1944

Our contribution to this SportsIllustrated issue has more to do with grins than it does with greatness. Baseball player Bill Cary remembers that coach Jeff Tesreau was built like the Parthenon, with calves that looked like Grecian urns and wrists the size of an average man's ankles. "I'll never forget a Harvard trip," says Bill, "when four of us had to ride from the Boston hotel out to Cambridge contorted into a cab with Jeff. JackRiley, the hockey whizz who also played baseball, was caught in the back-seat squeeze, and when we got back to Hanover Jack had a newspaper front page printed in a novelty shop, with the blaring headline: CAB-WRECKER SOUGHT IN N.H."

And Riley himself remembers that during a hitless streak someone put an ad in TheDartmouth, reading: "Wanted, one base hit by Jack Riley," "And dammit," Jack says, "I got two singles during the next game, but Cary, who was on first both times, fell down on the way to second. End of both innings."

Riley, who admits to an occasional Irish temper, is far better known for his frequent pranks. At a baseball game in Ithaca, he persuaded a coed to announce that Tesreau had been elected grand marshal of the Cornell house party parade and Jeff had to take a cab-ride into the countryside to get out of the obligation.

Riley, of course, was coach of the United States hockey team, whose last-second goal stunned the Russians in the Olympic finals at Squaw Valley in 1960. At the last intrasquad scrimmage the day before, Jack said to his players: "Let's start a friendly fight out on the ice just to give the Russian coaches something to think about. Well, I'd forgotten how our western boys weren't all that fond of our eastern players, and vice versa. All of a sudden our own players are beating the crap out of each other and I can't break them up. The Russians and other on-lookers are saying, 'Those guys are crazy.' But crazy like a fox. We beat 'em the next day."

Basketball star Joe Vancisin remembers that coach Ozzie Cowles was a stickler for orderliness. On all field trips, his players were required to wear coats and ties; and he even brought his own dry mops with him just in case home teams didn't do a proper job keeping the courts dry.

In preparing for a game against DePaul, which had 6-foot, 11-inch all-American George Mikan, Cowles knew that Mikan's weakness was the bank shot. So Ozzie, with only one player barely 6-feet, 5-inches, had a platform built under the practice basket and his players worked out all week on techniques to jump and block a bank shot.

After he left Hanover, Vancisin was an assistant to Cowles at Michigan and Minnesota, and he marveled at Cowles' adjustments to bright lighting in some locker rooms versus poor lighting on gym floors. Ozzie would have his players wear dark glasses in the locker rooms.

A final, personal shot: walk-on intramural athlete Fritz Hier wound up his boxing career (high school, Dartmouth, the Navy, and graduate school) by winning his last fight but losing his trunks. In front of 3,000 laughing, unbelieving fans in Syracuse, N.Y., the tie-string came un-done. My fiancee was in the third row and naughty friends said she married me not because of what she saw but in spite of it.

That's it. Blessings.

P.O. Box 24, Lovejoy Hill, Cornish Flat, NH 03746