Varsity Blues Showdown Erupts at Harvard
The Harvard football team must be really good -- because beating reigning Ivy champ Brown on Saturday 38-21 with this bullshit in the locker room is truly a feat.
We just got off the phone with Keegan Toci's dad, and the guy is pissed. With good reason. Toci, you'll recall, is the senior wide receiver that head coach Tim Murphy fired earlier this month after the team's annual Skit Night. The sketches at these things can get pretty raunchy -- was Toci behind the one that implied a player had given Murphy a blowjob? No, that was running back Clifton Dawson, who's still on the team. KeeTo's big crime? Um ... listing 20 reasons the team would never move up to Division I-A. God, Keeg, what were you thinking?
Coach Murphy's reaction was swift and insane. In a special meeting in front of the entire team, he canned Toci for his "mean-spirited attack." That's when things totally turned into that locker room scene at the end of Varsity Blues, the Boston Globe reports:
"After Murphy announced Toci's dismissal, he asked the 110-member team whether it supported his position. An uneasy silence ensued, then one player after another rose from his seat until about 20 stood in protest, with others apparently poised to follow, before Murphy abruptly ended the meeting and left the room, according to one witness."
Coach Murphy may well be out of control. Remember that he also benched Liam O'Hagan, the starting quarterback, for half the season and has never told anyone why.
Now Toci is appealing to the university for reinstatement. He didn't answer our calls, but his dad did: "'Unacceptably malicious?' This is coming from a man who called a team meeting and called my son out and humiliated him in front of 104 peers -- said he was 'a cancer to the team' and said he 'needed to be removed' -- this man is saying that what my son did was unacceptably malicious?
"Harvard's 'Academic and Community Standards' says that the central value at the university is the protection of free speech and inquiry. Apparently Murphy hasn't read that. ... We're not going to let this go until Keegan's name is cleared."
(Murphy and athletics director Bob Scalise didn't return calls we made late Sunday to their offices. They've never gotten back to David Toci, either.)
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November 18th, 2006 at 12:44 am
Are the “brown” links suppossed to look exactly like the text? What happened to the blue? And the green banners? This sucks.
August 29th, 2007 at 1:21 pm
Tim Murphy is a wack-o! His players hate him with a passion, and only come there to play, and continue to play because of the Harvard education. If it was any other school, Murphy couldn’t attract a soul. He is hiding behind the Harvard name, but the players suffer under his wack-o behavior in his self created empire. He enjoys mind games, silent treatment, and public humiliation. His assistant coaches come and go like rental cars. Don’t let your sons endure this misery.