THE MALCOM X-FACTOR: Unholy Mess At Holy Cross

It was just one more in a long line of transgressions.

Harvard coach Tim Murphy stood with a more menacing look than I’d ever seen on his face, and a remark he made about wanting to “see the officials” was heard as a small crowd began to form around the Crimson football team. The players stood in a small group, fresh off their crushing 31-28 last second loss at Holy Cross. They were dejected, downtrodden. They, like Murphy, were angry.

In part because they lost, and, surely, in part because of the way they lost—on a 40-yard touchdown pass to the corner of the endzone with 19 seconds to play in the game. But Murphy and his players were also upset for another reason. A reason that should never happen, not even on the road, and not against a school you’ve play almost every year for nearly three decades.

They were upset because, well...they got locked out.

You might be asking, what’s the big deal? Yes, Crusader officials finally did get someone to unlock the locker room, but it wasn’t over then. Once the door was open, it became abundantly clear that there was no way that the whole team would fit inside. That left a good quarter of the team literally sitting and waiting while their teammates showered. Once a few guys left, another few trickled in. As my fellow football writer pointed out, it’s not as if the Harvard football team is any bigger than the Holy Cross squad. No, it was almost as if the Crusader-hired engineers designed the visiting locker room to be far too small for the visiting team on purpose.

Was it simply an architectural snafu? Perhaps the engineers got the plans wrong, and Holy Cross had never gotten around to fixing things?

Sure, that might explain things, if not for a whole slew of other transgressions on the afternoon.

Can anyone explain why the lunch that we media in the press box so dearly rely on to survive the three-and-a-half-hour games was conspicuously missing during halftime? They may tell you it was because of a delivery faux pas, but you know what they say: don’t trust everything they tell you.

The pizza finally did arrive—after a good three quarters, mind you—but by that time, half of the press box was almost frozen, thanks to the open windows and the steady drizzle that blew into our faces and onto our computers. Why didn’t we close them, you say?

The bars on the windows would have obstructed our view! Okay, so they weren’t bars, but still...we wouldn’t have been able to see.

A conspiracy to silence our words, perhaps?

Despite their best efforts, though, a fellow writer and I would not be silenced. We ended up watching the last quarter and change of the game from outside, in the sun-soaked Holy Cross section of Fitton Field, scribbling on notepads and having fans throw candy at us (true story).

Hey, I know I’m not the best host in the world, but really, all it takes is a little bit of effort. When my friends came to visit freshman year, I slept on the La-Z-Boy and let them take my bed. My friends usually return the favor, too—when I come to visit and need to crash on a couch or a floor, they’re there for me.

Even when we’re not on the best of terms—if, say, a friend beat me in a friendly game of Xbox, he wouldn’t pour salt in the wound by failing to feed me or locking me out. He wouldn’t keep the windows open so I’d freeze, forcing me to go outside just to achieve a little bit of comfort. In short, he wouldn’t be like Holy Cross.

Don’t get me wrong—I’ll be the first to say that the Crusaders beat Harvard in football fair and square on Saturday. The few questionable calls that did take place were the fault of the refs, not the team, and they didn’t really change the overall outcome of the game much. Holy Cross played fair, and they won fair.

But the school’s facilities?

Hell, there wasn’t even a press conference after the game, because, well, there was no place to hold it.

Finally, after we held our standing-room-only interviews with the players and the coach, we got set to head out. The day was done, until another writer mentioned he needed to go to the restroom, only to find it...locked.

So, in sum, I’m disappointed in you, Holy Cross. Because you know what they say: fool me once, shame on me. But lock me out, forget my lunch, try freeze me to death, don’t let me talk to your players and prevent me from going to the bathroom? Well, shame on you.

—Staff writer Malcom A. Glenn can be reached at mglenn@fas.harvard.edu.