A Harvard Hoop Season; Images and Reflections

Sportswriters have varying motivations for practicing their craft. Love of sport, love of writing, love of creativity. A perverse desire to violate Crimson form. Personally, I write for shot glasses, college shot glasses.

Or rather, I used to write for shot glasses, before the last basketball season. I often travel with the teams I cover, but if I already had the shot glass, I didn't make the trip. All that stopped with the 1980-81 Crimson basketball team.

I knew I liked basketball, but ever since Herb Brown got sacked as coach of the Detroit Pistons, I hadn't watched much. All that changed last season, too.

I spent a lot of time with the team and enjoyed myself immensely. In short, even if I already had the shot glass, I made the trip. A few scenes stand out from over the course of the long season; a season which the Crimson finished at 16-10, the best record in a decade. Here are some of those pictures:

The Princeton Game, February 27: A filled, steamy IAB. Fans in the weight room above the floor, hundreds more ringing the court, jostling for space where only a lone photographer had ranged before. All 2000 of them--all the IAB can hold--were on their feet down the frenzied stretch, as the Crimson fought back from a ten-point deficit to put the game into overtime.

They all sat back when the Tigers' Steve Mills hit two free throws to put Princeton up by two, 54-52, with four seconds left in the extra period. Harvard lost the game, sure, but a lot of people discovered Harvard basketball.

Monroe Trout on the boards: At 6 ft. 8 in., 205 pounds, he doesn't quite fit the role of the enforcer, but you can tell that's what he is destined to become. When he's on his game, he can dominate the inside at both ends of the court. Trout led all Crimson rebounders with a 5.9 rebounds-per-game average.

Moving, jostling inside, the freshman is a physical player, crashing the boards and picking up more than his share of points on offensive rebounds. With Joe Carrabino, they formed the best rookie combination in the Ivy League, perhaps in all of the east. His pivot is a thing of beauty. Speaking of Carrabino, rumor has it (wink, wink) that the New England basketball coaches voted him the best rookie in Division I.

Derek Bok: Frank McLaughlin raves about the support President Bok gives to the Harvard basketball program, enthusiasm that was easily evident at several home games this year.

With less than 10 seconds left in the overtime period in the Cornell game on January 31, with the score deadlocked at 69, the Crimson was still looking for the last shot but couldn't get the ball inside. Tommy Mannix--perhaps the best pure shooter in the Ivies--then took charge, unloading a perfect 20-ft. jumper to give the Crimson a 71-69 win.

In one of the timeless images that defined Harvard basketball this season, Bok bounded out of his perch in the top row of the bleechers, ran out onto the court, and embraced Mannix.

The bus trips: Late night bus trips illustrate character and personality; they show the psychology of a team. And when you're travelling all night from Cornell, things show up as they really are. Tom Clarke, a rugged guard who saw action mostly in garbage-time at the end of run-away games, had to get the bus driver back on track when the team got lost in the middle of New York's Spanish Harlem.

By 3 a.m., silence settled over the bus. McLaughlin sat close to the front, thinking and speaking softly to assistant coach Terry O'Connor. Soon both were asleep. Further back, point guard Calvin Dixon, studied quietly, making casual conversation with Robert Taylor, who sat across the aisle. Donald Fleming had two books in his lap, an economics text and a well-worn copy of the Holy Bible.

Past the Plutnickis and Mitchells, in the facing seats at the back of the bus, Mark Harris and Tom Clarke held court, providing whatever semblance of rowdiness there is on this team. But this is a quiet team, pensive, maybe. It is a team of pleasant, articulate individuals. That's why they were so much fun to cover.

Other things come to mind, too, when I think about the season. Things like Mark Harris taking charge, and turning around the momentum of a game. Or even the memory of Kirkland House's Steve Larkin winning the Bermuda Shoot.

I don't however, think much about shot glasses.