Before I begin, I must take note of an article from The Dartmouth last Thursday entitled "Live free, get high in N.H.?" The representative initiating the bill was none other than the aptly-named Charles Weed, D-Keene, which begs the question: If your last name were Weed, wouldn't you find a different representative to introduce your bill proposing the legalization of marijuana? But I digress....
I will also start this week off with an award. The first ever "Most Underreported Dartmouth Sports Story of the Week Award" goes to Dartmouth men's soccer players Craig Henderson '09 and Daniel Keat '10 in their quest to reach the 2007 FIFA U-20 Men's World Cup. Henderson and Keat, both natives of Wellington, New Zealand, are competing for their home country and are just one win away from reaching this summer's tournament. In order to reach the big stage, all New Zealand needs to do is beat world soccer power New Caledonia, a country with approximately 237,000 people.
The FIFA U-20 men's World Cup will feature the top under-20 players in the world, and more importantly, will feature the one and only Freddy Adu. For those of you who have been living under a rock the last few years, Freddy Adu is a 17-year-old American soccer player whose age has been the subject of more jokes than anyone this side of Danny Almonte. He also became the youngest player ever on the U.S. National Team when he debuted last January. The tournament in years past has featured players like Diego Maradona, Luis Figo, Michael Owen, Ronaldinho and Lionel Messi.
But back to the Dartmouth connection to this story; Keat has four goals so far for New Zealand, while Henderson has also been starting for the squad. To get a little ahead of myself, this theoretically means that if New Zealand ever made the World Cup and the pair were promoted to the full squad, there could be TWO Dartmouth alumni playing. To put that in perspective, there were no Ivy League graduates in last year's World Cup, although Brown alumnus Cory Gibbs was on the United States squad until an injury.
This concludes our infomercial for the Dartmouth College athletic department. Moving to the broader world of sports, this last week was pretty ordinary. The first week of Super Bowl hype passed without any particularly noteworthy incidence, I think. I may have missed a few things as I wallowed in my bitterness over the current Super Bowl match up.
In the most puzzling announcement of the week, Pete Sampras has decided to come back and play in an over-30 tour against players like John McEnroe, Jim Courier and Michael Chang. There are many athletes from whom I expect repeated comebacks: Michael Jordan, Sugar Ray Leonard and Roger Clemens are three athletes whose retirement announcements need to be taken with a grain of salt. I never expected it out of Pete Sampras, a man who as much as he always seemed to love tennis, never really seemed to live and die with his sport the way so many other greats did. To be fair to Sampras, this is more of a glorified exhibition tournament than any real comeback.
Closer to home back here in Hanover, our men's basketball team split a pair of games against Ivy League foes Brown and Yale, evening their conference record at 2-2. Not only is this notable for a substantial improvement over last year's conference play (where the Big Green went 4-10), but they also have a better record in conference than the Dartmouth women's basketball team (who stands 1-2, with an overall 7-10 record -- identical to the men's). The two-time defending Ivy League Champions were 12-2 in conference play each of the last two years before this year's puzzling start to conference play.
Finally, since winter is now upon us (not the fake winter of December/early January), I want to close with a mention of real cold-weather sports. In past years, I have criticized schools like Columbia and Penn for their lack of a hockey program, but thanks to Dartmouth's location, we go above and beyond any other Ivy League school when it comes to cold-weather varsity sports. Not only do we have a cross-country ski team, but we have an alpine ski team too. Cornell appears to have a cross-county ski team (they have their own website), but it is not listed on their athletics website. This being said, I would like to salute the skiers in advance for convincingly winning the unofficial Ivy League title.
