CBS Reports

I'm not usually a betting man, largely because I seem to have an innate ability to pick a team to win and have them finish fourth, or predict another to lose and watch them embarrass me by winning easily. When the swimming team faced Dartmouth earlier this winter I put my money (actually it was a six-pack of Tuborg) on the Big Green, figuring that the Indians (oops, can't call them that anymore) were too strong for Don Gambril's team. Harvard, however, won decisively and I lost the brew.

All last week people kept coming up to me and asking me who was going to win the swimming meet against Yale. I really didn't know, and I was loathe to make a prediction, but when I added up all the facts I had accumulated about the contest I said to them, under my breath of course, "I'm afraid Yale is going to win again" and walked off hoping they wouldn't remember my prediction if in fact Harvard did the impossible and won the meet.

Well, true to form the Crimson beat Yale and I, despite all my wisdom, once again proved to be a particularly lousy predicter. Not only did it top the Elis for the first time in a decade and make IAB history by winning for the first time since the white elephant landed, plop, in the middle of Cambridge, but it embarrassed the Yalies all afternoon. As it piled up what had to be the highest point total the Elis have ever given up, I couldn't help but think what a remarkable switch Don Gambril has engineered in just two short years.

I, nor anybody else, had really expected him to bring Harvard all the way from the depths of the league and a 2-5 circuit record to the very top and a superlative 6-1 mark. In a winter of discontent which has seen a number of Harvard coaches come under the gun for their failure to produce championship teams, Gambril's almost fairy-tale perfect success story stands out even more clearly.

Had Help

But Gambril has had help. This year's swimmers have proved again and again that they are the most dedicated, competitive, and talented group of athletes to swim at Harvard in quite a while, if not ever. In a performance which seemed so perfect that it read like a movie script, they broke nine pool records and eight Harvard standards. The consistently high level of these swims in such a high pressure situation as a league championship battle used to be the trademark of the great Yale teams of the past. This season Harvard has seemingly out-Yaled Yale.

All through the course of the meet I kept waiting for an Elis rally which never came. Yale had out-psyched and out-swum everybody for so long that it took me until after the meet was over to realize that Harvard had refused to fold, and had, if anything, out-psyched Yale. The Elis, after two tough wins against Dartmouth and Princeton, may have been due for a letdown, and while Harvard swam its best times in every single race, Yale had trouble matching its times of a week ago.

The era of Yale supremacy in swimming now seems to have come to a permanent end. The league is so well balanced at the top that no one team can dominate in the future the way the Elis did in the past. If any team can start a dynasty, the chances are good that it will be Harvard. The smashing triumph over Yale will undoubtably help Gambril as he continues to build the Crimson into an Eastern, and perhaps, national power. The recruiting edge over the rest of the Ivy schools is now his, and it is just the kind of advantage that Gambril likes to work with.