Publicity, Ignorance & Sports Reporting

Down at Yale's Ray Tompkins House, Charley Loftus does a yeoman's job. He mimeographs more publicity about the Eli swimming team than most information offices spread on all sports in toto. This is all very good only for Yale, however. Because Loftus' rightful line is Blue, and because city sports editors have more important concerns than collegiate dualmeet swimming, practically no one cares to doubt or work over Yale sports information releases, and the Eli bombardment hits the press one-sidedly.

The result, especially when unanswered by the more lethargic publicity offices of rival institutions, is uninformation approaching misinformation on the part of sportswriters. They in turn take out their errors on the losing athletes. Such was the case with the Harvard-Yale swimming meet last Saturday at New Haven.

Loftus announced to the sports world before the contest that Harvard was going to snap Yale's streak of 141 consecutive victories. He had three reasons for his prediction: 1) a close meet is naturally more exciting than a runaway and will therefore get more publicity; 2) if Yale did lose, it would not look bad in doing so because the loss was "predicted"; 3) if Yale won, as anyone who follows swimming knew it would, the Blue would look even better than its winning position merited because it was an "underdog."

Sports desks got the releases, which told about the crack performers on the Crimson team and about the great Rex Aubrey of Yale being sick. Harvard, which had forced the meet down to the last event a year ago and come so close to winning, was going to take the Blue this time, Loftus feared.

The press swallowed the theory. The New York Herald Tribune and even the Christian Science Monitor accepted and adopted the Loftus line to a degree in pre-game articles. Only one sportswriter in the area, George Carens of the Boston Traveler, took the trouble to contact the Crimson swimming coach on the matter.

Hal Ulen would have told all inquirers what he told anyone else who asked: Yale had a roster of 61 swimmers; Harvard had 26. One third of Yale's swimmers were rated All-American or some equivalent as scholastic competitors; Harvard's roster contains four such men. When a team starts with such an advantage--almost as many proven All-Americans as the opposition has total squad members--that team has a tremendous edge merely in depth, no matter how great a coach Ulen is or how amazingly his swimmers develop.

Ulen told anyone who asked that his team couldn't possibly score more than 34 points, which would mean a 50-34 loss at best. This was clear to him from what he knew of his team and its times compared to Yale's. Harvard had one of the East's greatest teams ever, but Yale was stupendous. Therefore Harvard was the second-greatest.

But only one metropolitan paper ever discovered this. The height of the general misinformation occurred in the usually conscientious and well-informed New York Times. Its post-game report under the by-line of Allison Danzig took his ignorance out on the Harvard swimmers. Danzig said they failed when actually no losing team has ever done so well.

Because Danzig doesn't know swimming, or knew only what Loftus fed him, he wrote with a sneer, as if Harvard had been upset. He panned Pete Macky, Dave Hawkins, and Chouteau Dyer, barely recognized Jim Jorgensen's wide-margin records which prove his Eastern leadership and rank him among the top four in the country, and left out Gus Johnson completely. He may have been limited in space, but his greater limitation in knowledge proved more severe as he harshly and unfairly stated the Crimson was bad.

Macky swam the 220 for the first time in his life in a meet, forced Yale's Captain John Phair and Ray Ellison to come from behind to place second and third--the latter caught up only on the last turn, and recorded the excellent time of 2:13.5. That clocking ranks with the top six in the East, but with it, though he forced the Yale entries to swim faster than they ever had before and nearly pulled off a surprise third that no one expected, Macky was panned by Danzig.

Johnson finished fourth in the 50, but in doing so, he reached the best time of his life, 23 seconds flat. This clocking would have placed him fourth in the National Intercollegiates last spring, but to Danzig it wasn't worthy of note.

Dyer tied his own all-time Harvard record in the 50 with a 22.4, and beat his own mark for the 100 with a 49.7. He was so close to Yale's Sandy Gideonse, who took second, that no watch could distinguish between them. Yet because Aubrey was magnificent and because the judges awarded second place to Gideonse in both races, Danzig termed Dyer a poor third. Dyer never swam both races so fast in one afternoon in his life. Nor have more than two currently swimming humans. To be the third fastest sprinter around is not enough for Danzig.

That Hawkins exceeded his Crimson record for the breaststroke and pushed Deed Hardin of Yale to a new individual medley mark also escaped Danzig's notice.

Danzig's ignorance of his subject last Saturday appeared finally in his coverage of the relay events. He said the Crimson trend toward defeat started when it lost the opening medley relay. He didn't know enough about Crimson swimming to realize that Ulen entered his second medley team in order to save his best three men for later events.

Yale's Loftus did some wrong in setting up this situation; he overdid his job. Henry Johnston of the Harvard sports publicity office may be charged with contributory negligence in the matter, for no sportswriter at New Haven ever received a word from him on the state of things.

As for Danzig, he is blameable not for being ignorant, but for writing up a meet in that condition. He never contacted Ulen, before or after the meet. He foisted his ignorance off on the Crimson swimmers, charging them with falling short when they exceeded all they had done before. For this reason, Danzig should never have written his article. That he made a fool of himself to the informed is inconsequential. That he panned some guys who swam their hearts out and succeeded eminently matters very much