ABC Selects Harvard-Brown Contest for TV

For all the Harvard football faithful that left last Saturday's Princeton game with something just less than frostbite, there is good news. Next Saturday's contest at Brown has been selected by ABC for telecast as the regional game of the week. The network has pushed kickoff time back ten minutes to 1:20 p.m. because of the broadcast.

This is the second time this season that Harvard has been chosen to appear on television, having played Cornell before a TV audience last month. The decision, according to Beeno Book, executive vice president of ABC, came down to Harvard Brown and Cornell-Dartmouth.

Cornell lost its chance for a second exposure on television last weekend by losing to the Bruins 17-7. The Big Red's loss coupled with Harvard's win over Princeton makes this confrontation in Providence, R.I., the top Ivy League game of the week. Brown, usually one of the cellar-dwellers in the league, has a very real shot at a share of the title this year.

This will be the first time since 1958, the last year the Bruins had a winning season, that Brown has been in a televised game, "We try to do so many Ivy games a year," Cook said, "and we want to get teams that we haven't televised too often."

With the momentum gained from last weekend's upset, the Bruins should provide the fans with a hard-fought contest. "They'll probably beat you," Cook said. "They always catch you at the right time--between Princeton and Yale."

The Harvard band will also get another crack at displaying its talents for the television audience even though ABC's coverage of the half time program at Ithaca did not exactly please the musicians. "It sucked" was the description from Shep Rainie, '74, manager of the Band.

"They put most of the show on, for the first time, which was good," Rainie elaborated, "but they put this inane commentary from the booth along with it. It was not what you would call excellent coverage."

Rainie hopes for better coverage this time, but he's not sure whether they'll get it. "ABC did ask for details of the show, so there is a chance we'll get on at halftime," he said.