For God, for Country, and for Phil

Phil Moriarty was introduced to the crowd. The soft-spoken Yale coach, his hands shoved characteristically deep into his pockets, graciously acknowledged the applause. Then, over 2,200 spectators at the University's Kiphuth Exhibition swimming pool wildly chanted "Phil" for the next ten minutes. Coach Moriarty paced along the pool deck as he had so many times before. But this occasion, as everyone present knew, was different from all previous ones. The date was February 28, 1976. It was the final meet of the season; on this day, Phil Moriarty was to end his forty-four year coaching career at Yale. Appropriately, Harvard was his team's opponent.

The noise in the natatorium was deafening. It was reminiscent of the decade before when Yale teams collected four national titles. The fans that were packed into the amphitheater brought to mind an ancient Roman audience, lustily awaiting a gladiators' fight to the death. The huge throng, which included Yale's president Kingman Brewster, ranged from students to professors to alumni of all ages--some dated back to the class of '09. One of the many banners draped around the pool read "For God, for Country, and for Phil."

In the emotion of the moment, one might have easily forgotten that this Yale team was 6-6 on the year, and 1-6 in the Ivy League. The previous year, Yale's swimming team had suffered its first losing season in the sport's sixty-five year history at the school. What's more, Yale had lost badly to Harvard four years in a row. Harvard, on the other hand, brought a three-year, twenty-six meet undefeated streak into the contest.

Still, this was Harvard and Yale, an intercollegiate swimming rivalry that dates back to 1907.

Before the meet began, both teams waited nervously in their separate locker rooms. This is where the psychological warfare begins. Here, swimmers and coaches say the final words of preparation. Taylor McDonald, then a junior business major, remembers the pre-meet ritual: "Phil came in for a very brief moment before the meet. He was very taken by the thing. There was just a tremendous amount of feeling in the room. But no one quite had the capacity to put it into words. There wasn't much that had to be said, anyway. We all knew that we had to win it... for Phil."

After the coach had spoken, the team convened a closed meeting. It was the only meeting of its kind during McDonald's Yale career. Again, little was said. The team sensed they owed Moriarty this one. Bob Blattner, the team's captain, said there would be three magnums of champagne waiting for them at Davenport if they won.

The idea of having "A Final Tribute"--as Moriarty's last meet was billed--had originated the previous summer. Ed Bettendorf, the team's articulate assistant-coach who had swum for Moriarty six years before in Yale's heyday, had first mentioned the plan to the squad. Speaking to the team during its annual "Cake and Coke" organizational meeting in September, Bettendorf said: "On February 28, 1976, Yale swimming will meet Harvard. It is Phil's last dual meet, and it is fitting and proper that Yale will be victorious. It matters very little that Harvard has the strongest team in their history and we have you, the team the experts pick to finish last in the league. We will win."

Seven months and twelve dual meets later, the day had arrived.

The Yale team filed out of the locker room onto the pool deck. The scene that erupted could have happened in a Spanish movie, just after the matador had made a daring pass. Over two thousand spectators, who had been primed for this moment by a week-long publicity blitz in the school's newspaper and posters all around campus, exploded, as if on cue. Each swimmer received a noisy standing ovation as his name was announced to the crowd. The cheering culminated in the ten minute tribute to Coach Moriarty.

The crowd then broke into a thunderous chant of "YALE!" which delayed the beginning of the meet for fifteen minutes. Taylor McDonald, who was preparing to swim in the first event, calls it "the scariest moment of my life. The noise was so loud," McDonald recalls, "that I had to shout just to get Phil's attention."

The 400-yard medley relay (which consists of 100 yards of each stroke--backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, and freestyle) pitted the Harvard team of Jim Pyle, Mike Haywood, Mark Kein, and Malcom Cooper against Yale's foursome--Quentin Lawler, Chip Tom, Taylor McDonald, and Hank Hook. McDonald, now a corporate planning officer for Republic National Bank in Dallas, recalls the almost hysterical crowd: "I got up on the blocks for the relay and they started chanting our names in unison," remembers the handsome, dark-haired McDonald. "Nothing like that had ever happened to me before--two thousand people chanting my name. I was so psyched, I felt like crying."

Quentin Lawler, the fifth of sixth brothers to swim for Yale, had been told in the locker room that he had the honor of being the first swimmer in Moriarty's final meet. Responding to this distinction, Lawler gave his teammates a body-length lead. Tom's strong breaststroke leg, followed by McDonald's swift butterfly swim, gave Hook the lead after 300 yards. He blazed home in 45.4, nearly five full seconds ahead of the Harvard team. Yale's time--3:31.9-lowered its year's previous best by six seconds. The fans, many of whom had feared they would have little to cheer about after the lineups were introduced, roared their approval.

It was the old Yale, but could this unexpected magic continue?

The next event, the grueling 1,000-yard freestyle, matched Yale's captain Bob Blattner against Harvard's distance ace Paco Canales. Blattner, when he'd first arrived at Yale in the fall of '72, had not been the ideal freshman candidate. At 6'4 1/2", 156 lbs., the stringy-haired native of Pittsburgh looked more like a pickup basketball player than a swimmer. In fact, Blattner hadn't planned to swim in college. "I wasn't very good," he was to admit later. "And besides, swimming in 1972 was definitely an uncool thing to do," Blattner said, in reference to the politically-conscious campus that was the Yale of the early seventies.

One man changed Blattner' s plans, though: That man was Phil Moriarty.

"When I showed up in '72 I was a pretty strange case," relates Blattner. At the time, he'd been drinking a lot--about a bottle of gin a day. Later that year, he began to write for the school paper, the Yale Daily News. "Phil really took me under his wing. He knew I wanted to be a writer, and he told me that I could be a writer for the rest of my life; but that I could only be a swimmer for four years."

Moriarty also has fond memories of the rather unusual friendship. "He' 11 make you scratch your head every once in a while," Moriarty said with a laugh, "but he's got lots of stuff."

That cold February afternoon, Blattner had a chance to prove his stuff. When he stepped to the blocks, the crowd bellowed its recognition of the campus's legendary hero. Most Yalies had heard at least one Blattner story. One of the best--a story that everyone on campus seemed to have heard--originated the previous spring. Nearly five-hundred Yale students had packed into the courtyard of Timothy Dwight Residential College (one of twelve student dormitories on Yale's campus) to watch the annual "gentleman's drinking contest" between Timothy Dwight and cross-street rival, Silliman. Drinking the most difficult "corner" position on the Timothy Dwight relay, Blattner had downed two eight-ounce beers in 1.7 seconds.

Unfortunately for the home crowd, Blattner found Canales's competition to be a little stiffer. Blattner controlled the race for the first 900 yards. At that point, Paco Canales, Harvard's more experienced distance swimmer from San Juan, Puerto Rico, stroked past Blattner. The crowd's disappointment best told the outcome. Canales out-touched Blattner by six-tenths of a second to grab first place.

"Now you guys don't have anybody left", taunted Harvard coach Ray Essix, as he heckled the crowd with the Nixon victory sign. "We've got you beat."

Essix had overlooked one detail in his otherwise accurate observation. It's unwise to wave a red flag in front of Billy Lindsay. Lindsay, a baby-faced, blonde-haired native of Walnut Creek, Cal., was Yale's number one entry in the next event, the 200-yard freestyle. The soft-spoken sophomore, on the rebound from a disastrous performance against Princeton the week before, knew that Yale needed a win here. "Since they used Canales in the 1,000, I had to win the 200," says Lindsay, now a second-year business student at the University of California at Berkeley. "I remember stepping up on the blocks and hearing the crowd," he adds, "but I don't think anybody really knew who I was."

Eight laps later, everybody knew who Billy Lindsay was. He led from start to finish, outdistancing Harvard's Haywood by nearly two seconds.

"The whole last lap, I kept looking back to make sure no one was catching up with me," says Lindsay, who is planning to marry his Yale-days sweetheart this coming spring. "When I touched the wall, I couldn't believe the noise." Neither could Harvard coach Ray Essix.

After the first three events, the cinderella Bulldogs led by seven, 16-9.

The next race was the 50-yard freestyle--the glamour event of college swimming. It is the equivalent of track's 100-yard dash, and the participants are just as eccentric.

Hank Hook, Yale's premier sprinter, had blonde shoulder-length hair, a 27-inch waist, a 46-inch chest, and the cold eyes of Hesse's Steppenwolf. And Hook always shook his opponent's hand before a race just to demonstrate his physical prowess.

But out of the water, Hook wasn't exactly a coach's dream athlete. The season before this one, Hook, without explanation, had hitch-hiked to Florida and missed valuable training sessions. This year, he'd taken three weeks off to complete work on an original rock opera. Moriarty, who recalls finding Hook playing his flute on the New Haven green on more than one occasion, now says with a laugh, "There aren't too many guys like Hook around--and thank God for that."

In a word, Hook is his own man. On this particular February afternoon in 1976, however, Hook was also Moriarty's man. For Hook wanted to win the meet for Moriarty just as much as everyone else on Yale's swimming team did.

Standing bowlegged atop the starting block, like a cowboy awaiting the draw, Hook broke the pre-race silence with his loud inhaling and exhaling of air. He then exploded off the start to take a commanding first-lap lead. Twenty-one and three tenths of a second later, Hook was floating on his back happily listening to the crowd's wildest response of the afternoon. "Hook, Hook" they chanted for five minutes in succession. The scene reminded assistant coach Ed Bettendorf of Yale's surprise win over Stanford six years before. It was, recalls Bettendorf, "the Stanford meet revisited."

Still, due to Harvard's 2-3 finish in the 50 freestyle, Yale had only a six point lead going into the next event, the 200-yard individual medley. Yale's entries in this race were Lawler, and senior Richard Eckerstrom. Lawler, Yale's strongest swimmer in this event throughout the season, was still tired from the opening relay, and fell off the race's pace. Thus, the Elis's hopes fell upon Eckerstrom, who, according to Blattner was "a flaky senior who managed to get to two or three workouts a week.

After an even first 50 yards. of butterfly, Eckerstrom and Harvard's O'Connell, both strong backstrokers, pulled ahead of the field. Then O'Connell opened up a lead during the breastroke leg, and held on for the win. Nevertheless, the little-known Eckerstrom who had only come out for the team a month before, grabbed second place. "I wasn't too gung ho on swimming that year," recalls Eckerstrom, who is now working for CBS records in New York. "I missed a couple of workouts by just lying up there on the high board, where Phil couldn't see me." Blattner, a close friend of Eckerstrom, and Coach Moriarty, had convinced Eckerstrom to swim just one more year. "Phil was such a great guy, such a kind man, that I decided to give it one last shot, Eckerstrom says now.

His unexpected performance served to boost the Elis's confidence. With Yale leading 24-19, Billy Lindsay now admits that he began to reconsider the meaning of an incident which had occurred the previous Wednesday. On that day, Coach Moriarty walked onto the pool deck for practice and sensed a certain tautness and tension in the air. The swimmers wanted to pull off the upset in the coming meet, but they doubted their abilities. "O.K., we're gonna' throw kicking boards today," the Coach had said, matter-of-factly. Kickboard throwing is a ritual that dates back to 1968 when Moriarty's squad was preparing for the national championships. As the legend has it, no one had succeeded in throwing a board all the way up from the pool deck to the top of the gallery since the time of Yale Olympian Don Schollander, in 1968. On the Wednesday before the Harvard meet, Moriarty handed a board to Bill Lindsay and asked him to try his luck. Lindsay took three steps and winged the board onto the indoor jogging track at the top of the natatoriurn. Lindsay's toss, like Eckerstrom's surprise second place finish, was according to Bettendorf, "one sign among many."

Yale's chances in the one-meter diving event seemed fairly dismal. Chab Betz, then a timid, 5 '6" freshman diver from Westfield, New Jersey, remembers the mismatch: "We hadn't been diving too well all year; and Harvard had Ted English--the previous year's Eastern champion on low board--and three other guys who were all stars. On paper, it was very one-sided."

Moriarty, who had coached the United States Olympic diving team in 1960, was no stranger to the sport. His joint responsibilities as Yale's head swimming and diving coach, according to Betz, "really served to unite the team." Moriarty had told Betz and sophomore Mike Dehn to try to "split" (place second, thus separating Harvard's first and third places) the Harvard divers.

Betz dove consistently throughout, and was hovering around second place after the completion of five dives. "It was an incredible experience to dive in front of that crowd," Betz says. "It must have added twenty points to my score. On that day, they would have applauded if I had landed on my back."

Moriarty chose to gamble on Betz's final dive, and suggested that he attempt a double-twisting one and a half (one an one-half somersaults with two twists)--a dive with a near maximum degree of difficulty factor. Betz received judges' scores of straight sixes on his final dive, and Yale cashed in on its gamble. Not only did Betz finish in second place, but Mike Dehn outpointed Harvard's Todd Cook, 238.15 to 237.90, to grab third.

Before the applause had subsided, Harvard countered with its most effective display of the afternoon. Taking advantage of Yale's conspicuous weakness in the 200-yard butterfly, Harvard's swimmers--Tetlow, Craig, and Holzinger--swept all three places to give Harvard the lead for the first time, 32-29. The butterfly win was Harvard's third straight, and Yale seemed to be losing its early momentum.

In light of these new circumstances, the next event, the 100-yard freestyle, involved a critical strategy decision. Should Yale use Hook to break Harvard's momentum or should Hook be saved for the last relay? Moriarty gambled again by holding Hook out of the 100. The decision rested upon McDonald's ability to "split" Harvard's sprinters, Neville and Cooper. McDonald got off to a fast start, and led after the first 50 yards. Then Neville, who had finished second behind Hook in the 50, churned out a strong last lap to tap McDonald, 47.9 to 48.0. Harvard's fourth straight win left Kiphuth pool strangely silent.

After the freestyle, Harvard led by six, its biggest lead of the afternoon. The Lawler-Eckerstrom duo was once again Yale's entry in the next event-the 200-yard backstroke.

The field's controlled, easy pace for the first 100 yards well suited the racing strategies of both Yale backstrokers, who preferred to accelerate through the second half of the race. At the halfway mark, Eckerstrom made his move; he stroked ahead swiftly, opening up a narrow lead over Lawler and Harvard's Pyle. But Pyle, in turn, regained the lead going into the last lap. With 25 yards remaining, all three swimmers were in contention to win the race. Eckerstrorn touched first at 1:58.5, Lawler was second at 1:58.7, and Pyle had to settle for third at 1:58.8. Eckerstrom didn't actually realize that he had won until Bettendorf descended upon him to shake his hand: "I just remember the powerful noise," said Eckerstrom, during a recent conversation in his New York city apartment. "Never before or since have I experienced anything comparable."

The second distance event was a Blattner-Canales rematch. It was a revitalized, confident captain who stepped up to the blocks for the start of the 500-yard freestyle. The sense of deja vu conjured up by the rematch epitomized the closeness of the day's contest. After nine events, only one point separated the two teams.

With Yale leading 40-39, Blattner was as relaxed as ever. "You don't even have to watch the race," Blattner told Coach Moriarty with a grin. "I've got this guy in my hip pocket." The lanky senior apparently knew what he was talking about. After opening up an early lead, Blattner decided at the 300-yard mark "to get the kids off the street." He accelerated out of the twelfth turn and pulled away from Canales. Blattner finished first, Canales was second, and Bill Lindsay third. Blattner, who is presently pursuing a second B.A. degree--this one in music at the University of California at Berkeley-admits: "Phil thought I was pretty funky after the 500."

Yale's 1-2 finish in the backstroke, followed by Blattner's win in the freestyle, dramatically changed the complexion of the meet. It was no secret to anyone present that the next event was Harvard's weakest. At this point, Bettendorf recalls, "even Harvard began to realize that the meet might be over before the final relay." The fans, many of them hoarse by now, sensed the nearness of the kill. David, in the guise of the surprising Yale team, pulled his slingshot taut. The Harvard Goliath stared in disbelief from across the pool.

The 200-yard breastroke was the meet's single event which, on paper, actually favored Yale. Harvard's standout breastroker had left school in December to train for the Olympic trials. His absence invited Tom Behlen's unexpected heroics. Behlen, a Biology major from Cleveland, Ohio, may have been Yale's least likely candidate for such a role.

Behlen, nicknamed "Babs" by his Yale teammates because he often babbled unintelligible scientificese, had been plagued by terrible allergy problems throughout his career. "He'd look like a million bucks in practice," remembers Coach Moriarty, "then he'd get sick, and fall flat on his face in the meet." The ups and downs of Behlen's health were matched only by his unorthodox bobbing breastroke style.

On the Saturday of the Harvard meet, there was nothing wrong with Behlen's health. It seemed more likely that something was wrong with the meet's electronic timing system. For Behlen stroked to first place, smashing his previous best time by nearly four seconds. It was a performance that Behlen would not even approach, again, in two subsequent years of swimming at Yale. Chip Tom, and Alex Rae-Grant completed Yale's 1-2-3 sweep of the event. The deafening shouts of "One-Two-Three" echoed and re-echoed. throughout the natatorium. Yale's side of the scoreboard ticked up to 54. The Elis were three points shy of a victory.

Now Yale's hopes rested precariously upon the shoulders of Mike Dehn, a 5' 8" diver from Oil City, Pennsylvania. Despite his Eastern origins, "Deana", as he was affectionately known to his teammates, seemed to be a Californian at heart. He painstakingly pursued the laid-back, West coast image, even amidst New Haven's long winters. Frequently skateboarding to class, and always the first to welcome an early spring by throwing off his shirt, Dean was yet another of the Yale team's anomalies. He had managed a third in the one-meter event, but much preferred the high board.

"The crowd was screaming every time I stepped on the board," says Dean, now an industrial engineer for IBM. "That had never happened before."

After completing five of his six dives, Dean knew that he was virtually tied for second place with Harvard's Johannigman. "My final dive was a reverse two-and-a-half--my worst dive", remembers Dean. "It wasn't like I had saved the cookie for the finale. It was the only dive I had left." Sensing the importance of the final dive, the audience cringed as Dean left the board. After what seemed to be an eternity, Dean's slight frame broke the water's surface.

The noisy crowd impatiently awaited the results. Before the scorers' stable made the official announcement, Bettendorf, who had been frantically computing the totals throughout the diving event, knew the results. The twenty-eight Yale swimmers who huddled around their assistant coach heard the words in a whisper. Tired, practically too hoarse to speak, Bettendorf quietly said, "Deano's second."

Bedlam erupted in the Kiphuth natatorium. The team members, many with tears in their eyes, screamed and danced about the deck like participants in some native ritual. The gallery, realizing the meet was over, came to its feet once again. Coach Moriarty, who had begun his association with Yale as a towel boy back in 1923, gave Bettendorf an emotional embrace. Harvard coach Ray Essix, who used to bring his New Trier high school (Chicago, Ill.) swimming team to New Haven for the high school national championships throughout the sixties, crossed the familiar deck to congratulate Moriarty.

As the celebration on the pool deck and in the stands continued, the Yale 400-yard freestyle relay team of McDonald, Blattner, Free, and Hook stepped to the blocks. It would be Blattner's last time to swim a dual meet in the Kiphuth pool. For all of the swimmers, the relay was a last opportunity to say thank you to Phil Moriarty. Bettendorf had spoken of that honor in his locker room speech before the meet. Clad in his traditional blue blazar, with a white Y stitched on the pocket, Bettendorf had told his swimmers: "Today, every mother's son has a chance to do what no one else will have a chance to--thank Phil on behalf of Yale Swimming. This should be the only thought in everyone's mind. For the first and last time, don't swim for yourself, but for one guy--Phil."

Miraculously, twenty-eight young men had pulled together to give Coach Moriarty the only fitting retirement gift. A gift for one man because of what he had done for so many. A telegram from Steve Clark, Yale's 50-yard freestyle national champion in 1969, expresses just how much Phil Moriarty meant to those who swam for him: "Phil is a man whose achievements stand far above those of the champions he has coached. Tonight, in my home, I will raise a silent toast to the man you are now honoring. And I probably will shed a tear that other swimmers will no longer be as fortunate as I was--no longer able to share the knowledge, friendship, and most importantly, the values of Phil Moriarty."

The relay was the last hurrah of the rivalry. The contest had been decided; only pride remained an issue.

Taylor McDonald's lead-off leg left both teams dead even. Then Blattner, who had persuaded Moriarty to put him 6n the relay only moments before, sliced nearly two seconds off his personal best to give Yale the lead. Tom Free handed Hook the lead intact. And Hook anchored the relay to his third first-place finish of the afternoon. The gallery had just enough energy left to elicit one huge, final roar.

"A Final Tribute" to Phil Moriarty had now been completed. The day was Yale's, as it had been so many times before, in the school's illustrious swimming past. The scoreboard read Yale 64 Harvard 49, and it was left that way for an entire week.