PARTING SHOT: Setting the Record Straight

So here’s how I originally wanted to open my Harvard Crimson Sports farewell article:

“The first piece that I wrote for the Harvard Crimson Sports Board was published in February 2009, almost a year and a half before my upcoming graduation. Naive and extremely motivated, I set out to write heart-wrenching, inspiring stories about Harvard’s varsity teams in an entertaining and evocative manner. Here, I will attempt to revisit some of Harvard’s most memorable sports moments, a few of which I had the pleasure of covering as an eager reporter.”

There are a few problems with that opening. For one, it sucks. Not much to break down there. Sucks.

Secondly, it is the lede for a bad article that no one gives a frock about. If I don’t want to sit here and write a pretentious curtain-call piece about how my periodic game recaps were somehow profound, then you sure as heck don’t want to read one.

Instead, I’ll just bow out with some banter about the challenges that we Harvard sportswriters face, hopefully get two or three laughs out of you, and call it a career.

At a school where the athletes are only marginally stronger and faster than the math nerds, whose hourly spin-moves in and out of Cabot Science Library would come in handy for the coaches across the river, sometimes it’s tough to engage sports fans. With the bleachers mostly empty at all but the most infamous of our rivalry matchups, nobody’s getting paper cuts frantically flipping to the sports section.

As my peers and I packed into the Crimson conference room to start the comp process last spring, we had no idea what we were in for. We knew that the comp process would be demanding and that we would have to scribble notes about sports we had never heard of as if we were die-hard fans.

We knew that we would have to blow good money on shoddy digital voice recorders from that dusty RadioShack by the Garage, just so we could shove them in the faces of exasperated coaches who had extended their historic losing streaks moments before. What we didn’t know, however, was that, truly, no one cared.

Allow me to elaborate. As sportswriters and editors, we attempt to make every win into Michael Jordan’s “The Shot” in 1989 and every choke into The Curse of the Bambino. We take the gift of gab—oh, sorry, the BS skills—that got us to this great institution and dress our tales of Harvard sporting events in diamonds and pearls as if they were our own resumes.

Take the atrocious first sentence I ever published in THC Sports:

“It might be hard to believe, but there is something better than the butternut squash soup served in the dining halls on Tuesdays.”

Not only was that statement a corny, cheapshot pun that I used to introduce an article about Harvard men’s squash, but it was also a bold-faced lie. Nothing touches the soup.

Does our readership increase for more than a day when we depict moderately-exciting Ivy League games as if they were Olympic contests between athletes from warring countries? For fear of being wrong, I’m not going to include any stats on this one, but we will just go with, “No”.

What was the author thinking when he referred to a lucky fourth-quarter three-pointer with butt-ugly form as a “rainbow set shot that appeared to pause momentarily at its peak?” Well it was me, and I wasn’t thinking. I’m all for colorful writing, but I mean, what happened to journalistic integrity?

What some of my fellow writers and I learned during our time here is that sensationalizing every sporting event that we can is a waste of time. We are Harvard. Our mascot is a color. We juice with Adderall, not anabolic steroids. We are going to have bad games and bad teams.

But that is exactly what makes sports here so special. On occasions when Harvard resembles a big-name sports school, students momentarily achieve a level of confidence, and even a level of intoxication, that we long for during all-nighters in the library.

After a big win, an aura that Ron Burgundy would describe as “scrumtrulescent” sweeps this campus, as we cherish the few truly legendary sports moments that we are entitled to experience. And that is why we write.

Before I go, I just want to be transparent about a few things. I’m a washed-up senior who is grumpy about leaving and somewhat emotionally unstable due to fear of the unknown. Because of sheer apathy, I haven’t written a single article this semester.

Hopefully I haven’t spoken too much for all of our sportswriters, but I think we value the unique contribution of Harvard sports to our college lives. We all get a kick out of this place when it doesn’t look anything like this place. It’s up to the reader to see it from our angle.

Hope this helped. Go to some games. Peace.

—Staff writer Justin W, White can be reached at justinwalkerwhite@gmail.com.