Fusion on the Rocks : When Caltech and MIT Meet on the Ice, Theories Melt

Something new in the world of sports rivalries: Caltech and MIT hockey.

Although it got off to a rugged start Wednesday night when the MIT Beavers beat the Caltech Beavers--more about Beavers later--for the first awarding of the Beaver Cup by a score of 11-3, this little College Bowl With Teeth shows real promise.

Not often, for example, has sheer intellectual superiority, and all its attendant bad feelings, been given so violent an arena. The young scientists are allowed sticks, for goodness sakes. And not to compute logarithms either (slide rules/ sticks, circa 1952; there is much to footnote throughout this story).

Oh, it’s an ugly thing to see. Disabuse yourself now of the notion of nerds on ice. The fellows do not come to the rink and stow their Hush Puppies and plastic pocket protectors, then tranquilly skate figures in front of the goal, idly dreaming of black holes. They’re thinking black eyes, is what they’re thinking.

Of course, when you think about it, what should you expect of men who fool around with atom smashers all day. We may give our scientists entirely too much credit for a higher sensibility, in fact. The dominant cheer Wednesday night in the Pasadena Center seemed to be “hit ‘em.” It’s particle physics on a grand scale is all.

But we don’t want to make too much of the violence. There were no bench-clearing brawls, after all, no blood, and the fights were of the incipient kind. Just getting going. A lot of unexpected gusto, yes, but no felonies.

Anyway, the real surprise may be that there is such a thing as a Beaver Cup. For some of you, the surprise may be that Caltech has a hockey team.

Well, it’s not that much of one. Hockey is only a club sport, with hardly any university support at all. Ice time is so hard to come by that the team has only one practice a week, unless it has a game. Still, for the budding geniuses from the Northeast and Canada, all lonesome for the feel of ice beneath their blades, it’s a nice little diversion.

“It’s a good way to blow off steam,” said Martin Brouillette, a doctoral student in aeronautics from Quebec. “You don’t think about shock-wave theory on the ice. You break sticks, get into fights, all the things that make hockey a great game.”

This year Caltech has a roster of 19, up from the 7 or 8 who played last year. Of course, Caltech does not recruit strictly from within the student body. It’s different at Caltech. Graduate students are eligible. Professors, staff at the Jet Propulsion Lab, anybody in the academic community.

The player-coach is 38-year-old George Yates, a dangerous man to get started on fluid mechanics, which have nothing to do with maintenance of the Zamboni.

Yates’ being on the team is merely the weird extension of a weird Caltech tradition. For weird example, a Caltech janitor plays on the football team.

Still, it is clear that hockey is not the priority here. “It’s not like I came here on a hockey scholarship,” said Jim Bower, 33, a neurobiologist who just happens to lead the team in penalty minutes. One name on the roster suggests as much:

--Haj Sano, 5-10, 135, comp. graphics, Chelmsford, Mass.

It was Haj Sano, incidentally, who put this game together. Sano did his undergraduate and graduate work at the much larger MIT, known in these parts as the Caltech of the East, and played hockey there as well.

He kept in touch with friends and once suggested that they get together during spring break. The MIT Beavers took him up on this in a big way. They bought some max-saver tickets, booked free lodging on the Caltech campus and set out for a brave new world.

They were something of a sight, admittedly, wearing their “MIT Beavers Go Hollywood” shirts. They are not 100% science.

They are, however, a bigger percentage hockey than the MIT of the West team. The MIT Beavers have a big-time program, their own rink, a real coach, and satin jackets with “MIT Hockey” on the backs. They practice every day.

How big time is MIT hockey? They came with excuses! Their best players were off playing baseball, or rowing crew. Don’t these guys ever study?

Caltech, though a winner in the Southern Collegiate Hockey Assn., second division, was mostly out-manned for this one.

The night before the game, at a friendly barbecue for the visitors, who mostly sit and watch a hockey game on a big screen TV, there is not much sense of doom.

The Caltech players are cheerful enough, even patient enough, to explain themselves to an outsider. It takes some patience, too.

Brouillette, who also plays football, is explaining his area of expertise.

“You sure you want to hear this?” he says. “OK, it’s what happens when you accelerate two gasses of different density into each other. Laser/fusion physics. You know what fusion is, right? So, I have this ‘shock tube’ three stories high and use these shock waves. They compress the light gasses into the denser ones, in shells the size of grains of salt . . . “

Brouillette, it develops, is very much into compression. Although he plays quarterback on the football team, he prefers to be known as the team’s middle linebacker.

“I love to hit,” he says.

The more you know about these people, the scarier it gets.

He claims that he fits into a certain personality profile on this team.

“The most scientific guys want to make it less scientific,” he allows.

Bower, the aforementioned penalty king, would have you believe otherwise, but then its possible he’s into leg pulling.

Bower, whose work on sensory motor systems applies zilch to hockey--”no practical application whatsoever”--says that the game is nevertheless incredibly cerebral at Caltech. He uses the word cerebral about nine times.

“The locker room talk, for example. It’s different here than in the standard locker room,” he says. “Less grunting, perhaps. Less talk of women and body parts.”

Really? What then does a Caltech player talk about?

“Oh, radians and arcs. It tends to get technical, it’s the nature, a lot of cerebral type of drive.”

Still, is there a locker room humor, even at Caltech?

“Oh, the wit is something else. Recently somebody was quoted as saying the puck moved at a speed of relativity and passed a Newtonian goalie.”

The resulting lull in conversation seems to take him aback.

“Of course, that’s not the full quote,” he adds quickly. “The full quote, with Lorenz’s Law, is much better.”

Bower goes on: “A nice thing about hockey, the cerebral aspect to it. You get smarter, control the number of variables, all the specific points you can be on the ice, depending on who’s occupying the other nine positions . . . “

But you do lead the team in penalty minutes?

He smiles proudly.

Meanwhile, Yates, the kindly coach, has been asked about his field, fluid mechanics.

“Like fish swimming, how do they get propulsion,” he begins, suddenly sounding like Carl Sagan. “We thought there was a lot to learn from the creatures . . . oh, I could go on for hours.”

He talks a bit more about the physical properties of waves “on a more geophysical scale” and then kindly moves on. “Sorry, we do talk a lot of shop.”

Of course, the other big talk at Caltech is about pranks. Pranks have been institutionalized at Caltech to the point where there is such a thing as Ditch Day, a day devoted to the construction and solution of locked doors.

Dwight Bergk, a freshman who is fairly worked up at the prospect of Ditch Day, is lamenting the failure of a recent prank, a blimp over the Super Bowl. We agreed not to discuss it in detail but the prank literally never got off the ground. It’s considered a major setback at Caltech.

“From what I hear,” Berg is saying, “UCLA or Michigan, somebody like that, is planning a prank for the Beaver Cup.”

“I know,” volunteers Brouillette. “Some UCLA football players will come in and tear up the scoreboard and go ‘ha-ha.’ ”

Caltech does not take UCLA real seriously.

For the time being, that is the principal anticipation of the game. Oh, the small rink will be full this time, not just the five or six kids who come for all Caltech’s games.

“They do a nice wave, though,” says Berg of the faithful.

They must do it very slowly, it is suggested.

“Well, resonant wave theory and all that . . . but the crowd will be ugly, I’ll guarantee that. It couldn’t get much uglier.”

The game itself turned out to be something of a letdown.

UCLA students did, in fact, pull a prank. They sneaked into the Pasadena Center Ice Chalet and painted “UCLA BRUINS” on the ice. This was considered extremely lame. The Zamboni took it off in one pass.

The crowd was no uglier than any other and nobody attempted a wave, or anything else.

MIT, meanwhile, was clearly the better team on ice. They spent a lot of time digging their noses out of the boards but still managed to pile up goal after goal. It possibly reflected a catastrophic game plan by Caltech.

Watching MIT fire and fire upon the goal, we were reminded of something Brouillette, the middle linebacker, had said the night before. “They are too small. We will scare them at the start of the game, hit them hard, make them think.”

Swell idea, Martin. Make MIT think.

So the Beaver Cup, named for all engineering schools where the industrious beaver, builder of dams, stands for construction ingenuity, goes East for its first year.

Next year, though, the Caltech guys certainly will think of something. It’s what they’re good at.