Ivy League Athletes by Maiorana Sal;Fitzpatrick Ryan;

Author:Maiorana, Sal;Fitzpatrick, Ryan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Northeastern University Press

KEITH WRIGHT

HARVARD MEN’S BASKETBALL

Keith will never forget the moment when an entire year’s worth of work—a career’s worth of work, really—went splat in the blink of an eye. Or, in this case, the splash of a last-second jump shot.

As October 2011 neared its end and basketball practice was in full bloom at Harvard and everywhere else across the nation, many Ivy League followers believed the Crimson would win the outright League title for the first time in the eleven decades the men from Cambridge had been playing basketball; that in turn would mean the Crimson would make their inaugural appearance in the modern-day NCAA tournament and their first since 1946; hey, they might even win the national championship. But as magnificent as all that would have been, nothing would ever quell the throbbing pain of what happened on the afternoon of March 12, 2011.

“You never file it away, you never forget it,” Keith said of the devastating 62–61 defeat he and his Crimson teammates suffered that day at Yale in the special one-game playoff between Harvard and Princeton that decided who would win the Ivy title and earn the League’s automatic bid to March Madness. “It’s not like I broke down and cried in the locker room, but it was a tough day, for sure. It’s always in the back of my mind that we were 2.8 seconds away from going to the Big Dance. Those 2.8 seconds, we’re going to use that as motivation for the whole year.”

A new season was upon coach Tommy Amaker’s team, and the expectations for long-awaited Crimson glory were soaring. As Amaker put his team through practice in preparation for the opening game just over two weeks away against traditional local rival MIT, Amaker hadn’t forgotten what happened in 2011, either.

“It was a God-awful ending to a fun year overall,” he said. “If you ask me would I wish we would have won the game that would have put us into the tournament last year, I would say yes, and then look at different types of motivation for this season. It’s in the back of our minds constantly; it has to be. When you get that close to something, it’s gut-wrenching if you don’t get there and don’t finish.”

Earning a share of its first regular-season Ivy title wasn’t enough because Princeton matched Harvard’s 12–2 League mark, and then won the showdown when the Tigers’ Doug Davis took an inbounds pass on the left wing, dribbled toward the key, pump-faked Crimson guard Oliver McNally into the air, then went up and released his twelve-foot jumper as gravity was pulling a defenseless McNally back to the ground. As the breathless sellout crowd—equal parts Crimson and Tiger faithful—stood fixated on the ball, it passed through the rim as time expired, crushing what had been Harvard’s greatest season.

The Crimson had lost at Princeton a month earlier, and that really wasn’t anything new. For the Tigers—who had won twenty-six League men’s basketball championships, tied for number one all-time with

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.