The California Kid

Sean Doyle sat in the corner at our first proctor meeting. He was the only southern Californian in the group of about 20, and like the rest of us, he could hardly believe what he was hearing. Rob, our proctor, was outlining the punishments for breaking various rules; the worst things warranted expungement.

"Praised my hand and asked 'What does "expunge" mean?'" Doyle recalls. "I figured I was in trouble, I didn't know what 'expunge' meant."

But nobody else did, either. It means being expelled and erased from Harvard's records, and a sign went up on the door of Hurlbut I soon after: "We Love Expunge Cake."

Unlike the rest of us, Sean was never really in awe of Harvard. A graduate of Patrick Henry High School in San Diego, where he lettered in three sports, Doyle says. "I thought Harvard was in Connecticut." Recruited to play volleyball, a quintessentially Californian sport that has hardly taken hold in beachless Cambridge, he had never even seen Harvard until he arrived on September 9, 1981. He was, he recalls, "the ultimate California kid."

He looks back on it now, shakes his head. "Being from California, at Harvard, is a trick," says the California kid. But that's not the whole story. He has, over four years, come to incorporate the stereotypes of the Harvard Mar and the California Kid, and wears both hats with equal ease.

"I still say I'm stoked," he smiles. "I'm stoked I came to Harvard."

You can take the kid out of California, but you can't take the California out of the kid.

* * *

The adjustment was a tough one at first. "Everybody thought I should have blond hair and blue eyes--I have brown hair and brown eyes. But I surf--not very well. I play a beach sport. I take things that are not significant lightly." He was not the typical Harvard freshman, if there is such a thing. Three of his four roommates were devoted to academics, but school was never Doyle's biggest concern.

"I think the hardest thing was getting used to the system," he says. Expos was a particular problem. "I got all 'credits'--it goes A, B, C, credit." His teacher called him in and made sure that he was from California and had gone to public school. "I can tell,"' he remembers her saying.

That was one of several times Doyle considered packing it in. He never did. But he did think seriously of transferring back closer to home, to Stanford or UCLA, where his girlfriend was at school. "My first two years here I really regretted not going to UCLA," he recalls. "I was still having a hard time getting used to the different culture out here--the people--and the weather."

Climate was definitely a problem. On the first beautiful, crisp fall day of freshman year, he got up for a 10 a.m. class with only a few minutes to spare, saw the sun, pulled on shorts, and left. By the beginning of Moral Reasoning lecture at 11, he was turning blue from the cold. "I was so pissed--so pissed. And I still get caught."

* * *

When rooming forms were due, Hurlbut I went its separate ways. Doyle and Doug Johnson wound up in Leverett, along with John Krusz, Mickey Maspons, Pete Mielach and Jeff Musselman.

It was a good move. The group, five of whom were varsity athletes, instinctively got along and--despite the loss of Doug, who left Harvard during sophomore year--wound up, by all accounts, one of the closest rooming groups anybody knows. "We honestly do everything together," says Doyle. In their large, cluttered common room, the television hardly ever stops, and the mayhem that surrounds it includes competition for the less-than-coveted "Asshole of the Month" award, whose previous winners are commemorated on one wall.

"We shared a lot of problems, academic problems, disciplinary problems," Doyle says of their sophomore year. "We raised hell. The administration didn't know what to do with us. We got to know all the police officers...we were just growing up."

The closeness with his roommates was to be vital in sustaining Doyle during a time of real adversity, injury a devastating injury almost ended the erstwhile star's career.

A broken bone and destroyed ligaments in his left ankle kept Doyle off the volleyball court, and Harvard fell short of the Eastern title it was favored to take. The ankle had to be re-broken. There was rehabilitation, therapy--no surgery, but a lot of frustration that continued into junior year, when he returned able to play, but not as well as he would have liked.

"I couldn't perform--I just wasn't playing up to what I should have been," he says now, still sounding frustrated. The rooming group had been split up, with Doyle and Mielach sharing a double one floor below the other roommates, and the team wasn't a close group. "Off the court was fine, but on the court, nobody was together." On April 1, toward the end of a season that seemed to have gone on forever, he quit the squad.

"I felt like I cheated [Coach] Ishan [Gurdal]. He worked with me for two years and then I went and got hurt on him," says Doyle. "I lost control in volleyball junior year--and I regret doing it because it's the only time I've ever quit. I think that's why I stayed at Harvard--I couldn't quit."

* * *

A sign of the closeness between roommates is the way they support each others' teams. This year, the four varsity athletes and Krusz--a varsity basketball and baseball manager and intramural street hockey star--have been one another's biggest fans.

They traveled to Philadelphia in November via the Musselman house and Atlantic City, then met the football team at the airport when the squad arrived to play Penn for the Ivy League title. They exchanged high-fives with Coaches Joe Restic and Mac Singleton, even waved a banner--but, unfortunately, to no avail.

In the spring, they amused baseball funs all over the East by cheering on Maspons and Musselman. During a rainstorm between games at Dartmouth, when Harvard desperately needed a win to tie for the league title, Doyle and Krusz broke up the tension with an impromptu wiffle ball game on the field. "We go in for rain delays," Doyle explains.

Between those seasons came volleyball, in which Doyle was finally able to put it all together. He'd been working out with Mielach after football ended, insisting all the while that he didn't want to return to his own sport.

Last fall, Doyle says, "I was just gonna be a socialite. I wasn't gonna play volleyball, I was just gonna enjoy myself." But to his own surprise, he found he could once again enjoy himself on the volleyball court.

In midseason, after one of the co-captains had quit the squad, Doyle approached his coach. "I called Ishan to the side one day and said, 'I'm enjoying the game a lot. Will you let me be the [on-] court captain?" he recalls. "He said, 'I've been waiting for you to ask me that.'"

With a new combination and strategy, suddenly the team came together, on and off the court, and enjoyed one of its finest seasons in years. The Crimson won the Ivy League title, besting nemesis Princeton for the first time in two years, and just narrowly missed the NCAA competition.

Again the roommates' presence in the stands was crucial. "We'd have him laughing on the court," says Krusz, who was there so often he was made an assistant coach. "Jeff, John, Mick and Pete were my biggest fans," Doyle says. "They made me a lot more intense. When you have fans yelling like they did, you don't want to let them down.

"Those kids pushed me--not to play well, but to play as well as I possibly could."

* * *

After today, Sean, Economics degree in hand, returns home to San Diego. His plans for the summer include starting a career in medical electronics or real estate and getting engaged to his high school sweetheart, with whom he has conducted a long-distance romance over the past four years. Even from 3000 miles away, Kelly Duncan has kept him on track, helping him through everything from injuries to his parents' divorce, which became final during freshman year.

You will hear Sean Doyle's name again. He knows where he's headed. He'll work for five to eight years, then, he says, "I've always had political aspirations." And if his friends are to be believed, there can be little doubt that before too long, he'll also have political accomplishments.

"He's pretty confident in his own ability, more in personal interaction than anything else. I think people just respect his ability to lead," says Musselman. "He's going to be making some big decisions over time."

He may already have made his biggest decision coming to Harvard in the first place.

* * *

Doyle is different than he would have been had he stayed in California, particularly if he had gone to UCLA, says Jack Duncan, father of his girlfriend Kelly.

"The cultures are diverse enough an meeting people from different parts of the even of the world, has made him see that country," adds Duncan. "He's a volleyball player, and a very good one at that, but volleyball players are a dime a dozen in southern California gone to UCLA, he might have made okay, but he certainly wouldn't have been a star."

Doyle has not, overall, been a standard at Harvard, but as Mielach says, "The successful kids at Harvard won't be the A students-it'll be B and C students that are personable. And Doyle is nothing if not personable. He is also, by his own evaluation, intense. "If he's going to do something," says Mielach, "he's going it." He's a closet studier. It doesn't seem like he's ever studying--but he gets good grades.

That translates, in the social arena, into gregariousness. "He likes crowds," roommate, adding, in a dead-on imitation drink, let's party, let's be loud and obnoxious.

The crowds at Harvard may not have been as rowdy as the ones he would have enjoyed in California, but even though "he always hated the place," Mielach predicts, "He miss it."

"I think the East has made a big change he continues. "It's the same Sean, but--it's matured him, Harvard matures you little faster-paced. He likes to get things done and get 'em done quickly."

If it comes to meeting people or getting things done, though, Doyle will take the already knows he can get things done. "When you want something to happen, you can make it happen," he says. "I'm just like any other kid-I'm scared. But I'm not scared of the future anymore, because I know I can control it."

He no longer regrets passing up Stanford, USC or UCLA. "It might be good for some Harvard was the perfect place for me what class is from Harvard--everybody at Harvard is a winner."

Would he send his children to Harvard? "I wouldn't tell them Harvard is the great the world, but I'd give them guidance them if that's what they want to do." He thinks it over for a moment and grins. "They won't go to Yale, that's for sure."CrimsonTimothy W. Plass