THIS IS STEINAL TAP: Cusworth Or Oden? Give Me Four Years

Ohio State has its Greg Oden. Syracuse had its Carmelo Anthony. Harvard had its, um, Brian Cusworth.

Not a great parallel, I’ll admit, but perhaps we should be glad that the dominant player on the Crimson men’s basketball team for the majority of this season was a four-and-a-half-year senior. Our star earned his degree in biology and earned his stripes in basketball through years of improvement. Other schools perpetually renew their stars and stalwarts and head into each season with a fresh crop of highly-touted freshmen.

Duke, UNC, Arizona, and UCLA fans out there (I know you’ve somehow made it into Harvard) might be dumbfounded by this, but I’m happy that the stars of Crimson sports almost always stick it out through four years here, even when Cambridge is far from where their athletic brilliance could have taken them.

A recent article in the New York Times sports section bore the headline “College Offers Attractive Pit Stop on Way to the N.B.A.” It detailed the frenzy surrounding former, present, and future N.B.A. locks as they came with a basketball to play college (or is it came to college to play basketball?).

While these high-profile athletes generate fan interest—something Harvard could use a bit more of—and sometimes lead their teams to great success during their short stints, they mostly evoke a feeling of free agency in its ugliest sense. That sense is, of course, that sport is all about what your team gives you—truckloads of money, a straight shot into the pros, a Rolex and an Escalade from an anonymous “sports booster”—and not about what you give to your team.

To those who say Greg Oden and his fellow grown-man-sized “one-and-doners” are too good for college competition, I say: I’m sure their fans would enjoy them even more if they won a championship or two or even broke UCLA’s record of 88 straight wins. And it wouldn’t hurt if they got an education in the process. Economic logic might trump my own, but at least my thinking would make for good sport (and sports stories).

In this era when much of college athletics has become more spectacle than sport, it’s nice to be confident that I’ll be able to watch the next crop of spectacular Harvard athletes hone their skills through four years of trials, and not just on the playing fields.

Take, for instance, the case of Clifton Dawson, the Crimson’s most-hyped big-sport athlete in recent memory. The holder of every relevant Harvard rushing record transferred to Harvard during his freshman year because “I wanted to get the best education I could get.” As a result, Crimson football fans got to ride the Dawson train for four years of almost constant ascent. Following a player as he moves from good to great to mythic (and sometimes back into oblivion) is as integral a part of the experience of being a fan as any.

What’s more, Crimson football fans got to take classes (the meaningful type, with homework and finals) with their weekend hero. They got to legitimately live the life of the star they cheered, taking the same shuttles, eating the same food, bench-pressing the same 400 pounds.

Even if Oden brings Ohio State a championship in April, he won’t have given the Buckeye nation as much as it will surely have given him.

The same cannot be said for Dawson or Cusworth or world champion fencer Emily Cross or our Olympian women’s hockey players, for that matter.

So, while I would love to get to cover a Final Four run, or a bowl game, I’ll take living, growing, and learning with the athletes that I’m covering. Here’s to college sports for their own sake, not just layovers on the way to the pros.

—Staff writer Jonathan B. Steinman can be reached at steinman@fas.harvard.edu.