War

BACK in the spring of 1975, Dave DeMarco's patience was beginning to fray. He was on the bus when Dartmouth's baseball team left the cover of Leverone Field House for its annual tour of Virginia and the Carolinas, but he was also trying to escape the pain and aggravation of a pulled groin muscle. It was a lingering injury and DeMarco sat through the first seven games of the trip, watching and waiting.

Dartmouth was nearing the end of the trip in late March. It was Sunday and the team was in Norfolk, Virginia, for a rematch with Old Dominion. DeMarco finally was healthy and Tony Lupien sent the sophomore lefthander out for his first starting assignment. He threw seven pitches and faced three batters. One-two-three, all easy grounders, but when DeMarco came to the dugout, Lupien cornered him. The conversation Went something like this:

Lupien: "What were you throwing?"

DeMarco: "Fastballs and sliders."

Lupien: "You can take that slider ana .... It's a #*@&%$ pitch. It's for pitchers who've lost their fastball. It's hard to control. I've seen too many sliders slide over the fence. Don't use it."

Only the participants really know who was maddest as DeMarco went to the mound for the second inning. He didn't throw another slider. He threw fastballs and curves, ranted, raved, and sustained a barrage of epithets and expletives with the next 20 batters. When he walked off the mound after seven innings, he'd thrown 85 pitches. He struck out ten, walked two, gave up two outfield flies and no hits. His infield grounder in the first inning had driven home the only run he needed. It was the first no-hit game by a Dartmouth pitcher in eight years.

DeMarco spent the rest of that sophomore season as an occasional pitcher on a staff dominated by Jim Beattie, who won eight of Dartmouth's 20 victories in 1975. He also was a designated hitter but had only a modest 207 average to go with a 2-4 record on the mound. It wasn't much to write home about, considering the way it began, especially to the folks who had watched him as a first baseman and sometime pitcher on a Shelton High School team that had won 41 of 44 games and two Connecticut state championships during his junior and senior seasons.

Last year, DeMarco proved to be the only glimmer in the long, long season of six wins in 40 games. His bat was more valuable than his arm. A .347 average (he was Dartmouth's only batter over .300), a 12-game hitting streak, and selection as an all-Eastern League outfielder were the credentials he put into the book. There wasn't much question who would be elected captain of Dartmouth baseball in 1977.

Knowing that a captain can't lead nearly so effectively from right field as he can from first base, Lupien planned to put DeMarco at first this spring. Then, in February, Carl Hanson, the top returning pitcher, wrapped up his athletic career by way of early graduation. Lupien asked DeMarco if he wanted to do some pitching.

The agreement was struck: DeMarco would play first base and pitch as often as he liked. It was, as they say, an operational necessity and Lupe told his competitive lefty to throw whatever he wanted - in" eluding the #*@&¢$ slider.

After hitting .226 and splitting two decisions on the mound in 11 southern trip games, DeMarco launched the regular season with a .421 pace at the plate and won his first two starts, going the distance in both games (one shutout) and reducing his earned run average to 1.55. In 29 innings, he walked seven men, struck out 32.

"When Dave's pitching, he's like a fifth infielder." said Mike Durham, a sophomore who's played second and third base. "He's such a tremendous competitor. It's war between Dave and every batter he faces. You can't believe his concentration. Last year, we had a half-dozen seniors on the team. When it was obvious we were in for a lousy season, some of them started to coast. Dave's the only senior on this team. He's not about to coast and he won't let anyone else take it easy, either."

"The thing I do best is improve from year to year," said the oldest of Frank and Jackie DeMarco's seven kids. "I wasn't a very good hitter in high school but I walked extremely well. We worked hard and we won. The nice thing about this team is that we have guys who are willing to work."

In a way, DeMarco represents a vanishing breed in Ivy League athletics - the totally tough, middle-class kid who worked his tail off to get what he's got. He came to Dartmouth never having seen the place, a good athlete from a rugged corner of the Naugatuck Valley whose only goals have been to get a good education and play baseball. When he graduates in June, this economics major will have spent every term earning grades worthy of either second or third honors recognition.

As for baseball, DeMarco has become an established leader of a team that looks to be more interesting than the last. He's gained modest acclaim as a pitcher who has learned to throw four pitches, with better-than-average efficiency, where he wants them to go. Which means, essentially, that he's not shy about setting up a batter with an occasional fast ball in the vicinity of the chin or wrists - and then finishing him off with that slider.

IF you stop to consider that four A of the nation's top 20 college lacrosse teams are in the Ivy League, you'll appreciate why Dartmouth can have a good team this spring and still end up with less than a break-even season. In fact, half of the teams in the top 20 are among the Green's opponents, including a team from Cornell that hasn't lost an Ivy League game in four years and is the defending national champion.

"We're a better team than our record probably will indicate," says Coach Dudley Hendrick. "We're better, but we're still not quite as good as a lot of the teams we play." He said that with memories of games against Massachusetts and Penn-sylvania fresh in mind.

UMass is New England's top-ranked team but after nine minutes of play, Dartmouth was leading the Minutemen, 5-1. By the end of the first period, it was 5-5, and UMass then scored five unanswered goals in the second period, goals that proved to be the margin in a 14-9 game. Sure, it was a loss, but measured against scores like 25-5, 22-4, and 24-10 during the past three years, it shows the direction that Hendrick has taken his team.

Against Penn, the Ivy's prime challenger to Cornell, Dartmouth played it even with the Quakers for two periods but Hendrick concedes that "mental errors, by the team and by me, too" contributed to a 15-8 setback. On the positive side, Dartmouth bounced back from that loss to thump Middlebury, 20-10, as junior attacker Bob Battle scored four times and as three sophomores - Jeff Hickey, Mike McCarthy and Joe Nastri - had three goals each. To provide some dimension, think about Hickey and Nastri as likely starters at linebacker next fall.

The fortunes of Dartmouth's tennis team this spring are being built with ongoing strength in doubles, a trademark of John Kenfield's teams, and the play of a couple of freshmen, John Steel and Scott Hadley. This tandem has become a capable doubles team while operating in the middle of the singles lineup. It's a team that probably would be better with the services of Pete Renner, a standout in doubles, who is sitting out the season with a knee injury.

Tennis has also been the most active of the women's teams in the early stages of the spring season - and one of the most successful. Coach Chris Clark's squad won five of its first six matches. There's only one senior, Captain Vicki Austin, on this squad that has sophomore Karen Loeffler playing on the top rung of the singles ladder.

DARTMOUTH laid claim to the national intercollegiate individual trapshooting championship in mid-April when sophomore Denny DeVaux led a field of over 180 shooters from 28 teams with a score of 199 out of 200 shots. DeVaux, whose father is a gunsmith across the river in Norwich and is coach of the Dartmouth team, was the main man for the Green which finished fifth in the team standings.

Honors: John Macomber and Whit Johnson will be co-captains of Dartmouth's ski team in 1978 while Mary Kendall has been re-elected to lead the women skiers along with Wendy Thurber. Olympian Walter Malmquist, who set hill records in four different jumping competitions, won the Norwegian Trophy as Dartmouth's outstanding skier in 1977.

Football: The Ivy League sports information directors have made Yale their unanimous choice for the 1977 championship while Dartmouth and Brown are the pick to be primary challengers. Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Columbia, and Penn follow. The publicists picked Harvard last year with Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown next in order. Yale and Brown finished as co-champions while Harvard and Dartmouth shared the runnerup position.

Pitcher Dave DeMarco loads up with Red Man before taking his turn on the mound.