Sound Minds and Sound Bodies

In the weight room at the Indoor Track and Tennis facility on the Business School side of the Charles, funny stories about James Q. Wilson abound. Supervisory personnel claim that the Shattuck Profesor of Government tries to press "way too much weight" for his strength on the Nautilus machines. They say he uses both arms when he should only use one.

Not many Harvard professors use the Nautilus, maybe because they don't want weight room attendants to laugh, maybe because--as Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France Stanley Hoffman points out--"it's hard to park at the ITT." But a number of faculty members pursue physical fitness in other ways.

An informal poll suggests that squash and jogging are the faculty favorites. History Professors John Brewere and Simon M. Schama, Britons both and buddies from their Cambridge University salad days, play squash together. Schama says of his colleague. "He is very hard pressed to win, and at crucial moments he goes bounding round the court uttering all manner of dire expletive undeleted. Whereas I, of course, am too naturally shy and retiring to do any such thing."

Pressed for comments about the game. Schama demurs, saying. "I never talk to The Crimson" and "There is nothing interesting about squash." He does take time to explain the difference between English and American styles. "Americans play sissy squash: they play with a fast ball so they don't have to run around. They can play be standing stil. The fastest American ball is about twice as fast as your average English ball. It just bounces off the walls and comes back to where you are. The slower the ball, the more you have to run."

Brewer doesn't agree with Schama's assessment of squash American-style. "He just needed an excuse for why he lost every time." Unlike Schama. Brewer plays for fun, not health. "I don't believe in keeping in shape--the rise of Puritanism is what that's all about. It's disgusting. Certainly I don't play to get fit; the idea is revolting. It's much more important to be a sybarite than to pursue physical fitness."

Winthrop Professor of History Stephan Thernstrom agree with Brewer that "English squash isn't really harder. It's a bigger court, as well as a slower ball, and certainly it is a game of greater finesse. But certainly in American squash you can run around." Thernstrom, who is often sighted hastening from lectures with two rackets in hand, is a convert from jogging, which he quit because, as he says. "I lack the moral stamina to make myself do it. It's boring."

Gregory J. Nagy, protessor of Greek and Latin, couldn't disagree more. "I find it wonderful to blank out, and I don't mind running in the same place, over and over and over again. It's a funny sort of being on hold."

History Professor Steven E. Ozmeni agrees with Nagy's reference to the calming effects of jogging. Ozmeni says. "When you sit around on your fanny all day, as most serious scholars do, writing, you build up a lot of tensions and frustrations and energies. Also I run so I can eat as much ice cream as I like. You have to feel better, you have to look better, you have to be more friendly and sociable if you do some kind of exercise. Athletes are the friendliest people, right?"

Ozmeni has another, more singular, reason for running: He likes going out in "those reflecting clothes which my wife insists I wear lest she be widowed. That's part of the fun, isn't it, wearing all that strange gear. It's like being part of a carnival or festival or something." He especially enjoys blinking his flashlight at oncoming cars to remind drivers to dim their headlights.

Conant University Professor John Rawls also runs, but he doesn't like to talk about it. "I jog very slowly. I'm a real amateur. I'm getting along in years, you know. I find I enjoy it now, but I only started because we had a dog who needed to be taken out on walks. Also I wanted to do things with my children, who were growing up, and I found I was getting decrepit too fast."

Rawls's favorite story about his athletic pursuits involves a rumor that started 20 years ago and is still active: that he was once a member of the New York Yankees. "I wasn't, really, ever a player. It's only a rumor. When I belonged to Leverett House the Junior Common Room challenged the Senior Common Room to a game. I played for the Senior Common Room, and I had a good day. I guess, and the Senior Common Room beat the Junior Common Room for the first time.

"At the end of the year there was a Senior Common Room dinner, and the master was talking about all sorts of things, all kinds of odds and ends, and he said that he heard the Senior Common Room had won because some ringer had played for the team that day. And I said as a joke. 'Oh, come on, tell them I used to play for the Yankees,' and that's how the rumor got started, I guess."

The most serious runner on the Faculty is probably History Professor Charles S. Maier. A couple of months ago he finished the 26.2 miles of the New York Marathon in three hours 46 minutes (winning time: two hours nine minutes). While he was training for the big event he ran 50 miles every week around his Fresh Pond home or near the Charles. "Now that the light has changed," he says, "it's harder to run," so he has cut back to 30 miles weekly.

But Maier doesn't like to talk about his favorite sport. "I'm sort of bashful about running, because there are so many fantastic athletes on the Faculty. The one's of us who run, we're the ones who aren't very good at competitive sports."

Associate Professor of Economics and Population Rober C. Repetto would probably agree with Maier. "Running is better than nothing, but basically it's boring." He prefers touch football, tennis, squash, skiing--and especially basketball. "I love it. I was captain of the basketball team as an undergraduate, and now they can't get me out of the IAB. It's competitive, it's a team sport, it's everything great. I had to give it up for a couple of years when I was in Bangladesh, though. They're all so teeny, it was unfair."

John Womack, Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, is another basketball buff. Before he let the game go one and a half years ago, he used to play at lunchtime with Repetto, who reminisces. "John is not particularly athletic, but he is aggressive." Womack quit the game during his leave because, he says. "I didn't want to spend the time when all my time was my own. Now I don't have the time, literally, to do it in the middle of the day. And you can't play in the morning, and by night you're too tired. "He plans to take it up again in the spring."

English Professor Robert I. Brustein swears by tennis. "Certainly I play to keep in shape, but tennis doesn't really strengthen that many muscles--just some muscles in the legs. I play more for rhythm, and for timing, and simply for the choreography of the game, which I find enchanting. It keeps you under the illusion that you're still young."

Philip A. Kuhn, professor of History and of East Asian Civilizations and Languages, sees physical endeavor as an alternative to total decay." Unlike many of his colleagues, though, he is unwilling to exercise in a boring or repetitive manner. He prefers to go cross-country sking in New Hampshire's White Mountains, where he owns a cabin. "Anybody who lives in New England and doesn't get out to the country really is missing a great deal. The thrill of gliding through the forest on noiseless skis is hard to beat."

Brendan A. Maher, professor of the Psychology of Personality, waves equally enthusiastic about cross-country skiing. He and his wife learned the sport in Norway during his sabbatical. "It's testimony to my extraordinary ignorance of sking that I didn't even know there were two kinds. Now I am frightened by downhill skiing. When we were in Oslo I went up to the top of the Holmenkollen ski jump, the Olympic ski jump ther, and I could not imagine why people would launch themselves off the top of that thing voluntarily. I decided I would stick to cross-country."

Hoffmann says he doesn't enjoy swimming in cold weather or in swimming pools. "Still, as they haven't quite fixed up the Charles yet, and as Cambridge tends to get chilly in winter, I use the pool." Which pool? "Well, a pool is a pool, and chlorine is chlorine," but he prefers the IAB facilities because he can't park on the other side of the river, and "anyway. Blodgett is like the Paris subway at seven o'clock p.m."

But Hoffmann doesn't need formal exercise, he claims. "Lecturing is a very good way of keeping in shape. It is a huge expense of energy, and preparing for lectures is something that makes one extremely anxious, so that has some effect on one's physical form. I find that I am one of those people who can eat like a horse and never gain weight." What he really likes to do is walk. "I find that I get ideas when I walk."

Another avowed walker is Edward O. Wilson, Baird Professor of Science. "I used to run a great deal, three to six miles every day, but now I depend mostly on brisk walks. I just didn't have the time it took to run--an hour out of every day. And I find walking keeps me in pretty good shape. The nice thing about it is I can often work it into just walking around Harvard, from the Science Center to the Square."

Professor of Government Jorge I. Dominguez walks for a different reason. "I have never liked sports, and I don't like them now. My only sport is walking, and I only do that when I need to catch the bus."

Sheldon Glashow, Higgins Professor of Physics, comments even more pithily. "I'm not in shape. And you can quote me on that."