With the Big Green Teams
IT began on Thursday night while Senator Eugene McCarthy was jamming them into the aisles at Spaulding Auditorium at the premiere of the documentary film of his 1968 presidential campaign.
It continued through Friday and Saturday of the second weekend in March - the days when, for the first time since the last week of December, it decided to snow in Hanover.
"It" was the Eastern Seaboard swim championships, and although Gene McCarthy and the weather cut rather drastically into the crowd (not to mention the eve of final exams) Dartmouth's swimmers gave Coach Karl Michael a fine farewell.
Mike retires in June after better than 40 years of association with swimming, most of them at Dartmouth. The Easterns marked his swan song before the home folk (the remaining NCAA and AAU meets were in Utah and Ohio) and there's no question that his troops wanted to make it a solid sendoff.
Which they did. To no one's surprise, Yale walked away with the team title for the eighth straight year. The Elis had 345 points. Princeton stood off Dartmouth for second place, 269.5 to 261, and only a brief slip in the medley relay on the first night of the meet cost Dartmouth second place.
As it was, Michael's men gave him more individual titles than Yale's swimmers could produce for Phil Moriarty. The Indians won five gold medals, including a record performance of 3:07.7 in winning the windup 400 freestyle relay that eclipsed a Yale record set by a quartet which included the fabled Don Schollander. Yale had four firsts, including a pair of relay victories. Dartmouth barely missed two other victories.
If there was a super performer for the Indians it was Chris Carstensen, the sophomore from Haddonfield, N. J., who tore past Yale's vaunted freestylers to win both the 50- and 100-yard freestyle races (he also was fifth in the 200 freestyle) and then anchored the freestyle relay combination of Stu Vance, Jim Gottschalk and Fred Severance that left the crowd of 800 screaming like 8,000.
While Carstensen was challenging Villanova's West German Olympian, Tom Aretz, for the title as best-in-meet, the other Indians weren't doing too badly, either. Mike Brown, the flawless diver from Denver, took the one-meter dive from defending champion John Huffstutler of Princeton and then had to settle for second in the three-meter event, which he won a year ago.
Al Rheem, another Denver product, shocked the Yalies with a victory in the 100 butterfly. The hard-luck guy was Gottschalk, another sophomore, who had a part in a lot of points but came no closer to victory than in the 200 individual medley where he was edged by Aretz (a triple winner in the meet) by .04 second.
The lone disappointment was the medley relay and it was a frustrating experience only because the Indians had a qualifying time that was less than a second behind Lehigh and put them into the consolation final. They breezed to a win in the consy with a time of 3:34.95, a clocking that would have meant third place in the final. The difference between third place (24 points) and seventh place (7 points) easily would have spelled the margin between second and third place in the final team scoring.
As it stands, though, the meet was a picture of efficiency as more than 300 swimmers churned through three days of trials and finals with awesome precision. That in itself is a great tribute to Karl Michael's efforts in making his finale a memorable affair.
It should also be noted boldly herewith that much of the success of Dartmouth's swimming program in the past decade has been due to the effort of Mike's bespectacled assistant, Ron Keenhold, the man who will succeed him as Dartmouth's third head coach of swimming (Sid Hazelton held the reins until Mike took over in 1939).
The Michael-Keenhold combination has collaborated for 40 dual meet wins against seven losses over the past four seasons. It's a record that speaks for itself and one that doesn't appear to be ready to diminish.
Sophomore Chris Carstensen starred inthe Eastern Seaboards by winning the50 and 100-yard freestyles and anchoring the record-setting relay quartet.
