Petering Out

From the beginning there had been the feeling that Bob Harrison wasn't really the man to be Harvard basketball coach. Somehow, he always seemed out of place in the Cambridge arena. His volatile outbursts on and off the court, his insistent quest for ballplayers "who will run through walls for you," his attempts to bring big-time recruiting and big-time basketball to Harvard always left most people a little uneasy. Not because his goals in themselves were incompatible with the Harvard atmosphere, but because Harrison never seemed quite the man capable of pulling them off.

The athletic department's announcement yesterday that Harrison will not return as coach next year, while too late to capitalize on the talent of the James Brown/Floyd Lewis class, is nevertheless a sound move.

Bob Harrison was not a good basketball coach. In his sojourn at Harvard, he never proved himself capable of teaching basic man-to-man defense, nor was he flexible enough to implement a system of zone defenses. His forte was the fast break, but during the last three seasons even that faltered at times -- often at crucial junctures -- and in many games it gave up as much in defensive lapses as it gained in baskets.

If Harrison's defensive strategy was suspect, his offensive approach was no better. Two years ago Harrison tried to install a new offense for every opponent. All that this approach achieved was confusion among his own ball players, and it did little to baffle the opposition. This year Harrison installed one basic offense. However, the new approach was little better than the old, because it only served to freeze last year's high scorer Jim Fitzsimmons out of the offensive picture or resulted in low percentage shots from the deep corner. At other times the offense degenerated into a pass-to-the-frontcourt-go-one-on-one attack, which rarely involved more than two men at a time in the offensive patterns and was even less productive.

It is easy (and justifiable) to fault Harrison as a basketball coach, but one cannot question his deep commitment to the Harvard basketball program and to his ballplayers, and he was more than willing to help out with their personal problems. He often invited them to his home and even loaned them his car for their personal use on occasion. Harrison often paid for scouting expenses out of his own pocket.

Bob Harrison might not have been a good coach, but he was a nice guy. And unfortunately the nice guy image got in the way when he got down to coaching. The "buddy-buddy" relationships he cultivated with his players off the court ultimately undermined the discipline he sought to exercise on it. Nice guys don't always finish last, but as far as Bob Harrison's Harvard basketball experiment goes, they do.