Kidding Around With Men's Swimming

Sports fans today switch loyalties as often as teams switch managers--opportunistically insisting that they sincerely "like Pittsburgh" even though they wouldn't go near the dump.

Yet Daniel Kaufman has remained devoted to the Harvard men's swim team ever since he was a kid.

Daniel started attending meets at the early age of six, and now, a seasoned spectator of 12, he rarely passes up the chance to travel to Blodgett Pool.

"I try to make all the home meets," Daniel, whose father is a professor of constitutional law at the Law School, says. "I've come more regularly in the past years because meets in the IAB sometimes started at 7:30 and went past my bed-time."

During a swim meet, Daniel positions himself in the stands directly above the finish line and begins his meticulous ritual. Before each race he listens attentively for the announcement of the competitors and neatly pencils their names into a makeshift scorecard in his looseleaf notebook.

At the contestants climb onto the blocks, the 4-ft., 11-in., 82-pounder scrutinizes the field checking for false starters, while one finger rests anxiously on his combination wrist and stop watch.

"I wanted one of these watches specifically to time meets, and now I can usually come within a couple of tenths of a second of the official times," the youngster, who clocks a time of 30 seconds in a 25-yd. freestyle swim, says.

As an event progresses, Daniel remains quiet except to comment on the pace or a swimmer's stroke. Occasionally he will tap his pencil against his notebook before predicting--accurately--the eventual winner.

When the race ends, the native of Cambridge does not allow himself time to rejoice as he frantically copies the times of the scoreboard, muttering to himself how the times compare with others.

The painstaking care with which Daniel completes the scorecard does not go to waste since he later pastes them on his bedroom walls.

"I've got just about everything about Harvard swimming in my room;" he proudly states.

But Daniel almost made an exception to this policy after Harvard suffered its first loss in three seasons to a shaved and psyched Princeton squad.

"I was so upset after that meet that I went home and ripped up my scorecard," the seventh grader says. "I later pieced it together and put it on my wall to remind myself that Harvard wasn't unbeatable."

Still, Daniel firmly believes that the Crimson will prevail at the Eastern Seaboard Championships this Thrsday through Saturday at Penn.

While Daniel describes last year's Easterns as "exciting but not surprising," he considers Harvard's 1978 dual meet against Princeton as the most thrilling meet ever.

"It was the first meet in Blodgett Pool and it went down to the last relay. I got so excited that I wrote on my scorecard that Bobby Mackett and Julian Hack were swimming for Harvard," Daniel says, smiling at the memory of the successful outcome.

Daniel's main concern lies with the entire squad, which he describes as "naturally zany during meets," and he can rattle off the best times of almost every swimmer.

Still, Daniel makes no attempt to hide that his favorite swimmer is Geoff Seelen, whose older brother John introduced Daniel to Harvard swimming back in 1974. Then, as the bespectacled tyke explains, "Once I got going I never stopped coming."

Although the 12-year-old acts more mature than some members of the Harvard swim team, he keeps his age in perspective--"I haven't thought about coming to Harvard for college--I've got some time to think about it."