What Rocks

WASHINGTON D.C. Georgetown University has gone basketball mad. The insanity that gripped the campus after Saturday night's blowout of Kentucky in the NCAA semifinals has continued almost unabated.

The silence that tell over northwest Washington during half-time, when the Hoyas were behind by seven, has been banished. The mood is one of cocky optimism.

That wasn't the case Saturday evening, 20 college juniors and seniors, three cases of Meister Brau, and a color television set packed into a medium sized living room. Nineteen of the students were invoking Sam Bowie's early demise, ideally at the hands of Georgetown (and Cambridge Rindge and Latin's) Pat Ewing.

The Harvard student was a bit disoriented. The Harvard student had not cared about the outcome of a basketball game in almost a month. Sitting in Briggs Athletic Center crying with 28 seconds to go in Cornell's victory over the Crimson, the Harvard student had written off college basketball for the rest of the year.

But here was a team wholly unlike anything the Ivy League has to offer. The Hoyas are fast and notoriously impolite they are also atrocious free-throw shooters. But this is really the only sport Georgetown has.

A year ago, Harvard's hockey team was in this position in the NCAA finals, and life went on.

At Georgetown, hockey is a club sport and tomorrow's classes have been cancelled, reportedly because so many people are in Seattle for tonight's final with Houston.

Watching the semi-final game against Kentucky, the Harvard student became a convert. The 19 other students in the room were remembering with horror, a last-second loss to North Carolina in the 1982 finals.

The Harvard student was trying to remember if any sport--including hockey--has ever turned Harvard students into such maniacs.

"What Rocks!" the Hoya fans shriek, "What Rocks!" This is the literal translation of the school's motto, "Hoya Saxa." The people in Henle 20 with the Harvard student didn't shriek that, or much of anything, until the second half of Saturday's game. What did it was an inbound pass by Gene Smith, accompanied by a grim and an unmistaka- ble nationally televised wink right into the cumeras.

The tide turned. The Georgetown defense turned away 30 of 33 shots in the second stuaza, including six by the evil Sam Bowie.

The Harvard defense, a reasonably good setup, probably wouldn't recognize a pereentage like that. Ewing and even the previously evil Michael Graham, who has a shaved head shaped like a bullet, came away looking like angels.

The depleted ranks on the East Coast did no such thing. They poured into downtown Georgetown and stopped traffic on M. St, their equivalent of Mass Ave., they banged kitchen utensils for a full five minutes after the final buzzer, they set off fireworks, and they decorated many of the campus frees with toilet paper and other paper products.

The hysteria continued for the better part of the next five hours, with groups of drunken people screaming. "Hoya!" and "Sazal" at one another, across rooms, across streets, across the whole campus.

The football team here is the Div, III, and two years ago the lacrosse team went almost winless. But the basketball team played before 38,471 on Saturday and most of the campus shut down.

Hoya Saxa! See you at Briggs