Winter Games
PRESUMING that all goes on schedule, the Olympics will unfold at Montreal in late July with no more than the usual snarls that enmesh a multi-million-dollar international extravaganza. There may be a couple of traces of Dartmouth green on the scene for the Summer Games in Hanover's backyard, but nothing like the Dartmouth representation at Innsbruck this month for the Winter Olympics.
Dartmouth has had more than two dozen skiers earn places on the U.S. team since the Winter Games first convened in 1924 at Chamonix. It's ironic that only in 1932, when the Winter Olympics were virtually over the next hill at Lake Placid, was Dartmouth not represented in competition. Even in 1940, when the Games were wiped from the scene by events on the Continent, a quartet of '39s - Howie Chivers, Ed Wells, Dick Durrance (whose son Dave is now coaching the Green's Alpine racers), and John Litchfield - plus another Chivers, Warren '38, and Harry Hillman '40, were tapped for the team that never came to be.
With the upcoming events at Innsbruck, Dartmouth's overall Winter Olympic representation swells closer to three dozen. As at Sapporo in 1972, the majority comes from the ranks of the Nordic racers - Tim Caldwell, Doug Peterson, Don Nielson, and Walter Malmquist.
Caldwell, a senior from Putney, Vermont, is the son of John Caldwell, Dartmouth Olympian in 1952. He's one of those outstanding skiers who come to Dartmouth but who never compete in the collegiate sphere. Scheduling his academic pursuits around the world of prime national and international racing, Caldwell recently finished second in the Olympic trials.
Peterson, a perennial leader for Dartmouth before making the national team a year ago, placed seventh on the ten-man team, while Nielsen, co-captain of the 1974 Green squad, had to use his final run in the four-race trials, a ten-kilometer duel, to clinch his berth. Nielsen's fourth-place finish in the last race gave him a spot by the margin of less than one-tenth of a second.
While Caldwell, Peterson, and Nielsen work the cross-country trails, Malmquist, a sophomore, made his mark in the Nordic Combined trials, finishing second and making the three-man team in that gruelling challenge. Their performance at Innsbruck, as one ski writer observed following the trials, could range from somewhere in the top ten for Caldwell to a fleeting line of six-point type in the long list of Olympians.
Back at the Skiway and along the myriad tracks that crisscross the golf course, Storrs Pond, and the Garipay layout, Jim Page and Pam Reed have a gaggle of talent primed for collegiate battle this winter. In this Olympic year, Dartmouth has a young group of skiers that Page figures has an excellent chance to challenge the Western teams and their legions of Scandinavian imports when the NCAA championship returns to the East (near Rumford, Maine) for the first time since 1973 (Dartmouth was host at Cannon Mountain in 1970).
The Alpine squad is good but comparatively untested, while the Nordic contingent has both youth and experience. "We have an unusually strong freshman class in both talent and depth," says Page. The man who has been most impressive early on is one of the two Norwegian jumpers on Dartmouth's squad of 50, sophomore Chris Berggrav from Oslo (his countryman, senior Arne Nielsen, is also from Oslo).
Berggrav soared 79 meters to lead freshman teammate Bob Zinck in a 1-2 performance against prime opposition at a recent Brattleboro meet. A few days later, it was Berggrav-Zinck-Nielsen in that order at the top of the field in the Roger Burt Jump at the Vale of Tempe. You still question why Page is more than moderately pleased?
Berggrav arrived, by European standards, as an average jumper at best. Likewise with Nielsen. Page, as did his predecessor, Al Merrill, takes pride in the Dartmouth ski program's orientation toward development of skills, not staking everything on established talent. "Chris has made tremendous improvement," according to Page, "just as Nielsen did during his first two years. When they graduate and return home, they'll be challenging many of the established Norwegian jumpers."
The cross-country squad, built around freshman Tim Kelley, sophomore Whit Johnson, junior Phil Peck and another fast-improving freshman, Toby Morse, has established its credentials with victories in the Hanover and Putney relays, and the Alpine force, built around Craig Stone and Peter Dodge, should be able to more than hold its own as the carnival tour develops.
In the women's sector, the threesome that was so valuable in helping Dartmouth win the Eastern title last winter is at it again - Mary Heller, Anne Thomas, and Melinda Hungerford. Combined with an Alpine quartet of Chris Simpson, Ann Van Curan, Genet Ide, and Mary Kendall, the overland gang makes the Green a strong choice to repeat.
IN Thompson Arena things have gone far better than even the Biggest Greener would have dared hope. When the new building opened in November, there were all sorts of ooohhhs and aaahhhs about the glittering building but definite reservations about how the teams would perform in Signor Nervi's 3,500-seat creation.
That's a lot of seats to fill, but they're being occupied in ever-increasing numbers. The biggest crowds jammed the arena to see hockey against New Hampshire, first in the championship game of the Blue-Green Tournament and two weeks later in mid-January, when UNH came for a regular season rematch. Both games brought out standing-room galleries and even though New Hampshire won both times (6-3 and 7-0 to help prove that the team coached by Charlie Holt '45 is probably the second best - to Boston University - in the East), Dartmouth's performance has been such that the Green has an outside shot at making the ECAC playoffs after last year's dismal 5-19 record.
There were about 4,000 spectators on hand for those games, and as the Green heads into four late-January dates the record already is 7-4. In basketball it's just about the same. A 7-5 record includes a tourney championship (at Worcester, where the Green beat Assumption and Tennessee State, both nationally ranked college division teams) plus a decision over Boston College. The crowds for the visits by Penn and Princeton, the two best in Ivy League basketball this season, would have been of turnaway dimension in Alumni Gym. Dartmouth fell to both, but the disciplined play that was described here last month has been paying off.
Both hockey and basketball seemed at the brink of a downward tumble in mid-January. George Crowe's skaters fell to Colgate and New Hampshire but stunned the East with a 6-4 comeback win at Clarkson (the first win over the Engineers since 1954), thanks in large part to a superb job by Bob Huggard, the backup to Jeff Sollows in the goal. Sollows had played every minute of ten games before taking a puck in the chest early in the game at Potsdam. Huggard responded with 29 saves, allowed one goal, and the Green turned on to score four times in the final period. It has to rank with some of the greatest wins in any season.
Dartmouth is supposed to beat Springfield in basketball every year, but the Chiefs have forgotten the script for the past six encounters. After playing BC, Penn, Princeton, and Vermont in successive outings (and getting only the upset of BC on the plus side for their efforts), the Green needed a win badly and got it by 14 points at Springfield.
Take any game and Dartmouth has had an abundance of good performances in both sports. Sollows has been the backbone in hockey, but Brian McCloskey, Ken Pettit, Kevin Johnson, Scott Coleman, defenseman Ron Dove, and freshman Mark Culhane have been equally consistent contributors. In basketball, Larry Cubas is the scoring leader, but senior forward Adam Sutton, who missed most of last year with injuries, has been a remarkable defender on a team with national ranking in defensive statistics. Depending on the game, there have been big performances from guard John Lisowski and two other forwards, Sterling Edmonds and senior Bill Healey. Edmonds, a sophomore, was most valuable player in the Worcester Tournament and has made more than 60 per cent of his floor shots.
HOPSCOTCHING the winter scene: swimming won twice, then ran into Harvard. Despite 18 "best-ever" performances, a total of seven-tenths of one second spread over three races made a difference of 16 points (Harvard got them) in a 68-45 setback. A medley relay time that was seventh-best nationally launched the meet and measures what the Green will be able to do when the Eastern meet rolls around in March.
The gymnastics team won its first three meets (including Yale and Penn) with Joe Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Gary Komarow the leading performers. Squash won twice before running afoul of Harvard, and the wrestlers had the same fate on the same day with the Crimson, although Captain Rick Clark used a pin victory to show he is still among the Ivy's best. The lone winter win over the Crimson, outside of a convincing early-December verdict in basketball (the first in four seasons), belongs to the women's swimming team and that was against the Radcliffe representatives.
The indoor track season began with a triangular win over Colgate and Bates, a meet featuring a Dartmouth record in the high jump by Dave Woody. A week later, in the seventh Dartmouth Relays, Villanova set a world record in the four-mile relay. Dartmouth's mile relay team, intact from last year's success story, ran afoul of a spectator who wandered on the track during the second leg. Dan Tagatac, unable to avoid contact, was upended in the collision, and now the duel that involved flyers from Seton Hall, St. John's, Villanova and Dartmouth must wait until the IC4A meet in March.
Brian McCloskey uses all of his 155 pounds and 65 inches to battle an Olympic teamplayer for the puck. Last year McCloskey had a four-goal game against Pennsylvania.
