Ken Wolfe: Brooklyn's Finest

I had a terrible crush on Kenny Wolfe in third grade, long before he became one of the Harvard basketball team's top defensive guards.

To be a star in P.S. 197 in Brooklyn, you had to get A s in math and gym and be just bad enough to get C s in what Mrs. Murphy, the third grade teacher, called "deportment." Kenny fit the bill and was the idol of the distaff side of class 3-303.

The day Wolfe took up with Francine Mintz, the new girl in 3-303, our friendship ended and we lost touch. Kenny and I followed different routes to Harvard--Wolfe's led straight from the James Madison High School basketball team to the Crimson hoopsters.

A Brooklyn boy at Harvard hides his nervousness by jumping right into things. Kenny jumped into freshman basketball and made good, scoring an average of 20 points a game.

As a junior on the varsity team Wolfe leads the fast break and guards the opposition's toughest player. With his thin, wiry body, he often fakes out players five and six inches taller than he on drives to the basket. This year, he won the Beanpot's Tournament's Most Valuable Player award.

Wolfe has had vacillating periods of self-confidence on the team. Sophomore year, he emphasized defense, sticking to passing on offense. "I knew I could score, but I always stuck to playing team ball," he said.

This season, Wolfe has gone back to his old ways, scoring spectacularly in the Dartmouth and Northeastern games. Wolfe attributes his new strategy to the advice of his older brother, Eliot.

Eliot, who now plays basketball for the French city of Clermont-Ferrand in the European basketball league, left Kenny a tough reputation to live up to. Anyone in our neighborhood who saw both brothers play, said the second was as good, maybe better, than the first. Whatever competition there may have been between the Wolfe brothers has all been channelled into a cooperative team-spirited relationship.

Wolfe's whole family is athletic. Arthur Wolfe, Kenny's father, held the national handball championship twice, before either of his sons could dribble a basketball. Wolfe says his father met his mother playing paddle tennis down at Brighton Beach, where the best paddle tennis players in Brooklyn play from morning 'til night.

Rumor

There's a rumor in our neighborhood, though, that Kenny's parents met when his mother, who was Miss Brooklyn at the time, posed for a picture with his father after he had won the national handball championship.

The last time I saw the whole Wolfe family was at the Harvard-Columbia basketball game in 1971, when Eliot was captain of the Columbia basketball team and Kenny, a freshman, watched the game from the stands. Kenny rooted for Columbia.

When coaches from Yale, Stanford and the University of Virginia came to our high school to woo our basketball players, Kenny was dazzling, bringing the James Madison hoopsters into the limelight. Eliot advised Kenny to guard against the steak dinners at the Yale Club and contact Harvard. (Harvard has a rule forbidding coaches from courting perspective Crimson cagers.) Following his brother's suggestion, Wolfe applied to Harvard and was admitted.

So Wolfe moved from the school yard to the IAB--still spending the better part of his day on the court. At Harvard, he's practical about his school work and gets by with B s. Our third-grade teacher would be surprised to see that her star mathematician has found a new love.

Radicalism

Brooklyn isn't exactly a hotbed of radicalism, but Wolfe said he was fur-