Crimson Harriers Lose To Navy But Win Ivies

BRONX, N.Y., Friday, November 4--The Harvard cross-country team's impressive late season surge carried it to second place behind Navy in the Heptagonal Championship at Van Cortlandt Park here today. Navy had five finishers among the first 13, including winner Buzz Lawlor, in a convincing show of superiority. But Harvard coach Bill McCurdy and his team had plenty to gloat about:

Almost to a man, they ran their best races; their finish ahead of the other seven Ivy schools made them the 1966 Ivy League Champions. They avenged their early-season loss to Brown, which finished fourth. And Doug Hardin, Bob Stempson, Captain Jim Baker, and Jim Smith earned four of the twelve positions on the All-Ivy team.

In Lawlor, a 4:10 miler from the Naval Academy, Hardin finally met his match. The Crimson sophomore stayed on the Annapolis senior's shoulder for the first three and a half miles. Then, when the front-running pair hit the hills the second time around the course, Lawlor pulled away to win by a 13 second margin.

To beat Hardin, Lawlor had to obliterate ate the Heptagonal record of 25:03 set by Harvard's Welt Hewlett over the five mile course in 1964. Hardin's 25:01 clocking also beat the old record and was 50 seconds better than his time here in the triangular meet with Columbia and Penn last month.

Equally outstanding as Hardin's second place were Stempson's fifth place finish and Baker's tenth. Stempson passed three men on the steep hill near the four-mile mark and turned on a strong kick in the last 50 yards to register a 25:48 clocking, behind only Lawlor, Hardin, Navy's Jim Dare, and Columbia's Bennett Flax.

Smith, who set the early pace with a 4:32 split for the first mile, weakened at the end but held on for 15th, in 26:16. Joe Ryan knocked 56 seconds off his previous time here to finish 22nd in 26:39, rounding out the Crimson scoring.

The final score shows Navy with 37 points (with the first five of its seven entrants coming in 1-3-9-11 and 13) and Harvard with 54. Army was a distant third at 84, and the Ivies paraded out of sight from there: Brown 125, Yale 138, Princeton 140, Columbia 173, Penn 182, Dartmouth 246, and Cornell 268.