Events & Discoveries

FUN AT BERKELEY

While the heroes of the Alabama campus were battling for their rights, another set of athletes in faraway Berkeley, Calif. was behaving for all the world as if college sport is just fun. An invasion of 18 Harvard Rugby players burst on the University of California for a couple of matches over the weekend, and the way they enjoyed themselves was enough to make a high-salaried athletic director unfrock himself in disgust.

The Harvards swooped down on the Golden Gate with no heavier burden than textbooks and the striped underwear a Rugger player wears. It was the kind of day that brings coeds out in their sleeveless dresses, a sight that the men from Harvard noted with approval. Art Tichnor, president of the Harvard Rugby Club, spoke for his teammates. "I would not say," he said in an unmistakable Harvard accent, "that the California girls are prettier than the Radcliffe girls. But they are certainly a most healthy lot, and with their low-cut dresses, we all feel it has been an early spring for us."

The Harvards were soon distributed among the six fraternity houses where they were to live. Then, textbooks under their arms, they strolled up the hill to the 88,000-seat Memorial Stadium for a morning workout and a little relaxed study. Next there was a lunch sponsored by the Cal students' organization, followed by a sightseeing tour with the women's rally committee—each coed driving a Harvard or two in her own car past San Francisco's finest landmarks and retelling, as best she could remember, the story of the 1906 earthquake. Dinner that night was a pizza-and-beer shebang in San Francisco's Italian quarter.

Saturday morning was relatively quiet. Fullback James Damis had to take an exam, so he was closeted in the office of the California dean. Jim Joslin, the center half (and tailback on the football team), went for a walk and was captured by Pi Beta Phi sorority girls for a coffee party as he wandered past their house.

After lunch there was, of course, the game, and something like 4,000 Cal students sprinkled themselves throughout the huge bowl. Cal scored first with a well-executed try on a short passing rush and converted from a difficult angle to make it 5-0. A few minutes later Harvard's Charles Levine, the scrum half, kicked a 28-yard penalty, and it was 5-3. Just before half time, Cal put together a beautiful 40-yard rush in which four forwards handled the ball before Bill Vallotton scored the try. Noel Bowden again converted and it was 13-3 at the mid-game break.

Harvard looked better in the second half, but was no match for a Cal fifteen which had lost only one of its last 12 matches. The final score was 18-6, but everyone agreed it had been a whale of a game. That night the Harvard players did pretty much as they pleased. Some went dancing with the Cal coeds, some took out young ladies from nearby Mills College. As this issue of SI went to press, no defections to the West had been reported, but there was an ever-present danger.

THE INFLATED TAPE MEASURE

The knowing football fan avoids putting much faith in the weights of the players as printed in the program; too often they reflect a species of psychological warfare. Should the wise fan also learn to be a skeptic about the heights of basketball players? Well, here's the case of Tom Gola.

When Tom Gola was a mere school-boy in Philadelphia, he towered over his classmates at 6 feet 6 inches and exhibited such grace and skill and classic proficiency upon a basketball court that he was offered scholarships to 62 institutions of higher learning.