Forgotten?

IT was Tuesday, November 9, three days after Dartmouth had seen its third comeback attempt of the season fall short at Providence. Brown had won, 35-21, beating the Green for the first time since 1955 and taking the next-to-last step toward its first Ivy League football title, shared with Yale. Things weren't particularly cheery around the Dartmouth camp. There was one game to be played at Princeton, championship hopes had gone glimmering, and the only remaining objectives were assorted individual records and the knowledge that a record of 6-3 would sound a lot better than 5-4. There was pride, too.

Either way, it would be a winning season, but that couldn't begin to measure what this year had meant for Jake Crouthamel's sixth Dartmouth team. What put things into perspective was an article that appeared on the opinion page of The Dartmouth on that gray Tuesday morning. It was written by Chris Jenny, a senior who has spent a lot of time observing the athletic scene. What Jenny wrote had meaning for those who, as linebacker Kevin Young said later that day, "... won't be remembered like the teams in 1925, 1965, or 1970." A part of Jenny's column went like this:

Not much will be said about this team after the Princeton game. There will be no throngs of alumni or students racing onto the field to congratulate the players. There will be no victory banquet to hail the champions.

At future Class of '77 reunions, there will be no talk of the old title days. Few will remember that they missed the Ivy crown (and an 8-1 record) by 11 points. In fact, most of the players will be lucky even to be remembered as having played football for Dartmouth.

Finally, few will appreciate that Jake C. (a man still forced to live in the shadow of his legendary predecessor) delivered his fifth winning team in six seasons of coaching.

Most alumni already are looking ahead to next year, some grumbling for a new head coach, others looking hopefully and expectantly to the freshman team. Most students have now turned their attention to preseason talk of hockey or basketball.

Well, if no one else cares to preserve the efforts of the 1976 Dartmouth football team, I certainly do. Rarely have I seen a team play with the guts, determination and pride that this year's team has. Having been forced to fight a trail of injuries that began in preseason and grew with every game, players with little or no experience stepped in to fill the gap.

Time ana time again, these guys struggled back from behind (New Hampshire, Yale, Harvard, Brown), sometimes winning, sometimes being agonizingly denied in the final seconds . . . but never, never quitting.

All the positive cliches of sport probably could be used to describe this team, for they had the best qualities a team could possess. And yet, because they committed The Unforgivable Sin, not winning an Ivy title, they will be forgotten. But even if no else remembers the total effort these guys gave, I will.

A week later, Princeton had been taken apart, 33-7, and 13 of the 15 seniors on this Dartmouth team were guests at the final weekly quarterback luncheon in Alumni Hall. More than half wore the dark green letter sweaters that have begun to see more exposure than they get on the closet shelf, where these rewards for athletic achievement have been wont to reside in recent years.

Jake introduced them as the only group of seniors he knew of who could stand and sing the first three verses of "Men of Dartmouth" without accompaniment. They'd done it for most of the bus ride back from Princeton and when Jake invited them to demonstrate the fact, they gathered around a table, took off on 13 different keys, and covered every word to perfection.

When it was done, a good many more people knew the special dimension of guys like Sullivan, Young, Case, Lucas, Thomas, Darnell, Milligan, Ward, Wilson, Jarrett, Griggs, Cordy, VanVliet, Mugglebee and Curley - and they had a better feel for what Chris Jenny had known all along.

What do you remember about a team that finished in a dead heat with Harvard for the runnerup spot and averaged over 30 points in its last four games, with wins over Cornell (35-0) and Columbia (34-14) joining the affairs at Brown and Princeton? For starters:

• Center Jim Lucas won a pewter mug given by the trainers and labeled the Hardnose Award. The name speaks for itself. Lucas played with one, then two, sprained ankles during the last three games. He wouldn't let the coaches replace him until he'd given every ounce of pain and effort he could muster. He literally dragged himself off the field at Brown and agreed that someone else could handle things at Princeton after Dartmouth had jumped to a 17-0 lead in the first period.

• Harry Wilson, a third-string split end as a freshman, showed that with one good arm he is as adept at catching a football as anyone who has played for Dartmouth. In the first period of the Brown game, he took off down the sideline. Kevin Case lofted a bomb that was intended to be good for 50 years, maybe a touchdown. Instead, it slipped off Harry's fingers and Wilson suffered a slight shoulder separation as he hit the ground.

He missed most of the first half, got taped four ways to Sunday during half-time, came back to make five catches for 95 yards including a 45-yard touchdown pass, and did it, for all intents, with one arm virtually useless.

Heading to Princeton, Wilson needed one yard and two catches to set Dartmouth season records. "We figured we could get him that," said Crouthamel, "without threat of injury." Harry caught five for 54 yards against the Tigers, got both season records, and tied the career reception record.

• Sam Coffey and Curt Oberg are the two junior runners who represent obvious reasons why Dartmouth's offense should be pretty fair again next fall. Oberg was the early season standout, and when he was injured at Yale and again at Cornell, Coffey took over. In the last four games, Coffey had successive totals of 124, 169, 111, and 114 yards. He was dominating on the ground, just as Case, a story in himself, was in the air.

Coffey finished with 764 yards rushing, second best ever in a season at Dartmouth and 23 yards shy of the record John Short set in 1970. Oberg missed nearly two games and finished with 573 yards. Last year, he was Dartmouth's rushing leader with 500 yards. Funny thing, but lately you don't hear the flacks chiding, "Up the middle, Jake, up the middle." The offense hasn't changed, but a pair of good, quick backs and a tough, quick line can turn two-yard grafitti into 12-yard poetry.

• Kevin Case. Three 'months ago, the senior who throws from the port side was regarded as the key to this season - and the biggest question mark. He hadn't been involved in more than 20 plays during two varsity seasons. A team that expects to be a championship contender needs a quarterback with credentials. Case had none, only the abiding confidence of his teammates and coaches.

When he completed his tenth of 15 passes at Princeton, he had more than proven himself. There isn't a passer among the nation's top 20 who can approach his Dartmouth and Ivy League season records for completion percentage, a heady .610, and during the past decade only Jim Chasey, the magician of the 1969-70 teams, was better than Case as an operative of Dartmouth's sprint and belly option offense. Kevin made things happen to the tune of a team average of 26 points and over 355 yards per game.

After cooling his heels for two years, Case showed the poise of a seasoned pro. His best day, perhaps, was in the losing effort at Brown when he set Dartmouth records for attempts (43) and completions (25) and inspired the surge from a 35-7 deficit. Five times he moved Dartmouth inside Brown's 15-yard line. Twice he produced touchdowns; Brown's defense stymied the other attacks.

Case's misfortune, as will be this team's, is that the complete comeback proved to be an eyelash beyond reach. He - and Dartmouth - came close, but it wasn't quite enough. They won't be remembered as the gang that took six teams apart with a total effort.

They will be remembered as the team that lost to Yale and Harvard by 11 points and the first Dartmouth team to lose to Brown in 21 years (the Brown team, incidentally, that finally buried the 1926 Iron Men and missed an undefeated season by one point). In some quarters their effort will be remembered and savored. As Crouthamel noted, "Anyone who faults a group of men who gave so much of themselves for Dartmouth football has never played the game."

How fast can Dean Stephens run five miles? You'll probably have to wait until next fall to find out exactly how fast, but for the moment it's apparent that Dartmouth's cross-country captain is quicker than anyone who has come down the Hanover road in this year or any other.

In leading the Green to a 7-1 dual meet record, Stephens made course-record runs seem almost routine. He has been the leader of Dartmouth's pack throughout the past season and actually broke down the theme of togetherness that Coach Ken Weinbel had espoused in most positive fashion - Stephens ran away from everyone else.

In the Heptagonal and IC4A championship races at New York, Stephens finished fourth and sixth respectively, well ahead of teammates Rob Duncan, Barry Harwick, Jim Cioban and Mark Jensen, the rest of the clan who contributed to team finishes of third and fifth in the tough competition.

Stephens covered the five-mile distance in the Heps in 24 minutes 56 seconds. That was 36 seconds faster than he'd run the Heps distance in 1975. A week later, in the IC4A race, he was primed for the swifter field and knocked another 22 seconds off his Heps clocking. That, and continued pack rtmning by the rest, qualified Dartmouth for the NCAA championship race in Texas.

Dartmouth's soccer season was billed as a rebuilding affair, but it turned out to be more productive than that even though the Green finished in a tie for fifth place in the Ivy League. Tom Griffith's squad, with only six seniors on hand (two of them, midfielder Charlie Krupanszky and fullback Ted Hunt, proved to be most outstanding), developed as the season moved along and assured itself of a winning record for the first time since 1964.

The final record, 6-5-2, had the makings of being much better - witness games like a pair of 1-1 ties with Yale and Columbia, in which Dartmouth held a sizable shot advantage, plus a 1-0 loss to Connecticut, the top team in New England.

Dartmouth's rugby teams finished with winning records on all fronts. The A team lost only two games and was 4-1 against Ivy opposition, closing with a 23-18 win at Princeton. The B squad was undefeated and the C team's 18-18 tie at Princeton wrapped up a 6-1-1 record. Ken Rothschild and Jack Olbrych were pillars for the A team, which showed its stuff by scoring 15 points in the last ten minutes to overtake Princeton.

The women's teams in field hockey, tennis, and cross-country came home with overall winning seasons. Field hockey had a 7-4-1 record, losing twice in the Eastern regional tournament, and had scoring leaders in Jane Kirrstetter and Cheryl Morgan. In tennis, the record was 7-3, and while the cross-country dual record was only 1-3, a second place finish in the first Ivy League meet (the Green's Caroline Coggeshall was fifth and Martha Cochran was sixth) measured the progress of the runners' first season.

Neatly choreographed, defenders Milligan, Mugglebee, and Young bring down a Princeton back in their last game for Dartmouth.