Where Have All the Heroes Gone?

YOU'VE ALL come a year too late. You missed it, or rather you missed them, the most colorful and bizarre members of the Harvard athletic cast. You have missed the unique and individualistic protagonists in the complex and immense Harvard sports drama, who in their brief and transient careers left indelible and marked impressions on Cambridge and the university, who in their successes and failures, in their hopes and reservations, endure, who in their fleeting tenure in the Cambridge university arena strove and groped and struggled with an immense individualism for goals and targets of athletic success. They are gone, lost forever by the transformations of time and succession, lost to the advance of a new generations. By the inopportune and irrevocable timing of your arrival, you will never experience these actors, these role-players, on the Harvard stage. They are lost to you. They are gone.

What can you do to replace Endzone Crone? Crone, three-year quarterback for the Harvard football team, whose exploits on the floor of the massive and cement-columned Harvard Stadium mystified a college generation. Crone.... a man who in a brief and fleeting moment at the end of a Yale football game, simultaneously snatched fame and infamy from the miasma of Harvard athletic history. End-zone Crone, a man fading, pumping, scrambling with an effortless inviolability, zeroing in like a computerized homing pigeon, tightening and tightening the frantic gyre until he could settle to his knees on that corner of the Endzone,clutching a football with a pregnant, held sigh, heaving that sigh, and mumbling, "Here, at least, is a spot that will be forever Crone." Maintaining his hold on that inconsequential little square of Harvard soil, clutching it tenaciously in the continuum of his mind as though it, too, will never die and fade into the memories of a one-time quarterback who went to training camp with the St. Louis Cardinals and was never heard from again, Crone is gone. You missed him. You'll never watch and marvel at the "Zone" or his matchless talents. What are you going to do about Endzone Crone?

You missed Harry too. Bob Harrison, a combustive man who lit the fuse on the longest and most anticipated dud firecracker that Cambridge has known in its athletic history or will ever hope to know. Harry, a man who plotted and schemed in dark corners and at locker room blackboards fro five uninspirational years, hoping at each turn in the road that the solution, the missing link, the lost piece in the jigsaw puzzle would stumble against his feet, and allow at long last his masterplan to reach a productive and manifest fruition. Harry, who was to bring the Big B into vogue in Cambridge, and make the James Browns and Floyd Lewises into superhuman and unquestioned BMOCs. Harry, who hoped to transform the phone booth gymnasium perched atop the ancient. IAB complex like an ascetic's mountain retreat into a hotbed of vituperative energy and activity which would emanate from its fourth-floor generator like a pulsing and life-giving sign. Harry, whose massive and hoopla'ed cherry bomb got somewhere defused, who never knew why the big cracker fizzled, who never could decipher whether it was wet gunpowder, or stale materials, or whether, and most painfully whether, the big firecracker just wasn't much to begin with, just wasn't the kind of night illumination that the Cambridge sky longed for, just wasn't the thing that would be accepted at Harvard and which would make him in a matter of instants a messiah, a come-again-Christ in the urban and academic wilderness. Harry who is now gone. What are you going to do about Harry?

WHAT KIND of Local Line can you conjure? Local Line, three local boys who came to Harvard to make good and for three and a half years made good collectively and individually and for the remaining half year made good in two-thirds effectives as one third beat a hasty retreat from the closing in of academic indescretion. Hynes, Corkey, McManama, rugged as the names imply, a Cambridge-Arlington-Belmont triumvirate which irrepressibly and forcefully peppered opposing netmen with a destructive machine-gun fusillade of goals and attempts, full and deadly, carrying the Crimson ice fortunes to wide and expansive successes, mounting attack after attack, coiling and recoiling with the relentless regularity of a blind and savage dog against an alien cage of restraint, whose cage was a 4 ft. by 6 ft. cubicle squatting at the end of an ice highway, hunched full of glove and stick and defending bulk in which sinew and muscle and the accouterments of a savage and irrepressible game warfare were dedicated to the sole purpose of thwarting repeatedly (and failing repeatedly) the thrusts and advances of the tripartite attack. The Line, molding and fusing local with international into the Harvard experience, blending the blunt and terrible gutteral tones of New England hockey articulation with the suave and impeccable scholastic interests on university living.

The Line, which brought a sample and measure of working class pure sport joy to an often-effete and growingly-decadent intellectual community, which brought the reality of teach tourneys and slapshots to university masses, ennervating and vitalizing bland and sterile intellectual pursuits with a vibrant and brutal vivacity and charm, pumping a living and athletic blood into a skeptical and cynical social atmosphere, fusing the gut response with the intellectual considerations, giving and enlightening more than laboratories and lecture podiums could ever hope to enlighten, bringing the street, the gouge-and-vindicate philosophy of the middle- and lower-class New England street, into the academic world, and holding, hypnotizing, mystifying, and then delighting with pure speed and blunt force any Ivy League audience. What can you do about a Local Line?

Ralph Goldston is gone. Ralph Glodston, a crusty and hardnosed coaching veteran, who punctuated practices with pithy similes and drove his defensive backs through hell and back, who once likened a defensive back's stance to "a dog shitting razor blades," and who inspired with the regularity of a Swiss watch bombastic letters from the Association of Black Athletes charging the football staff with racism. Glodston who resented being considered a "black" first and a coach second, who wanted to get into serious football, who tasted the brand and atmosphere of Cambridge and pulled up roots for the greener and more expansive fields of Colorado where men are men and no pseudo-psychological bullshit is required or even considered, let alone practiced, where you tell a player to eat dirt or nails or manure, and he does it with the meniality of an army private at the feet of an impenetrable and grizzled sergeant-bastard-god-the-father. Ralph Goldston, who was without a doubt the earthiest most graphic and explicit person ever to instruct a Harvard athlete, who found that Cambridge was a nice place to visit but however to begin, to continue, or ever to consider coaching at. Goldston, a man who never fit into the black atmosphere, who never wanted to create, not tried, nor even recognized the "brother" kinship of blacks at Harvard, who bore charges of "Uncle Tom" with a brusque and abrasive stoicism and who had a series of alleged confrontations with prospective black athletes. Ralph Goldston and his similes are gone. What can you do about Ralph Goldston?

DON GAMBRIL is gone. Gambril who brought crewcuts and coaching genius to the IAB pool. Gambril, who pumped life into an antiquated and mediocre swimming program and transformed it into an aquatic tour de force, an invincibility, a flawlessly primed winning machine, who paced the pool deck at the IAB like an impatient and regal lion that knows that he want sand realizes that he has limited time to attain it, and brought a share of an Eastern title to Cambridge in two years, who recruited finagled, persuaded, and cajoled enough high school seniors across the country to come east and who generated and enlivened Harvard swimming. Gambril, whose stature at Harvard was once likened to spreading peanut butter on caviar, who adjusted to the easy-come-easy-go attitude of Harvard athletes by transforming it into a train-hard-and-win philosophy. Gambril, who brought Harvard to the pinnacle of Eastern swimming and then, seeing the restrictions, the limitations, the frustrations of coaching with a limited budget and restricted recruiting powers, who saw than even with the lure of Cambridge and John Kenneth Galbraith he could only entice a limited number of stellar swimmers into the Cambridge-Harvard web, who realized reluctantly but perceptively nonetheless, in two years where others had taken more, that he could never rise above seventh or eight in national swimming ranks if he maintained his Cambridge residence, who foresaw that the prospects for a new and dynamic East Coast swimming program featuring his stocky shoulders and butch cut standing, thrusting out above the crowd, was just too much of an unreality when he wanted waking, sleeping, pacing, instructing wanted above all an immediate and absolute reality which would give his team top billing and unlimited resources, packed up and traded the Crimson for the Crimson Tide, shifting to Alabama, where swimming is the least successful of an intensely athletic campus, but where he was hired to "beat Tennessee," where he would have $90,000 to dabble with in recruiting, where Bear Bryant would give him a pat on the back and water-walking lessons, where swimmers would be expected to swim and damn the rest of the academic ball of wax, where he could negotiate athletic scholarships regardless of financial need, where he could settle back, heave his bulky shoulders, tighten the tendons in his squat neck, and butt his tubbly head into the midst of the national swimming power struggle. Gambril, who having built an instant title team with promises of national statistics and schedules and having roped two consecutive years of standout material, pulled the plug on the program and bid sayonara to New England for the South where sports rank ahead of the men in sheets and hoods even, where he could get the green light for an unlimited construction plan, where his crewcut wouldn't be conspicuous in crowds. Gambril, whop deserted the nucleus of swimmers who followed the lure of his name and reputation into the Cambridge jungle, hoping to somehow fuse the academics and social qualities of Harvard and calibre swimming into a quixotic wonder land where having and eating one's cake would not be impossible or even out of reach. Gambril, who left a brief but indelible brank on the deck at the IAB pool, but who left nonetheless. What can you do about Don Gambril?

These are not the only ones all of you, locked into the controlless starship of time and impotent in chronology, have missed. There are others who probably rate in every individual mother's scrapbook a star or a word or both, but not in a general prospectus of Harvard sports. You missed a lot, yet there is still much to look forward to in the existing Crimson rogues gallery mounted in the athletic forum.

You can still find Edo Marion, on old world fencing master, who single-handedly keeps enough people returning to fencing year after year at Harvard to maintain a competitive program. Edo, who after 25 years at Harvard, still has an accent one could find in the market district of Prague, who talks more and more rapidly with each succeeding year and demands more and more concentration to understand, who is a humanitarian and an artist first and a coach second, who punctuates his nearly-unintelligible stream of consciousness conversations with nostalgic recollections of Europe and his variable and impressive career. Edo who is as close a facsimile of the renaissance man as one can find anywhere west of Vienna, who on isolated, occasions has likened his team to a forest, a leaden silver dollar, and a stick of rotten wood ("a nice appearance outside, but no caloric value when you out it in the fire"), who demands style and elegance above win-lost records, who interrupts crucial matches for summit conference on the strip and winds up after two or three or five minutes of frantic gesticulation and commentary, winds up after failing to find the words to fit the crisis, winds up emphasizing in cool an desperate tones: "You must win!"

EDO MARION, who is as proud of his four fencing Rhodes Scholars as he is of his individual All-Americans, who teaches fencing from the rudiments to subtleties to build his contending teams, who annually unleashes his troops on New York City and relishes good wine and Tchaikovsky as much as fencing, who transports his squad in his personal car with driving skills ranking somewhere between a Boston taxi driver and a blind man, who has become a living tradition, an expectation, a pleasant and different surprise, who fits the kindly old world professor image more than the American coaching stereotype and who amalgamates the two into an unforgettable and wonderfully unique balance. Edo Marion remains.

The nationally-renowned and world-traveled Radcliffe crew remains, too. Emerging like an unwanted bastard child from the shadow of Harry Parker demigod across the Charles, Radcliffe's crew program began in September and ended in August, traversing the entire eastern seaboard and extending during the humid and oppressive summer months from the fetid, unpalatable and wretched Charles River waters to the ancient, mysterious, and tradition-laden hinterland of Europe: Moscow, Bursting from its oblivion-ridden past with the dazzle of a resurrected phoenix, though never resurrected, not even dead because it was born for the first and only time two short and immeasurable years ago, relegated by some to a perennial shadow stretching at the feet of the male rowing oligarchy thriving across the Charles, ridiculed and down-graded during the early and faultering stages of emergence, struggling against the interest and facilities and innate attitudinal bias of a male oriented community, striving and pushing the nose of its program into a male-oriented and dominated sport, gathering and cherishing every scrap and morsel of attention, keeping logs and impossible hours, answering each derogation with a confidence foreshadowing with a wisdom and clairvoyance a perception far beyond its maturity, thrusting itself into the midst of its sport and claiming the only championship in crew that the Harvard community could muster. Radciffe crew outsone, outrowed, outpromoted the rest of the women's competition in the country, encroaching not only onto the Harvard crews' male dominance of the audience in Cambridge, but usurping with an irrepressible and undeniable drive the spotlight and front stage of the entire sport. Radcilffe crew, taking sprints and national championships, with a contingent comprised of freshmen and sophomores, boasting only one rower with previous compeittive experience, stamping the New England east coast crew scene with an idelible and indomitable "R," growing and excelling simultaneously, compressing the years of hard and extensive training into eleven short months, finding at long last after endless and fatiguing hours of aspirations, national limelight and recognition, finding its way on the cover of Parade and onto WideWorld of Sport, out-publicizing the publicity mongers from Harry Parker's den of masculinity, reaching parity from the pure sweat and anguish of eleven months of looking at the same back and tugging the same oar, braving New England winter temperature an July humidity in an inexorable quest for Moscow. Radcliffe crew, which attained Moscow in the nick of time, finishing up one season a month before the next would begin, closing out success after success with the satisfaction of knowing that despite the disparaging commentary over the course of nearly a year of effort and hope, that Radcliffe is the crew story for 1973. Radcliffe crew is back.

HESS YNTEMA is back. Yntema, who in an astounding freshman year, defying the laws of age and experience, shattering the myths of Harvard impotence on a national scale, plunging, stroking, paddling through hour after hour, day after day of endless practices, traipsing in at early hours for morning work and again in afternoons for evening tune-up, zeroing in with the unfaltering regularity of a computerized missle, pursuing the ultimate target, the final goal, the quintessential achievement with the relentlessness of that missle, propelling up and down his 25-yard aquatic domain throughout the year, established himself as the premier swimmer in the Harvard fleet of standout mermen. Yntema, who ignored with an indifferent composure the frenetic excitement of Harvard's drive to a share of the Eastern League swimming title, eyeing with an unvarying determination his singular objective, refusing to be distracted for the vaguest moment by the hullabaloo swirling around him as Harvard achieved swimming parity and superiority for the first time in over a decade, keeping his head when all around him were losing theirs in the excultance of success, refusing to shave down for even the championship meet with Yale, refusing for even the Eastern title events, maintaining that immense and immobile eye, on his goal, never faultering wavering, deviating like an eagle vying for game from the distant and transcending heights of flight, removed yet intent, detached, almost abstract, yet always and forever committed to the achievement of that aim.

Yntema, for whom the regular season and the Eastern title meet were merely warmups for the untimate and true challenge, who set records nearly every time he pulled on his sleek and brief pinstirped trunks and slid into the pool, who maintained a composure and dedication befitting someone far in advance of his years, who never wavered from his supreme and awesome committment, in the culminating and most fulfilling act of his swimming endeavor, came home from the NCAA championships in Tennessee with a third place bronze medal in the 200 yd. butterfly. Yntema, who in nine short months amassed thousands of practice miles and rewrote the record book in astonishing fashion, is back.

The Harvard baseball team is back, too. Last spring the herculean gladiators of the Eastern baseball world, who terrorized the entire Eastern collegiate seaboard with a fatal combination of hitting and invincibility and pitching finesse, who mechanically and mercilessly devoured every other college baseball team from Pennsylvania to New England (after an appetizer of Floridian spring vacation opponents), who scrambled, hustled, clawed and manipulated their way to 35 wins against only three setbacks in the course of the spring schedule, who lacerated each new opponent with the decisive and unalterable impact of a Watergate paper shredder, who achieved, succeeded, mastered, and dominated the Eastern baseball world with a team boasting only nine seniors, with the remainder of the squad coming from the potent and cocky sophomores and juniors, the Harvard baseball team returns intact.

HAVING PROVED that the squad Loyal park has amalgamated into a national calibre unit is the top contingent in the East, having won one trip to the Omaha, Neb., College World Series of Baseball, having successfully and carefully orchestrated the talents of each integer of the whole into a sum success with the diligence, the mastery, the care, that a Beethoven, a Mozart, a Chopin exerted in blending the harmonies and rhythms of their art, having created a smooth and masterful whole from diverse and individual bits and pieces, having molded a swashbuckling and exciting style of diamond exhibition, having succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of a John Harvard Doubleday and brought national acclaim to the bleak and Puritan New England athletic frontier, the Harvard baseball team is back.

You have missed much, and many. Yet there are compensations as you venture, virginal and unsullied, unprejudiced and unbiased, into the Harvard athletic scene. You may not be able to replace the ludicrous, the bizarre, the amazing exploits of Endzone, or Harry, or the Local Line, or Gambril, or Goldston--they are lost to you forever and are mere memories for those of us who have watched, rejoiced, suffered and agonized through their tenure at Harvard--but you still may find the incredibility of an Edo, a Radcliffe crew, an Yntema, a Crimson baseball juggernaut to temper and minimize your loss, to fill the vacuum left by characters that no longer thrive in Cambridge. And most importantly, you may yet produce, in the vague and limitless four years apportioned you here, people and teams that will transcend the memories and ghosts of the departed.HESS YNTEMA