[Vision2020] Turning Losing Into a Science

[Tom Hansen]

>From the "Life of Reilly" by Rick Reilly in the January 6, 2006 edition of
the Sports Illustrated

 

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At Caltech, the most eggheaded college in America, they love numbers the way
moles love dirt, so here goes: 

 

Number of Nobel Prize winners on the faculty: 5. 

 

Number of players on the basketball team who had a perfect SAT score: 2. 

 

Years since the hoops team won an NCAA game: 12. 

 

Forget that. It's been 21 years since Caltech, a Division III school in
Pasadena, won a Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference
game. Wouldn't you think just once a ball would bounce off a pocket
protector and in for a win? 

 

"We think too much," says Roy Dow, the Beavers' coach. 

 

That's true. Every player on the team can tell you the optimum launch angle,
parabola and velocity of a three-pointer. They just can't make one. 

 

Not that Caltech doesn't have a rich athletic tradition. During halftime of
the 1961 Rose Bowl thousands of kids in the Washington student section were
duped into holding up flip cards that they thought would spell out HUSKIES
but instead spelled caltech. At the 1984 Rose Bowl, Caltech students hacked
into the scoreboard by remote and changed it to read Caltech 38, MIT 9.
There is a T-shirt you can buy in the university bookstore that reads
CALTECH FOOTBALL: UNDEFEATED SINCE 1993. Possibly because Caltech hasn't had
a football team since 1993. 

 

But winning games instead of mocking them? They'll find the 10th planet
before that happens. (Oops! A Caltech professor just did that.) 

 

Do you have anyidea how difficult it is to get decent basketball players
into a school this hard? 

 

"I search all around the country, trying to find a few good players who
could get in here," says Dow, who has eight high school valedictorians on
his squad, "but as soon as I hear they've gotten a B, it's, 'See ya!'" 

 

Only six guys on his roster even played varsity ball in high school. Nobody
on the team got an offer to play from any other college. None has dunked in
his Caltech career. 

 

The team's best player, senior Jordan Carlson, who's a theoretical physics
major, figures he does schoolwork 14 hours a day. What's so important at
school? "Well," he says, "an interesting question we're studying now is how
mass is generated in terms of quantum field theory." 

 

Oh, sure, the Kentucky players were discussing that the other day. 

 

In his four seasons Dow has seen it all. One kid closed his eyes when he
shot. One didn't know if he was left- or righthanded. One current player
puts topspin on his jumpers. "Must be some sort of physics I'm not aware
of," Dow says. 

 

So I went to Pasadena last week to see the Beavers put their epic losing
streak on the line against Rivier College of Nashua, N.H. Three things you
notice right away: 

 

1) Caltech has the world's most optimistic statistician. The stat sheet has
a column titled WINNING STREAK. That's like Paris Hilton keeping track of
how many Oscars she's won. 

 

2) Caltech players are so skinny they look like they could be knocked over
by a butterfly's burp. 

 

3) Caltech has no cheerleaders. But wouldn't it be great? 

 

Molecules, slide rules

Watt, ampere!

Fill that cylinder

With that sphere! 

 

But the Beavers do hustle, make smart passes and run their motion offense as
smoothly as a gyroscope. That's how, with 90 seconds left, they actually led
Rivier by four. And the only thing the crowd could think was, O.K., which of
these brainiacs is messing with the scoreboard again? 

 

Alas, Rivier started pouring in threes, and Caltech started spitting out
turnovers, and when Carlson's last-second 30-footer just missed, Caltech had
lost its 181st straight NCAA game 55-54. (The Beavers have since lost two
more.) 

 

Hey, at least it was close. Two years ago they lost by an average of 59
points a game. "Winning any single game at Caltech," Dow says proudly, "has
gone from impossible to improbable." 

 

Not that it made the pizza afterward any easier to swallow. "I thought we
were going to give you something to write about," Carlson said glumly. 

 

You get the feeling, with kids as smart as this, they will. As an opposing
player -- whose team had just slaughtered the Beavers -- said as he shook
each Caltech player's hand, "Now go cure cancer for us."

 

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Take care, Moscow.

 

Tom Hansen

Moscow, Idaho

 

 

"Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving
safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in
sideways, chocolate in one hand, a drink in the other, body thoroughly used
up, totally worn out and screaming 'WOO HOO. What a ride!'"

 

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