A Treat for Mr. Letterman

Crimson in Triumph By Joe Bertagna '73 Stephen Greene Press; 365 pp.; $39.95

THERE'S ALWAYS been something wonderful about working backwards, something almost deliciously sinful.

Like eating dessert before eating your vegetables.

Like watching Hogan's Heroes reruns on TV before studying for finals.

Like reading the last page of a book before reading the main text. Or something like that.

The magic--and tinancial potential--of the backwards maxim has not been lost on Joe Bertagna '73, one-time Harvard hockey goalie and Harvard sports enthusiast.

You see, Bertagna recognized that scores of current and former athletes would pick up his Crimson chronicle at the bookstore and flip straight through to the end.

Hence 69 pages worth of "Major H Winners" at the back of Crimson in Triumph--69 pages worth of subliminal, ego-buttering hard-sell.

Now nobody's going to go back and eat their lima beans after the apple pie.

But after Mr. Letterwinner '57 takes his personal copy home--and after the allure of seeing his name in immortal print wears off--he had better turn back to the beginning of Bertagna's book or risk missing out on a visual and historical treat.

Lest anyone forget, the book's title is drawn from the fight song "Harvardiana," a ditty by Raymond G. Williams '11:

With Crimson in triumph flashing, 'Mid the strains of victory,

Poor Eli's hopes we are dashing into blue obscurity.

Lest anyone care, Raymond G. Williams never won a Major H.

However, sandwiched between Harvardiana and Hubris-iana are the exploits behind the Major H's. An introductory chapter on "Harvard and the Ivy League," sections on individual sports, short features on outstanding athletes and coaches, and scores of photographs fill the pages of Bertagna's captivating history.

Meet Percy Haughton, Class of 1889, an All-American tackle and football coach from 1908 to 1916, looking like a face out of Brideshead Revisited. Meet Bill McCurdy--McCurdy to his friends--who molded the track program for 30 years. Meet the Cleary brothers, the Hughes brothers and the Fusco brothers, maintaining a tradition of sibling-led excellence on the ice.

Bertagna manages to transform 250-odd pages of encyclopaedia material into attention-grabbing vignettes. Nonetheless, a few questions peek through the pervading glow.

Why, for instance, do 90 pages elapse before a two-and-a-half page segment on women's ice hockey marks the first piece not to concentrate on male athletes?

And have swarms of angels really peopled the playing fields across the River for the past 134 years?

Then again, Crimson in Triumph is more of a mentality than a chronology, with "Triumph" the key word.

What self-respecting alumnus gives money, year-in and year-out, to a losing cause. Like it or not, success and its fellow traveler, money, have always been the standards by which sports are judged.

Thus football and hockey--the two big revenue generators--fall first in the anthology, and each receives two or three times as much coverage as basketball, with its history of poor finishers and sparse attendance.

But Bertagna does not neglect the outstanding individuals behind both the successes and the failures. It is their story--their triumph, if you will. And Bertagna's as well.