For The Crimson Cagers: A Bad Taste From 1982

The 1982 men's basketball season leaves an ambiguous, sort of stale taste in your mouth--like the kind you get after cheering for a second-half Crimson rally against Penn and then swearing all the way home after the good guys falter and lose by 13.

It's the same taste you get after Harvard drops a key one-point game to Cornell is mid-January, a pair of contests to Brown and Yale two weeks later, and both ends of the Princeton-Penn road trip.

Every time there were explanations: a flukey bucket at the buzzer by the Big Red; worrying about the Tigers and Quakers while you're playing the Bruins and Elis; remembering your losses to the Bruins and Elis when you're playing the Tigers and Quakers.

What Harvard fans need after this season is a good, long gargle with some minty mouthwash.

Once refreshed, it might do everyone some good to look behind the obvious themes of the season--costly injuries to guard Calvin Dixon and center Monroe Trout and the cagers consistent lack of intensity in key situation--and examine some exemplary individual achievements and the subtle disappointments that accompanied them.

The team finished sixth with a 6-8 Ivy record and an 11-15 overall mark. Personal acclaim was earned by guard Bob Ferry, who won Rookie-of-the-Year honors and senior swingman Don Fleming, who will graduate as Harvard's all-time leading scorer (1797 points).

Fleming also made the first-team All-Ivy squad for the third consecutive year, while forward Joe Carrabino received Honorable Mention for the second straight year.

Though all three players had impressive end-of-year statistics, their weaknesses and periodic slumps were major factors in the cagers' failure to improve on a solid 1981 season.

Fleming stumbled early, suffering one of the mysterious dry spells that have speckled his seasons at the IAB.

The offense took shape without its most powerful weapon, and when Fleming returned to his usual awe-inspiring form, he seemed to be attacking on his own--dangerous but ultimately containable.

Ferry and Carrabino played superbly by any conventional standards Averaging almost 15 points per game and leading the league in free-throw shooting with an 89.8 percent mark. Carrbino battled bravely inside and served as the team's most vocal on-court cheerleader.

What the 6-ft, 8-in forward did not do was explode for an occasional game winning performance in crucial Ivy battles. On defense, he failed to prove his few respectable critics wrong, though a willing rebounder. Carrabino was often burned by quicker forwards who pulled up short and shot over him or drove around him for lay-ups.

Ferry was the squad's third-leading scorer with a 10.5 points per-game average. The heavily recruited alumnus of legendary DeMatha High School in Maryland drew awed gasps from fans around the league for his deadly 15-ft. jumper, and he improved his ball handling from shaky to dependable b midseason. Yet be too stopped just short of providing the timely spark the Crimson would have needed to push past Penn. Princeton and Columbia.

As often as Ferry hit from the top of the key, he would get a pass in the open and hesitate, feinting a shot and then giving up the ball Tentativeness cramped his passing and overall floor leadership as well.

It may seem strange to pick at the performances of three of Harvard's top players when trying t explain the team's mediocre performance. But the Crimson had the manpower this year to make a run at the crown, it was the little things the best players didn't do that seemed to get in the way.