ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALSH: Revising The Past For the Crimson

Indulge for a moment in a spectacle of what Harvard might have been.

The soft glow of lights illuminates Harvard Stadium like a dream. Noise swells as the Crimson offense takes the field. Armanti Edwards steps under center; his breath, cloudy and heavy in the cold, is like the exhaust of a racecar. He surveys the field and barks an audible before taking the snap. Dropping back, he bounces slightly on his toes, poised, balanced, alert. Then, like tires hitting the pavement, he takes off downfield. He zigs toward the sideline, zags back to the middle of the field, dances past the secondary, and cartwheels into the end zone. The band trumpets his glory as he sashays back to the bench where he assumes his seat.

Of course, still-undefeated Chris Pizzotti is the Crimson’s actual quarterback. However, with a little luck, we could have watched Appalachian State’s Armanti Edwards marshal Harvard’s offense. The Heisman dark horse was recruited by Harvard, but he ultimately decided to spurn the Crimson for the chance to play on a slightly larger stage as a Mountaineer.

Likewise, Amobi Okoye decided to enroll at a large football program, the University of Louisville, over Harvard. In 2007, Okoye was the 10th pick of the NFL Draft.

Edwards and Okoye belong to an extensive list of athletes who came close to wearing crimson. This history is largely anecdotal and has accumulated over generations. It begins with James Connolly, the first modern Olympic champion, who left Harvard to compete in the 1896 Athens Olympics. The chronicle continues today with the likes of Frank Ben-Eze who rescinded his commitment to play basketball at Harvard and, instead, chose Davidson.

This alternate history, a bizarro Harvard, spreads across all playing fields. Imagine the smell of lacquer stinging the air, Lavietes packed and pulsating to the chants of “DEFENSE!” Harvard corrals a rebound and brings the ball up court. It’s passed around the perimeter until the ball ends up in the reliable hands of Wally Szczerbiak. The forward rises up and fires a high, arching three-pointer. The ball floats in the air, spinning like a rubber globe as it falls towards the hoop, kisses the back rim, and swishes gently through. Pandemonium. Unfortunately, although Harvard recruited Szczerbiak, the former NBA draft pick and Western Conference All-Star also considered attending Miami University (Ohio). He chose Ohio.

Some athletes started their college careers at Harvard, unremarkably, before thriving elsewhere. Much has been made of Andrew Hatch, a quarterback who couldn’t crack the top of the Harvard depth chart as a freshman and is now starting for the No. 5 LSU Tigers. Similarly, Zach Putchel and Shay Doron brought their basketball skills to larger campuses, Minnesota and Maryland, respectively, after beginning in Cambridge.

Not to be forgotten, Olympic tennis player James Blake, currently ranked 10th in the world, tore up the Ivy League for two years before going pro.

Many elite athletes have snubbed Harvard in the past, and many more will do so in the future. Still, all of these stories have some place in Harvard’s larger history. In one sense, they acknowledge an inherent limitation of Harvard athletics. We are stuck at the threshold of being a major athletic program—good enough to garner interest, but not to be a main attraction.

This pessimism, however, only obscures the deeper significance of this alternate history: these stories inspire our vision of the future. Without them, we could see Harvard only as it is, not as it could be. Perhaps we do not have a Heisman candidate in our backfield or a lottery pick in our backcourt, but the Szczerbiaks, the Okoyes, and the Blakes allow us to imagine, “What if?”

—Staff writer Timothy J. Walsh can be reached at twalsh@fas.harvard.edu.