The Good and Bad

When an athlete is asked about personal accomplishments, the response is often something similar to, "Individual awards or accomplishments are nice, but that's not what we're about. We're a team."

The Harvard men's basketball team was a perfect example of this axiom this week. Sophomore Ralph James was named Ivy League Player of the Week the same weekend that the Crimson suffered its most devastating loss of the year.

James scored 49 points in Harvard's 83-81 win over Yale and 80-70 loss to Brown. The 6-ft., 4-in. guard was 18-for-33 from the field in the two games, playing his best basketball in an otherwise very disappointing season.

James, who is averaging 14.2 points per game, is shooting only 41 percent from the field and 67 percent from the foul line this season. He is second on the team in rebounding, pulling down 5.2 caroms per game.

But while James, last year's Ivy League Rookie of the Year, was breaking out of his sophomore slump, Harvard was not so lucky. The Crimson found itself behind early in both Ivy games and were able to come back and win only the Yale game. Against Brown, James' five three-pointers in the second half sparked a Crimson comeback, which cut a 13-point halftime lead to one point, 58-57, with seven minutes remaining in the game. But another Brown run iced the upset.

Harvard's loss to the last-place Bruins dropped the Crimson two-and-one-half games behind Princeton and two games behind Dartmouth in the Ivy standings.

Moving Up the Charts: Co-Captain Mike Gielen's 14-point effort against Duke Tuesday pushed him past Gary Borchard '62 into 10th place on the all-time Harvard scoring list. Gielen currently has 1041 points and needs to score 34 more points in his last six games to move past Bill Dennis '54.

Gielen was a high school teammate of Duke's All-America forward, Danny Ferry.

"He's the most knowledgeable basketball player I've ever played with or against," Gielen said. "He always knows where to be in a game."

I'm Right Behind You, Bud: Harvard's other co-captain and Gielen's Kirkland House roommate, Neil Phillips, scored seven points against Duke, pushing his career total to 985 points.

When the 6-ft., 5-in. forward scores 16 more points (probably Friday against Cornell or Saturday against Columbia), he will become the 14th Crimson basketball player to join the 1000-point club.

Phillips' 10.3 points per game ranks him fourth on the team behind Gielen (15.0), James (14.2) and Ron Mitchell (12.0).