Lion and the Thorn

NEW YORK--I've been residing here all week and only one interesting thing has happened to me. I went down yesterday morning to the ABC TV building on 52nd street, and when I stepped into the revolving door from the street, Howard Cosell stepped in from the lobby. I never actually got to see Howard face-to-face as I spun into the lobby just as he spun out onto the street.

This tale serves as a parable for the Harvard basketball team, which has been in a revolving door all season. With 11 straight Ivy League games ahead, though, it's still not too late for the Crimson to cross the threshold to a successful season.

Tonight the Cagers play Cornell in Ithaca and on Saturday they disembark here to face the Columbia Lions. Cornell is only 5-11 and has lost all four of its league games, while Columbia, which was expected to challenge Penn for the League title this year, is in the middle of its worst slump in three years. So if the Crimson is ever going to exit from its revolving door, this could be the weekend.

Morningside Heights has been in mourning all week over the sudden and inexplicable demise of the Lions. Columbia had its "big four" of Ricky Free, Juan Mitchell, Shane Cotner, and all-time assist leader Alton Byrd returning for the third year in a row. They had played exhilarating ball last year on their way to winning 13 of their last 15 games. The league race came down to a harem scarem finish with the Lions defeating Penn on the last weekend of the season and then losing to Princeton the next night to finish a game behind the Quakers.

This season they were expected to pick up right where they left off. At first, everything appeared to be going according to plan. The fast-breaking Lions jumped off to a 9-4 record and even blew out St. Johns, 90-77. Then came what they are billing here as the "lost weekend." After blitzing Cornell, 82-62, the Lions suffered back-to-back losses to Brown and Yale last weekend and have now been virtually erased from the Ivy League title picture.

All season long there had been whispers that popular first year coach Buddy Mahar was too easy going and, if anything, had a little too much rapport with his players. Mahar must have reached the same conclusion because he decided to crack down. He benched Byrd, Davie Fields and Free who had started every game for the last three years, for the first 11:49 of the Yale game. The trio was benched because they had been six minutes late to a team meeting earlier in the day.

After the loss, Byrd, the team captain, told a New York Post reporter that the team was riddled with dissension and the story broke the next day under a banner headline. Mahar and the rest of the Columbia team denied that there was any disharmony.

The drama reached Wagnerian proportions on Tuesday when the Lions faced Fordham in Morningside Heights. Mahar had been assistant to Tom Penders, who left Columbia at the end of last year to become head coach of the Fordham Rams. Penders was now returning for the first time to face the squad he had built from scratch.

Penders brought with him his 7-ft. Sudanese center Dud Malwal Tongal, whom he had previously hoped to bring to 116th and Broadway. The Columbia admissions office, however, felt Dud hadn't made enough progress in the English language course he was taking and rejected him, which increased Penders' disenchantment with what he perceived as a lack of administration support for the basketball program.

When Fordham held on the upset Columbia, 76-75, it was a personal vindication for Penders, who had been criticized for abandoning a potential Ivy championship team. After Fordham's win, the Post ran the headline "Troubled Columbia Dealt Death Blow" and the Columbia Spectator pronounced "Columbia Basketball Died Last Night."

Indeed, there is hardly a player on Fordham who could have made the Columbia team much less break into the starting line-up. Penders himself admits that his starting line-up consists of "five guys who play like they've got sprained ankles."

Still, I'm not surprised Fordham won. I also went down to Chinatown this week and as anyone there could have told you, it's the year of the Ram.