Racquetmen Do It Again, 9-0

What can you say about a 9-0 squash match? That Captain Bill Kaplan wore his customary light blue shirt and watch (the latter is customary, not light blue). That Mike Desaulniers still has baby fat. That Scott Mead has yet to have a game go into double figures.

These and other highly relevant facts surfaced in Hemenway yesterday afternoon as the Crimson racquetmen made it three for three--three matches, three shutouts--against a pretty good Williams squad.

Ephmen?

Unfortunately for the Ephmen (where do they dig up those nicknames, anyway?), pretty good against Harvard only means that you win two games all afternoon, and while Ken Ehrlich's 3-2 triumph tripled the number of games that the Crimson has relinquished all season, the record still stands at 81 up, three down.

So let's just say that for the third match in a row, Harvard casually flexed its racquets. The season doesn't really begin until February 5 at Princeton, and with Dartmouth, already an 8-1 loser to Williams, in Cambridge on Saturday, you might as well make that four in a row, and take off now for the weekend.

Some things, though, lie buried beneath the one-sidedness of the final score. Everyone knows, for instance, that Desaulniers is a freshman, a Canadian and the best squash player in the school.

But rare is the individual who also knows that Desaulniers a) is the only player on the team to attend high school, and b) is prone to blood blisters, against which he had to contend in yesterday's 15-7, 15-7, 15-3 victory. "The blisters are a result of the fact that Mike still has baby fat on his fingers," Coach Dave Fish said after the match while practicing with Mead.

Mead, though, needed little practice. For the third match in a row he held his opponent in single numbers (15-4, 15-2, 15-9), and only Kaplan and John Havens, the latter playing in the number four position after a Monday challenge loss to Mark Panarese, allowed less. For Havens, undefeated at two last year, playing in the fourth position is as strenuous as passing up a meal in one of the Houses.

As for Kaplan, well, some things just never change, like the color of his shirt and the watch on his wrist. Why the watch? "So I can see what time it is between the second and third games," he said--at exactly 5:43 p.m.--after a 15-7, 15-4, 15-3 thriller. And why the shirt? Skip it, that's why.