Racquetmen Teach MIT a Lesson, 9-0

The Crimson racquetmen engaged in some friendly intra-city relations last night at Hemenway Gym, and when the last round of handshakes had been exchanged, it was Harvard 9, MIT 0, and everybody went home smiling.

The Crimson was happy because a) it had won its seventh consecutive match of the season, b) in the process, it had surrendered just one game (out of 28) to the Engineers, and c) this match had allowed the racquetmen to loosen up between the Princeton victory of a week and a half ago and this Saturday's match with Penn, which will determine the intercollegiate champion.

As for MIT, which plays at a competitive level a few notches (a generous assessment) beneath Harvard's, this match was the equivalent of a Crimson-Oklahoma football game--there was no way the Engineers could win, but maybe they would pick up a few pointers in defeat. Besides, both schools are on Mass Ave.

Thus the fact that Harvard won so decisively came as no surprise; the only real shock was that the Crimson lost even a single game, the third in John Havens's match, by a 16-15 margin. Havens won his three other games by identical 15-10 scores, however, and that was the closest MIT could get.

Playing in the eighth position, Scott Mead had the easiest time of anybody, relinquishing just seven points en route to a 15-3, 15-1, 15-3 massacre, equivalent to a 23-0 hockey score.

One notch higher, Ned Bacon also won without too much trouble (15-1, 15-5, 15-10), while Peter Havens, in the fourth slot, didn't even remove his sweat pants in a 15-3, 15-4, 15-10 rout.

And on it went, from Bill Kaplan's 15-9, 11, 10 triumph in the first position (a comparatively tough win by last night's standards) to Ken Ehrlich's 15-5, 10, 7 victory at number nine. Ehrlich took that ninth position over from Ted Humphreyville, who graduated after last semester.

In fact, not only were the Engineers unable to win another game, but they could also force just one more into overtime, an 18-15 win by Cass Sunstein which soon became another three-game sweep.

But MIT was just the warm-up. The real thing begins again on Saturday, when everybody won't go home smiling.