From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

LAST WEEK, I had dinner with a woman whose daughter is a marvelously talented high school athlete and also carries an impeccable academic record. The daughter was a red hot prospect in the Ivy League, and she was trying to decide between Harvard and Brown. Brown was applying the pressure, trying to draw her to Providence. "I thought the Brown coach was going to move in with us," the mother told me. "But the Harvard coach--well, I hardly ever saw her."

The daughter decided in favor of Cambridge, for a variety of reasons; but the incident illustrates the sort of attitudinal disparity that currently plagues Ivy League sports, slowly eroding them, especially here, where Harvard struggles to uphold academic ideals in the face of ever-increasing athletic competitiveness.

A careful recollection of Harvard sports, 1976-80, bristles with vivid triumphs; staggers under the weight of expansive change; and, most of all, battles the gloomy veil of disappointment. This disappointment, in my mind, overwhelms almost all other memories because it seems to be consuming, steadily, the University's sports program. In effect, this disappointment is a function of the rest of the Harvard athletic program--it follows naturally from the victories and transformations that raise, in both participants and spectators, the hope of progress.

Harvard has, by leaps and bounds, upgraded its athletic program over the last four years. A dramatic facilities facelift has provided the University with badly needed first-rate homes for swimming, hockey and track. And the expected renovation of Briggs Cage, which will transform the Cambridge Dustbowl into a sparkling new basketball arena, certainly will give Crimson athletes access to a top-notch athletic complex (assuming, of course, that ancient Harvard Stadium does not crumble in the near future).

Yet this red-brick superstructure shelters a group of student athletes who are caught in the middle of Harvard's inability to decide what to do with itself. Athletes--and their coaches--have been thrust into the current of a competitive upswing that has been nourished amid the traditional Harvard attitudes of "sports for everyone," "participation first, winning second," and "brooks before ballgames." The contradiction is an obvious one, though the University seems unable to come to terms with it.

Consequently, Harvard carries an athletic program that attempts to compete successfully on a national level. It insists on maintaining Division I eligibility in most sports and aims to move up the division ranks in other sports, where fledging Crimson squads are not immediately eligible for top-flight status e.g., women's basketball, which, since 1976, has moved from being a pathetic joke, to the top of Division II in the AIAW, to frustrating inconsistency in Division I).

Obviously, Harvard's rigorous admission standards, lack of a persuasive recruiting program, absence of a physical education or similar "quasi-academic" major, and refusal to indulge in many other athletic ego-stroking actions, limits the University's appeal. Many of the nation's blue-chip prospects, who have athletic tunnel vision and hunger for a high-caliber program, are not going to be attracted by the educational advantages of a Harvard. Yet inexplicably, Harvard often competes against the very schools that do harbor such hot-shots. The handicap that Crimson teams must confront in contests is both clear and substantial.

INTERMITTENT sucesses only provide the architects of such a program with a false sense of progress. The self-delusion, though, is apparent; take, for example, the case of the men's swim team.

Joe Bernal has built a small dynasty in his new Blodgett Palace, and the aquamen have risen to the top of the Eastern ranks. This year, when Bernal decided to test the Crimson's prowess against a national power, he brought Indiana to town. Amazingly, Harvard dumped to Hoosiers, bringing chaos to the national rankings and raising questions about the omnipotence of Harvard swimming. On the surface, it seemed Harvard had achieved national stature while, ostensibly, maintaining its student-academic standards.

But three weeks later, the falseness of that proposition was driven home: Harvard did a nose dive in the Nationals. At its peak, Harvard could up end a national power that was saving something for those Nationals; but that Championship meet showed that, Harvard University, is still a long way from athletic superstardom on a large-scale level.

However, Harvard people are proud, and though they won't openly claim that the school boasts national sports power, they also won't readily humble themselves to admitting that we have a program that just cannot stack up against "major-leaguing" sports universities. And it shouldn't--not if this is going to remain the nation's foremost educational institution. Unfortunately, very few people can combine top-flight scholarship with superstar capabilities: most mortals must choose one or the other, making the second choice an avocation, more than a profession. (In that rare category of scholar-athletes, Harvard draws a fairly good proportion of the people: but such wonders prove too few and far between to provide the solid groundwork for an outstanding sports program.

The tragedy emerges as the Harvard program drifts toward the mythical status of all-powerful, while athletes in Cambridge are constantly churned up by contradictory forces. The problem can be seen most clearly in the women's sports program here, which has bounded to great heights in the past four years.

In the midst of Title IX equality gibberish, women's sports got an administrative push, and the women responded. An influx of coaches; the appearance of amenities such as lockerrooms, uniforms, traveling budgets, and so forth; as well as a gradual effort to attract more high school-trained women athletes, turned around such programs as basketball soccer, lacrosse and swimming.

Most dramatically, the soccer team, after only its second year of varsity status, rose to supremacy in the East--and perhaps the nation--tying for top honors last fall in the regional championship (there is no organized national playoff yet), but improvement has come at a cost--to both women and coaches.

Many of the "older" women--juniors and seniors--have found themselves ousted from teams by a new crop of well-trained, specialty athletes--students who have entered with strong high school backgrounds and a desire to exel in a specific sport. Also, many women who came here believing the sports program would be a somewhat low-pressure athletic opportunity have flinched at the impact of accelerating competitiveness; and many of them, especially the juniors and seniors, have fled interscholastic sports, succumbing to the pressures of trying to practice and study.

Professors demand performance and coaches demand dilligence; and the tug of war, using the student as a rope, has left many onetime athletic enthusiast disenchanted and often bitter. Also in the middle lie the coaches, trying to drive their teams to greater heights while burdened by their players' classroom demands.

Just how high-powered should a coach be? That seems to be a central problem. Paul Moses, a successful women's squash coach who left last year when his contract was not renewed, was a victim of this indecision. Some of his players complained about his intensity, while others were berating an acquiescence to academic loads. He could satisfy no one, so he left Harvard--or it left him. Stephanie Walsh, the women's swim coach who leaves this year after four seasons, has faced many of the same problems. Speak to any random handful of Harvard women swimmers and you'll get the range of opinions about Walsh: "She's too intense," or "she's not serious enough."

THE STRAIN OF frustration cannot be obscured. You can see it in the face of hockey coach Joe Restic, in the manner of hockey coach Bill Cleary, even though the fast-talking optimism of basketball whiz Frank McLaughlin. Women's hoop coach Carole Kleinfelder has struggled with it, and more students than one could possibly name have to live with it--unhappily--every day of the year. No one, it seems, has the answer, of how to find sports success at Harvard. And so team records keep getting worse, the results more discouraging, the attitudes more depressed.

Fortunately, this spring has proved an anomaly--a welcomed reprieve. Men's baseball and lacrosse have gained playoffberths and the crews have returned to Eastern Sprints domination after a couple of shaky years. But the rest of the year remains very lean, especially in the beef sports--football, hockey and basketball.

Yes, there have been glimmers along the way: the 22-7 upset of Yale last November in The Game, a 1977 Beanpot Trophy, last fall's women's soccer title, the 1977 women's hoop Division II title, last year's men's hoop upset of Pennsylvania--those are but a few.

Yet those highlights are almost unwelcomed when they breed a belief that Harvard can rise to infinite heights in sports without a basic philosophical shift.

"See," they say, "we beat Yale, and they had the No. 1 defense in the nation." Yes, and there could never have been a sweeter moment. But anyone who suspects such a win foreshadows a move to the ranks of the Big Ten or Pac Eight should submit to therapy.

Harvard University , one can safely predict, will outlast us all. Without a doubt, it will remain an institutional oddity: debates about social responsibility, the relationship with Cambridge, the quality of the undergraduate education and the role of sports seem destined to persist perhaps longer than construction on the Red Line.

But the problem of sports at Harvard--not unlike these other woes--hurts people, Harvard people, as it rages on. There is a great need, in this idealistic academic community, to recognize the drastic limitations an education-oriented school inherently places upon an athletic program.

Though I disagree with much of the rhetoric delivered by Yale President A. Barlet Giamatti, who recently called for the Ivy League to downgrade its recruiting efforts and perhaps abolish playoff competition, I sympathize with the spirit of his remarks. He urges a realistic recognition of what the Ivy League is about, and that is --most of all-scholarly enterprise.

Giamatti, I think, is rightly disturbed by the escalation of competitiveness at his own school and at many other Ivy schools in recent years. The surge is invidious; and it fosters such inflammatory accusations as those made about Yale accepting football players with a blatant disregard for their academic records, or Penn doing the same for its basketball dynasty, or Princeton prostituting itself to admit superb women athletes, or Harvard pressuring professors to show some leniency for athletes who perhaps aren't spending all that much time in Lamont or Widener.

True or false, such barbs are damaging, and their increasing frequency damages the reputation of the Ivy League, nurtures smug remarks about how the Ivies have their own little sports scandal.

If Harvard is to serve its students, it will have to take an assertive role in the years to come: either shrug off the academic ideals and turn to athletic mass production; or step in, stop the win-at-all-cost attitude now taking hold, and restructure the athletics program to a level compatible with Ivy League education. Right now, rigorous sports programs prevent many athletes form enjoying the numerous benefits of an Ivy education. It is a tragedy for an athlete to come to Harvard and then never have a chance to soak, up its scholarship because he or she is too busy catching up after endless hours of practice. The school loses out, the team loses out, and most important, the individual loses out.

A. Bartlet Giamatti is right in calling for the Ivy League to work on this situation together. If we are indeed a brotherhood of schools and if our teams are to continue to compete primarily with each other, then we should clarify our collective aims an priorities.

As Ivy teams expect more and more that they will have a shot at the golden ring on the national sports merry-go-round, the pressures and the frustration mount. It is a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle that must be dealt with now, before too many more athletes drift throught the Ivy League--and through Harvard--retaining a bitter aftertaste for college life. Such disillusion should not be passively endured, especially not in the Ivy League, where you are told to expect Utopia.

THE GLORY, that trite "thrill of victory," is indeed rewarding. but in the Ivy League, and here at Harvard, the cost of such glory has risen dramatically; and, as seems fashionable these days, the price just keeps climbing. Unfortunately, the Harvard leadership has taken the same type of approach to athletics as Jimmy Carter has taken to the economy: a sort of wide-eyed, respectfully distressed puzzlement, one that lacks any true definition of action and invites an accompanying rampage of rising costs.

If Harvard is to fight "victory inflation," it will need someone, or a group of someones, to confront the issues. I hope they have cut deep--stinging members of the Ivy League community. I know I bristled when I first heard them--my impulse was to berate Giamatti, to endorse the "I love you, coach; I'd beat my mother for you, coach" attitude which can pervade athletics. That attitude just does not work; I suspect it's not very useful anywhere, but especially not in the Ivies or at Harvard.

Athletes have compared a great victory to the grandest of emotions--it's like reaching the top of Mt. Everest or flying over the Grand Canyon. "It's sublime," they say. "You can't describe it." But true to the old cliche, winning in the Ivy League has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous, and it's time we stepped back and realized just how absurd the game we're playing has become.