Dr. J. 's Psychology Show

Harvard basketball captain-elect Jeff Hill pulled down the rebound. His quick outlet pass nestled into senior Mufi Hannemann's arms. The tall power-forward dribbled up court and proceeded to drill a bullet to "Dr. J." at the top of the key. The good doctor swooshed in the 25-foot jumper to win the tense IAB affair.

The above description is not from a Harvard varsity hoop contest, but rather a basketball section-meeting of Psychology and Social Relations 1860. "Dr. J.," James McCoy Jones, associate professor of social psychology, offers "Sport, Play and Society," Harvard's only sports-related course.

Jones slated optional reading period classes the IAB and Soldiers Field in an attempt to apply theories relating to the psychological concepts of play, work and competition studied during the spring semester.

'Sneakers'

This year's course received rave reviews from students, a majority of them Harvard varsity athletes. Nicknamed "Sneakers" by the same people who brought us "Boats" and "Gas Stations," Psych. and Soc. Rel. 1860 is not your run-of-the-mill gut, as its five class projects (ranging from five to 20 pages apiece) readily attest.

Jones stresses that this isn't a "dumb jock course" and is quite sensitive about the course's nickname. For five weeks, students are asked to keep logs detailing their daily activities. A paper based on the log enables the student to analyze his overall lifestyle in the Harvard society and determine factors that affect day-to-day decisions.

Jones feels that his course helps students discover how to balance their hectic Harvard lives better through the personal awareness garnered from the log analysis.

The basketball class resembled a Harvard varsity scrimmage with Brian Banks and Walter Hines balancing the opposition squad. But the main attraction was Jones, who captained the Oberlin College cagers during his collegiate career. An awesome outside shooter, the 5'8", 35-year old guard proved he hadn't lost the old touch by facing several students on the court.

Temple to Harvard

Jones also starred in golf, baseball and football while at Oberlin, where he majored in psychology. He did graduate work at Temple, received his doctorate from Yale, and moved to Harvard in 1970 in his teaching capacity.

His first major effort in the sports psychology field came when he did research on racial differences in professional sports performances. This resulted in a widely-heralded article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

On the strength of this work, Jones decided to teach a junior tutorial on the sports personality. Reaction to the tutorial was so favorable that Psych. and Soc. Rel. 1860 was established to help meet student demand for instruction in the subject. Still, Jones likes to limit the class to 50 students, in order "to give more personal, one-to-one contact. I can't do that with 200 people," he says. Indeed, that's how many showed up for the first class two years ago, but over two-thirds were discouraged by the course's stringent academic requirements.

Jones enjoys a unique rapport with many Harvard athletes who have taken his course. This has enabled him to perform a vital role as a member of the Harvard Standing Committee on Athletic Sports.

Jones served on the search committee that named Tom "Satch" Sanders Harvard's head basketball coach in the spring of 1973. He encouraged a project from the Hill-Hines-Hannemann triumvirate which explored the reasons why Harvard has not performed well during the Sanders era. This "constructive paper," as Jones terms it, "explored the relationships between players and coaches, and proposed solutions that could lead to improvements in the team's performance." The paper has been forwarded to Athletic Director Robert B. Watson '37, director of Athletics, and James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government and chairman of the Sports Standing Committee.

All-Ivy Roster

The class list itself resembled an all-Ivy sports roster this year. Number one tennis star Gary Reiner and linksman Alex Vik were among the 50 students enrolled. Vik, who will travel to the NCAA cham-pionships next week, tuned up his game with a friendly "challenge" of Professor Jones at the Myopia Golf Course last week.

"Arbitrary distinctions cease on the playing field," Jones said yesterday. "Alex made a wry comment to me while we were playing golf. After giving me some tips on my rusty game, he said, 'Out here, I'm the professor and you're the student!'"

Another class activity was a softball game at Soldiers Field in which teaching fellow Mike Forte slammed a pair of homers and Jones added a solo clout. The informal atmosphere of the outing was enhanced by two cases of beer, a "fringe benefit" of the course.

Jones recently completed the biography of Mack Herron, the former New England Patriot running back now with the Los Angles Rams. "Mack! "will be published this winter by Sports Illustrated's Little-Brown.