Saved by the Bell: Princeton Fans Take Sports More Seriously

PRINCETON, N.J.—John McPhee wrote a book about Bill Bradley while he was the nation’s best basketball player. In A Sense of Where You Are, McPhee examined virtually every aspect of the eventual Hall of Famer and U.S. Senator’s game and life.

McPhee measured the range of the Princeton forward’s peripheral vision—both horizontal and vertical—and found it to be vastly wider than average. He detailed the five distinct motions in Bradley’s hook shot. He crafted an in-depth biographical sketch of someone who spent time working for the Orange Key Society and doing thesis research. Imagine a hundred-page volume about the basketball player or Crimson Key Society member in your entryway and the thought seems all the more astounding.

But what was most striking about McPhee’s book was that the attention the author showered upon Bradley seemed justified. Rumors of the next great basketball star filled Princeton’s Dillon Gymnasium beyond capacity game after game when Bradley was a freshman, and McPhee wrote lustily of the “undergraduates who massed to praise Allah” after the star returned from dominating the NCAA Tournament. Bradley sold out Madison Square Garden and filled seats just for his warm-ups. And so on. Fan reaction suggested that McPhee’s investment of energies made perfect sense.

Obviously, reactions to Ivy League athletics are somewhat different now. The arrival of freshman women’s hockey star Julie Chu at Bright Ice—already an Olympic medalist—won’t spark quite the same fervor. James Blake, Class of 2001, went largely unknown to many of his classmates until they happened to see him on ESPN.

And here we get to the point. This isn’t a plea for folks who never watch SportsCenter to get out to the games and cheer for the football team, a refrain that has been repeated on these pages ad nauseum (this columnist is among the guilty). Instead, the question is posed to those people who ordinarily would be attracted to college sports, those who would go to games if they went to their state schools or Stanford or Duke: Do you know what you’re missing?

The great tragedy of non-attendance in Harvard sports lies in the would-be fans who don’t appreciate what’s available. Ivy League athletics are just a notch above Pee-Wee athletics in the minds of would-be Harvard fans who grow up watching Notre Dame football and Duke hoops.

Two weeks ago, Sports Illustrated came out with its ranking of the best athletic schools in the country. Harvard came in 41st—the highest Ivy League program and, perhaps more tellingly, the highest rank awarded a school without a Division I-A football program. Among the schools listed behind Harvard were Kentucky, Rice, Boston College and Syracuse.

Also lagging behind was Princeton, the second-highest Ivy school at No. 56, a perennial national contender in lacrosse and squash and a school whose men’s basketball team makes the NCAAs every other year.

Objective observers would probably rate both programs at or near the top of the Ivy League. But Princeton’s fans seem infinitely more appreciative of their teams.

Saturday night’s women’s soccer game was one example. The seats were close to filled, largely with people who had attended that day’s football, field hockey and men’s soccer games. When Matt Douglas, the senior who had scored the game winner in men’s soccer showed up, Princeton senior Joe Tursi screamed, “It’s the guy who scored the game-winning goal!” A warm ovation followed.

Despite cutting into the beginning of the school’s fall break, the game was infinitely better attended than the previous year’s H-P contest in Cambridge. Maybe that was because the fans knew the gravity of the situation—when the Crimson’s Sara Sedgwick ended it in double overtime, the crowd reacted with the stunned, knowing silence that should prevail when a 12-0-0 team loses. Throughout the battle, people had asked, “Why aren’t we winning? We’re ranked in the teens, we’re mad good. Watch out for No. 23—she’s won our last three games.”

Call it suspending disbelief, but Princeton fans are somehow better able to take their sports seriously.

At Harvard, each sport will get, at most, one amazing turnout each season. People who claim to like hockey will stay away from Bright Ice (or stroll in midway through an intense ECAC game), and “diehard” NCAA fans will ignore Harvard opponents until they become fashionable pool picks in March. The fans who watch the late rounds of the NFL Draft won’t recognize Jamil Soriano if and when he’s picked—and football is one of the sports that draws relatively well.

Harvard sports need not become the pedestal that Bradley enjoyed at Princeton in the sixties. Students here have freed slaves, starred in movies and written novels. Students at other schools are Maurice Clarett and Ken Dorsey. There is no need for Harvard undergrads to “mass around and praise” Sara Sedgwick.

But given Harvard’s wealth of genuine sports fans—people who sacrifice grades for the baseball playoffs and lament lack of SportsCenter in dorms—the empty seats that suggest that Harvard sports aren’t “the real thing” to their fans are a shame.

Maybe if we’d grown up watching Harvard in the opening round of the NCAAs instead of Princeton, the very phrase “Harvard sports”would be more palatable. I don’t know.

But we have all-region, all-American and all-world athletes at our disposal in Ivy League athletes, largely forgotten by fans who prefer to watch “bigtime” college sports. Chu will be overlooked by NHL hockey fans just as Blake was by tennis fans.

Sports Illustrated has recognized that Ivy League sports are legit. Not Stanford legit, not Texas legit, not UCLA legit. Nowhere near that legit. But legit.

Why haven’t we?

—Staff writer Martin S. Bell can be reached at msbell@fas.harvard.edu.