To the Editor:
Perhaps in his little corner of the Dartmouth world, everyone he knows is a "hyper competitive freak" ("Laser Tag -- More Than a Game" Jan. 6) and aims to outdo his fellow student. Maybe for him it would not be an intellectual stretch to "load that gun with real bullets" when one's future is at stake.
But rest assured, there is a minority on this campus who is simply glad to be here. I, and many of my compadres, do not feel that in order to gain something here, we have to take it away from anyone else. The reason Dartmouth is such a special place to so many people is that there is so much to be gleaned from it by everyone.
Kelly has it wrong when he says, "We were there to have fun, but everyone wanted to win." More correctly, it should have read, "We were there to win, but everyone wanted to have fun." Would an activity like Laser Tag have brought out the number of students it did, all knowing full well that half of them would only get one match, if it were not fun?
Had Kelly been where far too few Dartmouth students were on Friday night, at the women's basketball game, he would have seen the true spirit of competition: women from two seemingly cutthroat competitive colleges working together towards a common goal with unfailing intensity, coming up with the extra energy needed to meet their goals in overtime, then shaking hands, showering, and getting on with their lives. No one sits around at the end of a basketball game thinking, "I hope I can beat that point guard to the internship at Deloitte and Touche like I beat her to the loose ball tonight."
