Home of the Braves

By way of celebrating King George III's 25th birthday, the Chippewas and Sacs in 1763 got together for some in tertribal bagataway -- lacrosse,* in pale face language -- outside Quebec's Fort Michilimackinac. Invited to watch the fun, the Fort's entire garrison gathered on the sidelines. Whereupon the braves dropped their bagataway sticks, grabbed their tomahawks, and staged one of the bloodiest massacres in Canadian history.

Hardly anybody gets killed at lacrosse any more. The sport, Canada's official national game, is played also at Oxford, Cambridge and 90 U.S. colleges (mostly in the East) including girls' schools, notably Smith College. The basic principles have changed little: using netted sticks to carry or pass a small hard-rubber ball, two ten-man teams attempt to shoot it into the opposing goal; as in soccer, only the goalkeeper may take the ball in his hands. Nowadays the players wear helmets, masks, pads and gloves, and it is no longer good form (or legal) to bash an opponent on the head, Indian-style. Nonetheless, players generally indulge in subtle forms of intimidation, such as clouting each others' funny bones or jabbing for the groin.

Signs of Spring. The U.S. capital of lacrosse is Baltimore, which has been in love with the sport since 1878, when a track-and-field team returned from Newport, R.I., with news of a "most activating and exciting new game." To a Baltimorean, the first signs of spring are the dents made in auto fenders by kids practicing passes. Lacrosse is a major sport at most of the city's public and private high schools; and one or another of three Maryland colleges (Johns Hopkins, the U.S. Naval Academy, and the University of Maryland) has won the national championship in all but four of the past 20 years.

Baltimore's pride is the team fielded by the Mt. Washington Club--an organization of old braves, some of whom have been out of college for ten years or more. The coach is a torts lawyer, the star attack man a 33-year-old insurance broker; there are also two stockbrokers on the squad. The club pays no salaries, awards no letters, has never even got around to hanging the framed team photographs in its red brick clubhouse five miles from downtown Baltimore. Practice scrimmages are studiedly informal: the losers buy the winners beer. "We just have a good time," says Coach Ben Goertemiller--at the expense of the nation's best college teams. Since 1946, the Mt. Washington Wolfpack has won 185 games, lost only nine. Last season they were undefeated; this year they have already knocked off Virginia (20-8), Johns Hopkins (13-8), Army (15-14) and the Washington, D.C., Lacrosse Club (15-4). Their only loss: to Collegiate Champion Navy, by the score of 11-10.

"Go, Biddison!" For Baltimoreans, last week was typical, if slightly incestuous. Hopkins clobbered Army 6-3, and Navy beat Maryland 13-7. Meanwhile, at Baltimore's Kid Norris Field, named for an old midfielder who played 15 seasons for Mt. Washington before hanging up his stick, the Wolfpack took on the Long Island Lacrosse Club. Elegant women urged on Baltimore's heroes with cries of "How to hook it, Buddy!" "Man on your back, Larry!" and "Go, Biddison!" When an injured player staggered over to the bench, Equipment Manager Spike Watts prescribed his standard treatment: merthiolate for a minor wound, Band-Aid for a bad one.

Mt. Washington started out feeling kindly toward their visitors; by the time they got mad, they were trailing 2-0. They got quite mad. The final score was 18-6, and the two teams adjourned to the clubhouse to spike a keg of beer.

* So called originally by French Canadians who thought that the stick used in the game resembled a bishop's crosier.

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