Be My Guest

Dr. Seuss, Dartmouth class of 1925. Picked the San Diego Padres 10,000-0.

Unfortunately, the teams were Harvard and Dartmouth, the game was football, and the score was 21-7, against the Big Green.

Dean of the Faculty A. Nichael Spence, Princeton '66, didn't pick a definite score of any game except Harvard Princeton. But the dean wisely went with his employer over his alma mater.

Rep. Barney Frank '61 (D-Mass.) wouldn't go with anyone. He said he didn't want o took foolish predicting a winner in the 101st Game without knowing anything about Harvard or Yale football.

"My knowledge only barely exceeds my interest," he said a bit testify when asked who would emerge victorious. "I haven't the faintest idea."

But his better instincts took charge before long, "I hope they all go out and have a wonderful afternoon and enjoy themselves enormously,"

Maybe they did-Yale certainly did, to the tune of 30-27-but there have to be better ways to spend an afternoon than tracking down alleged celebrities who want to have "Guest Selector" under their name at the bottom of the "The Sports Cube Predicts" grid.

Maybe watching championship wrestling.

The hard-fought internal battles to occupy one of those "Guest Selector" spots just don't extend beyond the confines of 14 Plympton St., for whatever reason.

While any numbers of Crimson staff members will go--and have gone-to outlandish lengths to prognosticate publicity, cajoling a real public figure into picking the winner and score of four to eight Ivy League football games can take some persuadings.

Pleading also works well-sometimes.

"How about if I give you their records," I said to Paul Burditch, a very nice man who fields questions for Ed Marinaro, arguably the best Cornell football player ever and incidentally a star of "Hill Street Blues."

Could you tell him our sports editor's season record is below 500?" He had Marinaro on the other line and kept putting me on hold to relay the requests. "It's all in fun. Does he know that?"

After a good 10 minutes, the final result: he wouldn't do it. I was enraged. A two-time Ivy Player of the Year said he didn't know enough about his own football team to make a prediction.

But I knew better than to take it personally--I hadn't taken anything personally since Bob Woodward's secretary told me he was writing on deadline.

A Yale graduate and Navy veteran, he also said he didn't know enough about eiher Harvard or Army (Harvard-Yale, Army-Navy, get it?) to pick that game":

Or so the fellow answering the phones at The Washington Post's city desk said, after calling Woodward at home to investigate his knowledge of college football.

The West Point sports information director, another very nice man named Bob Kinney, went 4-2, and 1 had to be talked out of sending a copy of Kinney's predictions to woodward.

Let's be serious-he's a busy man. But so is Penn State football Coach Joe Paterno, Brown '50.

Paterno went 2-2, picking his alma mater over favored Harvard, but picked up points for returning the call himself.

And Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.), Princeton '54, broke the bank by picking at midnight, after a day on the campaign trait. It didn't hurt, though, that the person who lined him up. The Crimson's credit manager, happens to be a high school classmate of his son's.

So buoyed by success with one Princeton grad and member of Congress, the request went in to the reelection campaign of Sen. Bill Bradley (D.N.J.), Princeton '65.

It was a week and a half before Election Day, though, and the best Ivy basketball player ever was "in the district," as Washington staff members like to say. But it is one of his areas of interest, his campaign press secretary said when she promised to do the best she could.

"I have to tell you," she confided, "This is not a run-of-the-milt request."