Ragging on Beanpot Fans Undeserved

Last Monday's Beanpot championship victory over Boston University was undoubtedly one of the two highlights of this Harvard athletic season (the other being the football team's victory over Yale in The Game). The level of excitement and school spirit obvious to any Harvard fan in the Garden crowd was, unfortunately, lost on two of your writers.

In his lead story on the game, Jay K. Varma writes that "the few hundred Crimson faithful (the other some 14,000 were BU fans)" remained to watch the Beanpot trophy awarded to the Crimson. No one who was actually there would corroborate this. The fact is there seemed to be considerably more Harvard fans than B.U. fans. They were loud, they were rowdy, and they were in the faces of the BU players and coaches all night. And many of them, I assure you, stuck around for the ceremony. Whenever the BU players skated onto the ice to begin a period, the cheers would easily be drowned out by the boos. The opposite was true for the Harvard team. Even if we take Varma at his words that there were more BU fans (and this is highly unlikely) it must have been that our fans were much louder and more supportive of our team.

Varma's inaccuracies pale, though, in comparison to Michael K. Mayo's editorial ripping into Harvard's fans. Mayo claims that our fans "can barely spit out a 'Rah.'" in fact, he says that Harvard "rahs its way into silence" while "Boston College students scream along with their band, Northeastern fans sing their team's praises to the rafters and Boston University spectators nearly bring the Garden balcony to the floor." Mayo demeans the effort of every one of the students who went to the game. The editorial is filled with factual errors. His comments regarding the Boston College and Northeastern fans would surprise anyone who was actually at that game. There was little "screaming" and even less "singing," maybe because there were only about 500 fans in the Garden for that game.

I must say that I expected the crowd to be largely a BU one, because that's what I had read. But come to think of it, I read that in The Crimson. So I was pleasantly surprised to see that Harvard fans clearly made up the majority. In fact, I heard several BU fans grumbling on the Green Line about the crowd being "three-fourths Harvard." I think, in a small way, we helped our team win the Beanpot. One of the few truths in Mayo's editorial is when he states that "everybody hates Harvard." For whatever reason, many people do seem to resent our school. This is why it is particularly important for us to show our solidarity and spirit at events like the Beanpot. And we did, and it was one of the best times I have had since I have been at Harvard. Mayo, though, claims that "even we die-hard Harvard fans had to concede that sitting in our corner just wasn't that much fun." Well, Mayo is the only Harvard fan I know who would concede that. And as far as being a die-hard, if Mayo is a die-hard, then I can skate as well as Ted Drury.

With the University as spread out as it is and with the natural segregation imposed by the house system, it is rare when Harvard students can show their school spirit. The lack of such spirit has occasionally been the topic of articles in The Crimson. This is why it is so disturbing that when we finally do come together in the name of Fair Harvard, writers like Mayo must bring us down with his amateurish opinions.

I think every student who was at that game should be proud of both our team and of the solidarity we displayed.

I can only conclude that either: (1) Mayo was not at the game and therefore did not know what the crowd was like, or (2) he expected the Harvard crowd to be substandard, and when he found otherwise, decided that a good idea for an editorial should not be wasted in the name of accuracy. Either way, The Crimson loses. --Jay Kim '95