Ivy Leaguers Gone Wild: Squash Edition

Not everything in sports is about Tiger Woods and his porn star girlfriends. So if you're getting tired of steroid cheats, drug admissions, bad sportsmanship, threats at line judges and just plain bad people in today's sports world, let me offer a safe spot for a breather.

Ivy League squash.

That's right, squash. Frasier Crane used to play it with his brother Niles.

It's a civilized sport for civilized people, so you can relax and watch two snooty schools face each other. Say, Harvard and Dartmouth. They played last week, in fact, and how did it come out?

Well, the Dartmouth president apologized to the Harvard president about it. The parents of one of Harvard's players are upset over comments from the crowd taken as anti-Semitic slurs. Some of Harvard's female players sought protection from an assistant coach, feeling threatened by the calls of "slut" and "whore."

And of course, the captain of the Dartmouth soccer team issued an apology.

I'm pretty sure this was the plot of every movie I saw in the late 1970s and 80s, where the snobatorium gets overrun. The soccer players and also members of the Alpha Delta fraternity watched the match and caused the trouble. They say now that they were out of their social understanding with squash, but just trying to show support with their heckling.

Apparently, today, "Go team" has become "You $%$$# sucker."

It just so happens that that frat house at Dartmouth was the inspiration for the movie Animal House. I'm not making that up.

If they ever make Animal House II, this could be a great scene. Here's what happened: At the match, roughly 300 people showed up, roughly six times the usual number. Theoretically, students had decided to let off steam on the last day of classes.

Dartmouth's athletic director, Robert Ceplikas, told the Boston Globe that the large crowd surprised the school, so it didn't have enough security on-hand.

We all know how rowdy squash fans can get.

Roughly 10 students heckled big-time, relentlessly for an hour-and-a-half. Homophobic, sexist, possibly anti-Semitic, f-bomb-filled heckling. The fans sit so close to the players in a tight area that there's no tuning it out.

At one point, a fan reportedly sat next to a player who was watching a match and put his arm around her.

Harvard player Franklin Cohen was told he had small genitals, called a coward and a despicable human being and asked if he likes bagels. His mother took the bagel remark as anti-Semitic, but members of the heckling group said it was a reference to his score. In tennis, for example, a score of 6-0, 6-0 is called a double-bagel. Cohen, however, won.

His parents were also asked if they taught him to cheat in business.

A Dartmouth soccer player told the Valley News, a New Hampshire paper that first reported the slurs, that he and his teammates were simply trying to copy the atmosphere they see at soccer games on the road. He said they didn't realize how bad that would look in such a closed-in area.

"We don't know the etiquette," Bryan Giudicelli said. "So it came off much harsher than we intended it to be."

Let this serve as a lesson to today's youth, then: Screaming that someone is a "$#%^&head" is not acceptable behavior in squash.

In soccer, no problem.

The captain of the soccer team, Dan Keat, issued an apology that included this: "The Dartmouth men's soccer team have taken full responsibility for our actions and this experience has made us think more about sportsmanship, spectator standards and, specifically, how we can ensure that these ideals are upheld in the future at Dartmouth athletic events."

In Animal House, Tim Mattheson played Otter, who claimed to be pre-law, B.S.ing his way through everything.

Know this: Ivy League schools think they're producing our future leaders.

Does this mean we have officially infected the last clean spot in sports? Jay Coakley, sports sociologist at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, thinks that was done a long time ago. He wasn't surprised by this.

"Generally there's some confusion in this culture about which norms apply in various sports contexts," he said. "Fans have been encouraged through the years from announcers at live events to media commentators to try to influence the outcomes of matches.

"As long as there's enough people there for social contagion to occur, emotions get passed back and forth. Social contagion doesn't know social class and social context."

Everyone has issued apologies over this, including Dartmouth president Jim Yong Kim, Ceplikas the athletic director, the soccer team and Alpha Delta frat house.

Harvard's women and men won easily that day.

And the Valley News asked Ceplikas if any students would be punished. He said it was school policy not to make such punishments known publicly.

In other words, they're on double secret probation.

Email me at gregcouch09@aol.com