Setting Was Everything in Swim Meet

Next time anybody comes up and tries to tell you that a home field/court advantage doesn't mean anything, you can be sure that person was watching the Pro Bowlers Tour rather than the Harvard-Princeton swimming meet on Saturday.

Once all the hoopla of official dedication and the Dating Game-like rundown of both teams was over, the meet itself was finally stripped down to its barest essentials: strategy and pure competition.

For the next two-and-a-half hours over 1500 spectators were treated to a clash as magnificent as the structure that housed it. It was a battle free of coach-referee squabbles, devoid of nebulous injuries like hamstring pulls, refreshingly lacking of between period intermissions or T.V. timeouts. It was, rather, an event held taut with tension and spiced heavily with clutch performances.

After Coach Joe Bernal's plan for a first in the 1000-yd. free without using Bobby Hackett backfired. Harvard's superior divers realized the necessity of sweeps in the one and three-meter board events to prevent Princeton from putting the meet out of reach.

Enter Craig Gavin, a sophomore diver from Anchorage, Alaska, who will probably be remembered more for hitting his foot on the three-meter board in the later competition than the way he took second place in the one-meter event.

Leading Princeton's Jim Malot by less than a point going into the final round of dives, Gavin watched as Malot contorted an inward one-and-a-half almost flawlessly for a 7,7 1/2, and 8 from the judges and lodged himself in second place.

Gavin was almost obnoxious in his coolness ("I felt like I was gonna kill it," he said afterwards) as he ripped of an inward one-and-a-half of his own with superior scores to cop the first of two board sweeps for the Crimson.

An then there was freshman Tuomo Kerola, who probably got the most important second place of his college career in his 200-yd. breast stroke bout against unfair odds in the Tigers John Christensen and last year's Eastern Seabord champ Chuck Hector.

In third place for the first half of the race, the former Finnish Olympian proceeded to let loose with the frog kick of a bionic amphibian to overtake Hector in the last 50 yards.

"I could feel the pressure because I knew I needed at least a second and I knew that both of their guys had better times than me. That, and the stimulation of swimming in the new pool, well, it was something like the Olympics," Kerola said.

Harvard never led until the meet was over, but somehow the setting, the crowd, and the come-from-behind knack of the aquamen fused into a mass of irresistible confidence as it all came down to the 400- yd. freestyle relay.

And then there was Mr. Hackett, clutching a red rabbit's foot just moments before the start of that last relay. Now the Crimson had all the points covered. Somehow you knew it was over; dedication and dethronement in one afternoon.