Cavanagh Speaks Softly, Carries Big Stick

Joe Cavanagh ’71 laughs as he recalls questioning his son Tom after each of the boy’s youth hockey games.

“How’d you do?” Joe would ask Tom, the fifth of a nine-child brood. Joe was, of course, looking for goals and assists. “But he really couldn’t remember,” Joe says.

All young Tom could remember was which team had won and which had lost. It’s not so different from what you’ll get if you ask Tom today.

Flash forward 15 years, and you’ll find him a senior at Harvard, the assistant captain of the No. 9 Crimson, the team’s leading scorer and its most complete two-way skater to take the ice each night.

But it’s just about impossible to get that information out of him.

“He’s naturally inclined that way,” Joe says.

And if you want to know why, you need look no further than to Joe himself.

The elder Cavanagh was a three-time All-American for Harvard and one of the program’s most beloved skaters. Not that Joe, now a lawyer in Warwick, R.I., would ever tell you that, either.

“I suppose,” Joe says, “in the house, we never really talked about athletic accomplishments or things like that, because there are a lot of things that are more important.

“I think [Tom] just learned from that.”

In fact, Tom took it to heart. It’s nearly impossible to get the centerman waxing poetic about anything but the team. Team accomplishments. Team strengths. Team weaknesses. Team objectives.

Team, team, team.

“From a very young age,” Joe says, “the one part about Tom that I always thought stood out was that all he cared about was how the team did, and that was when he was six or seven. And it’s always been the same since.”

Take, for example, this fact: entering his senior year, the younger Cavanagh had never gone more than three games without a point.

Now, as his final season with the Crimson nears its end, Tom has 110 points to his name, and this despite remaining consistently marked by other teams.

“The points thing doesn’t really matter,” Tom says. “No, it doesn’t at all. Ultimately, all that matters is that your team scores more than the other team.”

Your team, not you. Typical jock-talk, right? But in Tom Cavanagh’s case, the words are, by all accounts, genuine.

According to Mark Mazzoleni, Harvard’s coach from 1999 to 2004 and the man responsible for recruiting Cavanagh, “It was very evident from the first time we dealt with him that it wasn’t about him. It was about the team.”

“He’s not a kid about individual goals,” Mazzoleni adds. “It’s all about the team achieving success, and that came out very loud and clear the first time we met him.”

Or you could go back even further, perhaps, and ask Mike Gaffney, Cavanagh’s coach at Toll Gate High School in Warwick. He will tell you that Tom’s ethic has not changed on bit.

“His approach to the game and his team play—when your best player does that, it kind of rubs off on the other guys,” Gaffney says. “We had other good players, but I think that his approach to the game and team-play [were unique].”

“He made our job [as coaches] kind of easy,” Gaffney adds. “He maybe didn’t know that at the time, but that’s not always the case.”

Of course, Cavanagh’s play didn’t hurt either. He was a Rhode Island All-State First Team pick his last two years at Toll Gate, leading the league in scoring both times. And in his postgraduate year at Philips Exeter, Tom set the single-season scoring record of 42 goals that still stands today.

The only challenger to that record was Cavanagh’s teammate Eddie Caron, who accumulated 30 goals during the first half of that season—“in large part due to Tommy’s playmaking,” says Exeter coach Dana Barbin—but fell ill and missed the second half.

But while Cavanagh transitioned into the college game seamlessly, notching 25 points as a rookie, his greatest asset still remains his least flashy.

“He is absolutely committed to playing defense,” says Mazzoleni, “and that’s one of the things that impressed me so much in the three years I coached Tom. He’s just a very, very high-end, two-way player.”

It’s not something the casual fan will notice the way he will, say, a hat trick, and thus, it’s not something for which the casual fan will always cheer.

But that’s really not what Cavanagh wants, anyway.

Describing his own father, Tom mentions neither Joe’s Walter Brown award nor his status as a three-time All-American, All-East, All-Ivy, and All-New England selection.

Instead, Tom says, “I get the feeling he was the complete player, that he played both sides of the ice very well, and that he had a really, really good work ethic.”

“Growing up, what he stressed is to be that complete player, and [to have] that work ethic,” Tom adds. “ I’d like to think I developed some of that from him.”

Physical and fearless on the ice, Tom is Harvard’s go-to face-off guy. And he is the only active senior to skate in every possible career contest—all 128 to date.

“It’s good luck,” Tom says. “Honestly, I think I’ve been lucky. Aside from when I broke my arm when I was about 14, I’ve never had a real, serious injury.

“Even with the knee thing,” he adds, alluding to the hyper-extended joint with which he skated earlier this season. “It wasn’t that big of an injury. So I don’t think it’s that I’ve played through things. It’s that I’ve been lucky not to get injured.”

What else did you expect him to say, really?

Nearly everyone refers to Cavanagh as a “quiet leader,” a man of few words, and it’s unlikely that he’ll waste them bragging about himself.

“When he does open his mouth,” says Tyler Kolarik ‘04, Cavanagh’s Harvard teammate for three years, “Tommy’s a good guy, a great kid.”

It’s just that Cavanagh doesn’t open his mouth that often.

“People say I’m pretty quiet,” he admits, laughing. “And that always been the way I’ve been. I don’t know why.”

But goaltender Dov Grumet-Morris, Tom’s classmate, has a theory.

“He doesn’t have to [talk a lot],” Grumet-Morris says. “He knows he’s that good, and he doesn’t need to say it.”

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.