Coming... and... Going...

Enter: Jack Reardon, Frank McLaughlin.

Exit: Tom Sanders, Joe Beaulieu, Baaron Pittenger.

Exit, then re-enter: Robert Watson, Jim Curry.

If ever a Harvard sports year could have pleaded insanity, the one just past was it. Sixty Boylston St. resembled Dresden that night in '45, and the phrase that pays was taken from an old Tom Kennedy game show. "It's not what you say that counts, but what you don't say."

The participants who starred in these mini-dramas are today scattered this way and that. Some remain, some are long gone, most wish they had taken the year off. As for the particulars, well...

JACK REARDON is one who stayed. A former associate dean of admissions and current director of athletics had one of those years you wouldn't wish on a section leader.

Reardon should have been named athletic director last winter; instead he was appointed last week. That was just the beginning, thought, for while the ex-Crimson football manager no longer has search committees to deal with, dissatisfied athletes and meddling alumni can prove equally painful.

BAARON PITTENGER should also have been named athletic director last winter. At least he or Reardon should have. Only one man could get the call from the bullpen, though, and when Manager Bok motioned in that direction, Pittenger was not the one he called.

As a result, the man who has called 60 Boylston home for longer than the Minnesota Vikings have been alive now resides behind a Park Avenue desk at U.S. Olympic headquarters, where he is the number one publicity honcho. Not bad, but not what he wanted, either.

The third actor in the athletic director drama, ROBERT WATSON, is finally being allowed to retire come February. Perhaps not as gracefully as he had hoped when he announced his original decision to step down last October, but for the former Harvard dean of students, that house down on the Cape must finally seem real.

FRANK McLAUGHLIN came from Notre Dame this summer to coach basketball. If Jimmy Carter moved to Bermuda to govern, the change would be no more dramatic.

McLaughlin has his hands full. The basketball program is in a sorry state, and while the ex-Fordham star has the intensity and know-how to win, he doesn't have the talent. Good luck, Frank, you'll need it.

TOM SANDERS now has the talent, and in his new role as assistant coach on the Celtics, maybe his low-key approach will be appreciated. At Harvard, Satch was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. A winner in the pros, Sanders was a loser in college.

After Sanders' departure, another soon followed. When JOE BEAULIEU came here last fall, he was accompanied by enough press clippings to satiate an Arthur Fonzarelli ego. When he transferred to Boston College last month--after being asked to withdraw from Harvard for a year for academic reasons--his star was no longer rising. Neither was the basketball program he had come to rescue.

1976-'77 wasn't the best of times for JIM CURRY, either. Exactly a year ago, after starring for two years and one game as a wide receiver and kicking specialist at Harvard Stadium Curry suddenly left school, taking with him Crimson hopes to repeat as Ivy champs.

Twelve months later he is back, and what that could mean on the gridiron this fall is a story for another day. As far as 60 Boylston St. is concerned, they're just happy to have made it to another day. Make that another year. The last one wasn't so hot.