Disaster at the IAB

Basketball co-captain Bob Hooft sat slumped on a bench in the funeral parlor of a post-game lockerroom at the IAB last night, when all of a sudden an idea came into his head.

"Watch this," Hooft said, spinning the wheel on his combination lock. "Nineteen,...28..." and the lock popped open.

It was one of the few times all night that a Crimson cager had done anything right, as the stumbling, reeling Harvard basketball team once more was unable to find the combination to victory.

For the record, last night's 81-61 loss to Northeastern was Harvard's 12th straight, putting the squad within six games of the records for consecutive losses (18, in 1948-49) and for losses in a season (20, in 1947-48 and 1948-49).

More to the point, the game was a humiliation--the 12th consecutive episode of a terrifying recurring nightmare. The gentlemen from Huntington Ave. made winning a college basketball game look like a piece of cake, scoring at will in the second half, then laughing and slapping five like a bunch of giddy playground kids.

"I've never seen a turnaround like that," emotionally drained coach Frank McLaughlin said afterward, referring to the 40-10 spurt Northeastern reeled off in the first 15 minutes of the second half. "I don't know what the answer is."

But with a campus that is beginning to expect something better than the brand of losing basketball that's been seen around here the past three seasons, answers are what is demanded. Unfortunately, it's next to impossible to pin-point what the answers are.

One answer would be an improved inside game, although the prospects for improvement seem dim. No offense to freshman center Dave Coatsworth--who's doing the best job one could expect in a high-pressure situation--but the Crimson simply has failed to do much inside on offense.

Northeastern played a zone defense for all but the first few minutes of last night's game, but with no big man working any openings underneath, point guard Glenn Fine and the rest of the outside shooters found themselves playing "bomb-and-pray" for much of the evening.

Another answer would be improved coaching. Francis Xavier McLaughlin may be the friendliest guy you'd ever want to meet, and he may be a virtuoso recruiter, but he lacks the benchi savvy needed to pull a team like this out of its catatonic state.

Many of McLaughlin's players lack confidence in him as a strategist, and the second-year coach seemed at a total loss during last night's contest (although, to be fair, the game may have been uncoachable). Except for a couple of crisp first-half fast breaks and one perfectly executed Fine-to-Don Fleming alley oop, the Crimson players appeared to lack both confidence and a sense of what their roles were.

"I don't know any answers," McLaughlin said afterward. "We're gonna keep working on it."

Fine, the senior co-captain and recently-named Rhodes Scholar, was at a loss for words after the game. "We just weren't aggressive in the second half." Fine said. "We stopped doing our assignments. I don't know what to say."

Hooft, the other co-captain and the team's leading scorer, was equally frustrated. "I've never seen a season like this," Hooft said. "This whole season has been bizarre. Weird things happen. It's something different every night."

Maybe after this break [the Crimson plays next February 2, against Cornell] we can get it all together," Hooft continued.

But when things become so twisted that an exam break looms as the high point of a season, something has gone wrong. Very, very wrong.

'I don't know," Hooft mumbled. "Just put me on a spaceship."