Fitzsimmons Scores Big in Pizza Hut Voting Even Though He Doesn't Play for Harvard

From Fairfield Prep to the Atlantic Coast Conference to the IAB on Winthrop St., and perhaps on to France, runs the trail of the bouncing basketball of Jim Fitzsimmons. Presently, it has come to rest in occasional games of Nerf in Eliot House and random trips to the former fourthfloor haunt of his 964 career Crimson points.

But the trail of the senior ex-varsity sharpshooter has not yet ended. Run amuck in the wilderness of oblivion, memories and post-season charity game ballotings, maybe, but not quite at its end.

Despite Fitzsimmons's retirement from college ranks (he was ineligible in the fall because of Ivy League transfer regulations, and opted against playing this semester), he has not been forgotten.

Somehow, somewhere in the hinterlands of America, 29,600 pizza-eating basketball fans have voted for Fitzsimmons to be one of eight collegians to represent the East in the third annual Pizza Hut Basketball Classic on April 1 in Las Vegas.

The ballots place the inactive guard 43rd in the East, so there is little chance that Fitzsimmons will win a free trip to the city of neon lights and one-armed bandits for a sporting April Fool's weekend.

Surge Needed

It would take a surge of 10,000 votes, reaching Hut headquarters in Wichita, Kans., before balloting closes March 2, to sweep Fitzsimmons into the top eight, a spokesman for the classic said yesterday.

Yet astonishingly enough, Fitzsimmons is, the Ivy League's top vote-getter in the NCAA- and NAIA-sponsored senior hoopla. Outside of Providence's Marvin Barnes (seventh in the East with 41,820 votes), he is the leading New Englander, a good 10,000 votes ahead of B.C.'s Dan Kulcullen (50th), Holy Cross's Malcolm Moulton (53rd), Dartmouth's Bill Raynor (55th), UMass's Al Skinner (57th) and B.U.'s Kenny Boyd (62nd).

What is more mind-boggling, Fitzsimmons has copped over one-third as many yea-votes as UCLA's boy wonder Bill Walton, who leads both West and East with an 88,422 total. The Bruins, despite recent hard times, have three others in the top 11 candidates west of the Mississippi: Keith Wilkes (3rd), Tommy Curtis (7th) and reserve Greg Lee (11th).

Furthermore, Fitzsimmons has been working against an unfriendly geographical distribution. "You guys are at a disadvantage--there aren't many Pizza Huts up there," the spokesman said. Because of the few extra ballots sent to New England, and computer monitoring of the vote, the possibility of a ballot-stuffing campaign for Fitzsimmons is unlikely, the spokesman added.

Memories and Regrets

Armchair jocks are not the only ones who remember Fitzsimmons, however. One insider who should know, Tom Sanders, regrets the senior's decision to sit it out. "The gentleman can play basketball," Sanders said before the Penn-Princeton weekend. "We had expected to have him back in the thick of the league race."

Fitzsimmons did not rejoin the Crimson because he was eligible for only the last eight games, "and it would have taken me two weeks, or four of those games, to get in shape," he said yesterday. This week's Sports Illustrated article on Harvard hoop, however, states that he is hoping to raise his grades to get into graduate school.

The future holds either business school or European professional basketball, Fitzsimmons said. "I've been contacted by a few French teams, and have given it a lot of thought," he added.

The 6 ft., 1 in. high school All-American from Milford, Conn., transferred to Harvard after one term at Duke, where he averaged 19.3 points and shot 57 per cent from the field in eight games with the Blue Devil freshmen.

Fitzsimmons broke into the Crimson lineup with a bang as a sophomore. Enroute to All-New England and second-team All-Ivy berths, he set a new Harvard single-season scoring record of 629 points, with 24.2 points per game and an 83.3 shooting percentage.

The meoric rookie year fizzled into a tailspin his junior year, when inconsistency and a more balanced offense cut Fitzsimmons's output to 12.2 an outing. Still, he finished seventh on the all-time Crimson scoring list and leaves with an overall 18.5 scoring average.