ハーバード、NCAA選手権に66年ぶりに出場

ジェレミー・リン選手の活躍で、注目を集めるハーバード大学バスケットボール・チーム。何とこの世界の最高学府のチームが、アイビーリーグで優勝して、NCAAトーナメントに出場を決めたのです。The New York Timesが、そのことを大きく取り上げました。

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March 7, 2012
Harvard Encounters a Rare Subject
By BILL PENNINGTON

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In the last four months, the Harvard men’s basketball team was ranked among the nation’s top 25 teams for the first time ever. It has been lauded as the springboard for the career of the N.B.A.’s newest sensation, Jeremy Lin. And Tuesday night, for the first time since 1946, Harvard qualified for the N.C.A.A. tournament by winning the Ivy League championship.

It may no longer be a surprise that Ivy League institutions can produce good athletes and teams that can win outside their conference. Still, Harvard has been around for 376 years and nothing quite like this has happened before.

“Everybody’s so excited about it; in the dining halls, everyone’s talking about it,” said Danielle Rabinowitz, a Harvard sophomore from Brookline, Mass. “So, even for a person like myself, who isn’t at the basketball games themselves, I’m pretty in tune with the success of the basketball team.

“People always stereotypically feel that our conversations are generally about philosophy, or obscure topics that the common man can’t relate to. I think that just adding this element of sports to the mix kind of grounds us in a more human way that is really great.”

Tyler Neill, a graduate student in South Asian studies, was walking around Harvard Yard on Wednesday morning reading a copy of Immanuel Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” in its original German. Neill had little knowledge of the university’s latest basketball achievement.

“I watch sports none at all,” Neill said. “It’s not in my radar. Actually, when I talked with my father, he’s mentioned this. He’s excited.”

The mix of emotions — and nonemotions — was a contrast to the reaction on many campuses this week as N.C.A.A. berths have been decided and celebrated.

There were, for example, no streamers or toilet paper caught in the limbs of the trees Wednesday from a basketball rally the night before. The chest and face of the statue of John Harvard had not been painted crimson. No one had inscribed “N.C.A.A.” across the pillars of the library facade, nor had anyone emblazoned the quadrangle next to it with, “ESPN, Here We Come.”

“We’re not Duke, and don’t want to be,” said Peter Sampson, an alumnus from Los Angeles who was visiting the campus to attend a research seminar. “We’re proud of the basketball team, and if they’re going to play they might as well be good. But we’re also proud of everyone. Tomorrow it might be the time to notice a new groundbreaking book by a professor or a scientific discovery. A basketball game is fleeting.”

Maybe so, but on Wednesday, the university bookstore and apparel outlet was preparing to take the unprecedented step of producing commemorative T-shirts recognizing the basketball team’s Ivy League title. It has not done that for Lin, despite customer demand.

Harvard will find out on Sunday what team it plays in the tournament, but regardless of its opponent, it is likely to be an underdog.

Harvard tied for the regular season Ivy championship last season but lost a one-game playoff that decided the league’s automatic N.C.A.A. berth. The Crimson earned the 2012 title outright Tuesday when Penn lost to Princeton, falling a game short of Harvard’s 12-2 Ivy record.

Most of Harvard’s players watched the Penn-Princeton game in their dorm rooms, although the senior co-captain Oliver McNally said he missed most of it when he fell asleep after staying up all night Monday to write a paper for his American foreign policy course.

Energized by his team’s Ivy championship, McNally decided to walk across campus.

“People I didn’t know were stopping to congratulate me,” McNally said. “My teachers were sending me e-mails asking about the N.C.A.A. tournament. I remember thinking: This wasn’t happening four years ago when nobody on campus knew any of us. We had zero impact then.”

The Harvard team before McNally and some of his senior teammates arrived had an 8-22 record. This year’s team was 26-4. Coach Tommy Amaker, now in his fifth year at Harvard, recalled that when he took the job, he would occasionally run into someone who, upon hearing his occupation, would remark, “I didn’t know Harvard had a basketball team.”

Asked before Wednesday’s team practice if someone had said that to him recently, he smiled, “I haven’t had that lately, no.”

Part of Amaker’s success has been convincing top high school players in all parts of the nation that Harvard does indeed play college basketball at the highest level.

McNally, for instance, initially declined to visit Harvard as a high school senior. Finally, after having narrowed his recruiting choices to colleges near his California home, he flew east to Massachusetts, but only because his parents insisted.

“I ended up committing to Harvard during my visit,” he said. “It’s an impressive place, and Coach Amaker made a good case that it would be fun to build something new at Harvard. It’s been great to watch so many people come together and be engaged.”

His co-captain, Keith Wright, agreed, to a point.

“It’s not like I walk into a classroom and everyone starts clapping,” Wright said. “It’s still Harvard. People clap for A’s on a test, or want to.”

To Drew Gilpin Faust, the Harvard president, the basketball team’s significant accomplishments this winter include drawing together a diverse campus populace.

“The team has been a real community building force,” Faust said. “It’s a tribute to the notion of the student-athlete, and it’s happening at the same time as the phenomenon of Jeremy Lin, who was on this team just two years ago and was fully a student here.”

Faust has attended several Harvard games this season, sitting behind one of the baskets — often a serious fan’s choice — in the small, old-fashioned pavilion gym where Harvard plays its home games. She said that her husband was a diehard basketball fan and that the game had deep roots in her family.

But now Harvard’s basketball team will travel to one of the biggest stages on the annual American athletic calendar. People around the country will learn that Harvard has a basketball team, and that it won 26 games — some of them against ranked teams.

Was Faust worried that people might start thinking of Harvard as a jock school?

Laughing, she said, “I think we’re pretty safe on that account for a while.”

Jess Bidgood contributed reporting.

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アメリカに春の訪れを告げるNCAAトーナメント。それに殴りこんだハーバード。初戦は、現地時間3月15日ニューメキシコ州アルバカーキで行われるヴァンダービルト大学戦。

ヴァンダービルトは、南部のハーバードと呼ばれる大学で、バスケットの強豪。ちなみに、東部トーナメント16校のうち、ヴァンダービルトは第5シードで、ハーバードは第12シード。勝つのは相当大変。でも、応援したくなります。

なお、上の記事のヘッドラインは、「ハーバード、希少科目に遭遇」とでも訳すもの。何せ66年ぶり。ハーバードは、この科目でAを取ることができるのでしょうか。