fan, what of it?)

But when Dartmouth and its disgusting traveling freak show of greenjacketed, hyena-mouth fans invades Cambridge to sleep on our floors, crash our parties, vomit on our rugs, and laugh all that way back to Hanover after flushing yet another Harvard football team down the nearest John, I feel like getting sick, which if you've suffered through enough Dartmouth debacles like I have, you've done more than once.

How many times have I crawled back to Dunster to drink myself into a stupor at the Zorbel while the comments around the room slowly degenerate from the depressingly sober "Jesus, we really blew it, didn't we?" to the no-less depressingly drunk "Jesus, I'm so blitzed I can hardly stand up." Nothing like booze to make you forget. What did I just say?

Well I didn't barf last Saturday (I learned my lesson over the summer when, staying with friends in, of all places, a Baptist church, I lost my sneakers in full view of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I did, however, have my sneakers (brand new) stolen while almost drowning in the soup off Newport Beach. What any of this has to do with anything else (especially what follows), I really can't say.

I'd like to talk seriously (if that is possible) about the Harvard soccer team which did the unexpected last week in Hanover: finding, through some stroke of luck or another, an offense at the expense of George Beim's on-again, mostly off-again Big Green. (All that stuff about sneakers and toilets was just to get you interested).

Nobody, least of all Bruce Munro, expected much out of the soccer team when the season began. For all practical purposes, the team seemed doomed way back last Spring, when Bent Hinze and Dragon Vujovic came to a parting of the ways with Mother Harvard, leaving only Felix Adedeji to take up the scoring slack. With Adedeji sitting out the last six games with a twisted knee, Munro has to dig deep into his bag of tricks to produce a winner.

Nobody can fault Adedeji for the unfortunate string of injuries he has suffered in the last two seasons and his long periods of convalescence. After all, he's been playing soccer most of his life, he's got a wife and medical school applications to worry about, and coming to Harvard after playing on the Nigerian Olympic team at 16, he was playing for fun and soccer ceases to be fun when you are forced to play in constant pain.

But, surprisingly, despite the loss of last year's entire offense, Harvard soccer has not taken the nose-dive most expected it to take. With the 4-2 comeback win last Friday against Dartmouth, the Crimson moved back (for however brief a time) into the Ivy race with a 2-1 record. It squared its season record at 3-3-1, scored more goals than it has in any other game, won its first road game of the fall, and finally proved it could come back after being behind. The squad has been fighting and scrapping in every contest, and while it is a mere shadow of the polished Crimson soccer machines of the glory years, it has played, for the most part, good, solid soccer.

In fact, Harvard may be a more interesting team to follow than its predecessors, because it doesn't blow anyone off the field, score on picture perfect pass plays, or win on pure skill. The reason, I think, is simple: Harvard soccer is again being played, after several years of foreign-dominated squads, by Americans who, while perhaps not as good as the Gomez's, Thomas's and Hinze's of the past, deserve a chance to play, an opportunity afforded to relatively few Americans during Harvard's years at the top.

The contrast has been remarkable. A fan at a game a couple of years ago would be treated to the fancy footwork and headwork of the foreigners who came to Harvard with their soccer skills firmly established. They were men who had come to Cambridge primarily to study, who played soccer as a sidelight, who were in the game because they enjoyed it and, without expending much energy, could dribble circles around most Americans.

This year most of the funny-sounding, hard to pronounce names on the Harvard roster have been replaced by ones such as Thompson, Kidder, Littlefield, Mead. They haven't scored too many goals (Americans do not have an instinctive sense for the goal, as do most Europeans), but in nearly every other aspect of the game they have compared favorably with the foreign-bred Harvard stars of the past.

It may be a lot easier to win games and score goals with foreigners manning most of the positions, but, in the long run, the only way America is ever going to produce quality soccer players is for them, and not the foreigners, to play.

The whole question of imported versus natural talent has been a particularly fiery issue on the college soccer scene the last few years, as Howard University discovered when it brought in an entire team from Trinidad, won the NCAA and was subsequently stripped of that title for alleged recruiting violations. Harvard has earned a good reputation for sticking to the Ivy League recruiting guide lines, and it would be hard to prove otherwise. Whereas past Harvard teams have relied heavily on individual skill, most of which was already acquired before coming to Cambridge, this year's team had had to do it the tough ways, by hustling, never giving up, playing as a team, and waiting for the breaks. Given a chance to play, they have proved they can play creditable soccer, if not win lots of games or score lots of goals.