Brown's sports coaches have found out the hard way that things don't always work out in real life like they do in the movies. Over the summer, the University's athletic staff attended an athletic film festival, in search for inspiration, But so far this year a few Hollywood gambles have gone terribly wrong.
In the football team's final game of the season, the Bears built up a 21-0 first-quarter lead against Columbia. Thinking this was a substantial lead, Head Coach Phil Estes sent in the practice squad seniors to play on the defensive line, in the final game of their collegiate years, and put the team's water boy at inside linebacker. Columbia quickly got back into the game and Estes forsook the "heart and soul" approach for a more pragmatic "pecs and abs" lineup.
Fans were understandably befuddled as to why the coaching staff made the substitutions in the first place. They found their motivation, according to Estes, in Henry Winkler's character from the movie "The Waterboy."
"Look, Henry Winkler is my hero, okay? What do you want from me?" said a rather peeved Coach Estes, sipping on a can of Tab. "When I was a kid, I wanted to be the Fonz, so as an adult, why the heck shouldn't I want to be Coach Klein?"
The baseball team had an equally fruitless search for an unlikely hero in its quest to repeat as Ivy League champions. Last season the team got an unexpected boost from a supposed pair of angels whom, by the end of the season, as many as five players claimed to have seen at all of the team's home games. This year, though, Head Coach Marek Drabinski was hesitant to bank on supernatural help and the team's prospects looked especially bleak after five players were banned from NCAA competition for use of illicit psychedelics. The team got what it thought was a stroke of luck when an assistant coach found a new hard-throwing pitcher.
"I was watching 'Rookie of the Year' on my car's DVD player on my way home," said the coach, who wished to remain anonymous. "I guess I must have taken my eyes off the road for a second, because next thing I knew there's this twelve-year old kid on the ground clutching his right shoulder. And I said to myself, 'Here's our new ace!'"
But one inning, 12 runs and a river of tears later, the kid was headed back to Little League, with a consolatory stop for ice cream on the way.
Still, these don't compare to the gaffe of men's basketball Head Coach Craig Robinson, who stated to the media back in the fall, "This team is just one golden retriever away from a championship."
The dog got off to a good start and established a great rapport with his teammates, who all agreed that he was "just the cutest thing." But in the contest against Cornell, the team's luck ran out. Restless from eight hours in a travel crate and full of pent-up emotion, the dog lunged at the referee after a questionable charging call and drew blood from the official's right hand.
Though the NCAA rule book does not explicitly mention nipping, the team's new star was assessed a flagrant foul and was ejected from the game.
Following the game, dejection and concern was written across the face of each player, but Robinson attempted to calm them, muttering that the dog would "probably be sent to a big farm or something," while avoiding eye contact.
Surely, this experimental year has had a few bumps along the way for Brown athletics, but there's still a lot of excitement ahead, including a Brown coed hockey exhibition match against a tough squad from Iceland, which is coached by an actual dentist.
