Echoes of Apathy

To get to Madison Square Garden from Manhattan College, you have to take the Broadway IRT from 242nd St. down to 168th St. and change there for the IND Eighth Ave. line. When Fordham is playing Manhattan at Madison Square Garden, the Manhattan fans make this pilgrimage at least two hours before the contest so that they can be properly soused before game time.

On the journey downtown, the Manhattan fans alternate between taking swigs from their quart bottles of beer and chanting, "The Ram is dead." By the time they reach the promised land, the Manhattan supporters have worked themselves into such a frenzy that there is no way they will have any voice left at the end of the game.

With the Ram fans coming from Rose Hill down the Dyer Ave. line to the Garden triumphantly singing school songs, there is no way that the game on the floor can match the cheering in the stands. All the noise, cheering, boozing and carousing makes a great atmosphere for basketball.

While there are plenty of problems with the Harvard basketball program, one of the difficulties is that the IAB usually sounds like a morgue during games. While hockey crowds are excellent, the few fans at basketball games seem comparatively uninterested. A few weeks ago, when Harvard was leading Penn, 39-32, at the half, one might have expected the IAB to have been in an uproar. Instead the place was relatively quiet. This weekend against Yale and Brown the crowd was similarly unenthusiastic.

One avid fan remarked that the crowds at contests he attended when he was a high school student in Chicago were more enthusiastic than Harvard backers. In fact, the only time the crowd seemed to get excited this weekend was when a brawl broke out Friday night.

If you ask coach Bob Harrison or any of his players about their audiences, they will say that they often prefer to play on the road simply because they find enthusiasm there. One of the things that particularly bothers Harrison about Harvard is that so few fans turn out to cheer Harvard basketball.

When the team opened its season at Indiana this year there were 12,330 fans ready and anxious to cheer every Indiana basket, foul shot and rebound. Indiana fans take such pride in their cheering, in fact, that a select group of students has been chosen this year to sit in a special cheering section to help boost the Hoosiers.

In Boston, because of the influence of hockey, the only thing that could bring out a crowd for college basketball would be UCLA. At the Beanpot Tournament last month, which Harvard won, fewer than 100 Harvard students turned out. Because of a ridiculous lack of interest the tournament is being cancelled.

Obviously lack of crowd support does not explain all the problems the basketball team has had in the last three years. But it would be a big help if a few more enthusiastic fans turned out to cheer at home games.