CROSBEE – A LETTER PUBLISHED IN SI IN APRIL OF 1975 ABOUT A HAVERFORD SCHOOL LUNCHTIME GAME

DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF THE LATE TIMOTHY LING CLASS OF 1976 GOALKEEPER SCHOLAR ATHLETE BUSINESSMAN FATHER HUSBAND CLASSMATE FRIEND TIM WE WILL ALWAYS MISS YOU ATHLETIC HALL OF FAME MEMBER 1974 & 1975 UNDEFEATED SOCCER TEAMS, HAVERFORD SCHOOL

In 1974-75, my classmates at HAVERFORD SCHOOL had evolved a new kind of game to play at lunchtime using the lacrosse fields adjacent to the old Upper School.  It used a FRISBEE and the object was to advance the FRISBEE and throw it into the LACROSSE NET past the opposite.  The resulting game was aptly called CROSBEE.

It became very popular and nearly everyone was playing nearly every day.  What the internet has brought to light is that in April of 1975, I and my kid brother JOHN KYRIAZIS (who was also attending HAVERFORD SCHOOL) co-wrote and had published in SPORTS ILLUSTRED MAGAZINE a short letter about CROSBEE AND HAVERFORD SCHOOL.  The letter appeared in the section then known as “The 19th Hole”.  The letter and website follow:

April 07, 1975

19th Hole: The Readers Take Over

Edited by Gay Flood

SI VAULT

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1089715/2/index.htm

CROSBEE AND GUTS
Sir:
We thoroughly enjoyed the article by J.D. Reed on Frisbee as a sport (“They Are My Life and My Wife”, Feb. 24). At the Haverford School, which we attend, Frisbee has become much more than a lunchtime amusement. Our game is called Crosbee, and there is nothing like it outside of our school. It is played four men to a side, on a 60-by-40-yard field, and the object is to throw the Frisbee into the opponent’s goal. The rules are simple: the man with theFrisbee is allowed to run, unless he is touched by an opponent, in which case possession changes. To forestall a touch, players can pass off or “down” the Frisbee by putting the disk on the ground and tapping it-Play then stops for a moment, whereupon the player can pass off or run again, although he cannot shoot from a downed position. A toss out of bounds results in loss of possession. The goalie, who mans a 6-by-6-foot lacrosse net, can come up on offense when his team has possession of the Frisbee.

A mixture of lacrosse, hockey and Frisbee, Crosbee is fast and furious. A Crosbee Intramural League has evolved, complete with Saturday schedules and playoffs.

ARTHUR KYRIAZIS
JOHN KYRIAZIS

I played lacrosse six years at Haverford, socer six years, captained an intramural hoops team that won the championship two years in a row, and prior to attending Haverford was on a football team that had been county champions two years in a row.  Yet, at Haverford, due to the incredibly great athletes we had there, I was considered only average in my athletic abilities.  I was a starter in lacrosse at Haverford for three or four years before the bigger faster guys started taking over; I was a hard worker and a team player.  I didn’t crack the starting lineup in soccer; everyone was too good.  In the winters, aside from hoops, I also played squash, and in the falls, some tennis besides soccer.  We had a lot of great tennis courts and superb old style squash courts with the old style rackets and the old style balls.

But what was terrific about sports at Haverford was that your coach was also your teacher.  In lacrosse, my coach was also my upper school  Latin teacher; in soccer, the coach was my middle school Latin teacher;   our squash supervisor was my upper school English teacher.  Our basketball preceptor was our middle school social studies teacher, later a noted attorney on Wall Street.  We forged strong bonds with our teachers on the athletic fields and in the classrooms.

Years later, when I read “The World According to Garp,” I instinctively understood exactly what John Irving was referring to with regards to the wrestling room; wrestling was like a religion at Haverford School, and yet it was conducted in a small, hot as an inferno room in an old gym which must have dated back to the 1920s.  A room where the School had gone undefeated in league matches for twenty-five years, a record of excellence that will never, ever be matched.  Wrestling at Haverford–man, that was something you WATCHED.  Our wrestlers were so, so good.  They just destroyed opponents.  Our wrestling team never lost a match in league play the whole time I attended Haverford for six straight years.

Our soccer team was undefeated my sophomore, junior and senior years.  Our football team was undefeated my seventh and eighth grade years.  Man, we were really, really good.  Our squash and golf players were the envy of not just Philadelphia, but the entire east coast.  Our squash and golf teams routinely beat COLLEGE teams in exhibition matches.  We had a squash player, Neddie Edwards, who later dueled for years with Harvard’s Mike DeSaulniers for #1 and #2 on the pro squash tour.  The number of golf pros and golf course designers who have graduated our classes is staggering.  Our annual alumni golf tournament–let’s just say you’d better practice before you show up.

Crosbee, though, was sheer fun.

We honor our great athletes at Haverford School annually with an Athletic Hall of Fame Dinner.  Tonight’s dinner will be the tenth annual such dinner, and I am proud to say that I was on the Alumni Board @ fifteen years ago when the idea for such a dinner was first proposed, and I was immediately one of the first and most ardent advocates for it to be pressed forward.  Many more worthy than me have pressed on and we now have a very distinguished group of alumni who serve on the HOF committee as well as on the selection committee.  It is so fulfilling to be at the birth of something, and to watch it grow into a full grown teenager and adult–sort of like raising your own child. This is one of my deepest and proudest accomplishments, that I in some small way, contributed to the Alumni HOF dinner at Haverford School.

It is now one of our most popular alumni events, and we have been honored and graced by many great athletes.  I especially wish to mention the late Timothy Ling 76′, who was goalie on those undefeated soccer teams, later a distinguished executive at UNOCAL who pioneered their East Asian resource exploration programs.  Mike Mayock 76′, who has served with distinction on the HOF committee for many years and also serves as once of the lynchpins of the NFL Network, as well as being the pride of BC football, and proudly, a former NY football Giant.  I once watched him drop 26 points in a 12 year old hoops game–out of 33 total scored by the team.  The 1974 and 1975 soccer teams which were recently inducted into the HOF–the entire class of 1975, as well as the class of 1974–were amazing, and role models for us, the class of 1976.

The Ancient Greeks said that proper training included a sound mind in a sound body–mens sana in corpore sana was the latin term.  To this day, the word “gymnasium” means high school in modern Greek, and “athletics” means sports.  The fact is, there is no separating the training of the mind from the training of the body.  We bond on the field, we bond in the classroom, we bond in the boardroom, we bond on the golfcourse.

This is the World According to Garp.  This is the World I Knew, and I praise the Lord for it, and thank all my dear classmates, coaches and mentors for it.

–art kyriazis

haverford school 76′

The Late, Great Timothy Ling

Obituaries

January 30, 2004|Elizabeth Douglass | Times Staff Writer

Timothy Hugh Ling, president and chief operating officer of Unocal Corp. and an active member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn. board, died Wednesday after an ice hockey workout in El Segundo. He was 46.

The cause of death was not immediately known, and an autopsy will be performed.

Ling spent six years at the El Segundo-based oil company, initially as its chief financial officer, then as executive vice president of Unocal’s North American operations, and finally as the No. 2 executive and a member of the board of directors.

The pianist, singer and cellist loved music so much that he knew the performers and would leave concerts “absolutely glowing,” according to Deborah Borda, president of the L.A. Philharmonic Assn. As a member of the group’s executive committee, “he was a gifted strategic thinker and had a real impact,” she said.

A native of Philadelphia, Ling won a hockey scholarship to fund his high school education at the Haverford School. In 1982, he earned a degree in geology from Cornell University.

While working as a geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, he met Kimberly De Mello, whom he married in 1987.

Ling earned an MBA from Stanford University in 1989, and hoped to create a small oil company with friends. Instead, he spent seven years as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. in Los Angeles, becoming a partner and co-writing a management book called “Real Change Leaders” before leaving for Unocal in 1997.

Despite frequent travel, Ling was a mentor to children from the urban core, helped with Boy Scouts, coached his eldest son’s ice hockey team and was active in the Young Presidents’ Organization.

In addition, Ling was a director of Maxis Communications, a Malaysian wireless service provider; a director of the American Petroleum Institute and the Domestic Petroleum Council; and a member of an advisory board for the Department of Energy. He was also on the management board for the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and a member of the Haverford Leadership Council.

“He was just a huge bundle of energy,” said friend Jamie Montgomery of the investment banking firm Montgomery & Co. “He helped everyone, everywhere along the way.”

In addition to his wife, Ling is survived by their three children, Hudson, 7, Tommy, 4, and Peter, 2, all of Pacific Palisades; his parents, Gilbert and Shirley Ling of Marion, Pa.; his sister, Eva Monahan of Wynnewood, Pa.; and his brother, Dr. Mark Ling of Atlanta.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that any donations be made to the Tim Ling Memorial Fund, St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church in Pacific Palisades, or to the Tim Ling Scholarship Fund, in care of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn.

http://articles.latimes.com/2004/jan/30/local/me-ling30

cf http://www.palisadespost.com/obituaries/content.php?id=130

AVARITIA BONA EST – THE NEW PHILADELPHIA SOCCER FRANCHISE TRIES TO SPEAK LATIN—AND GETS IT WRONG, OF COURSE….

With great fanfare, the organizers of the new MLS Soccer Franchise for Philadelphia unveiled their team logo on Monday of this week, an event which was duly reported in the various sports pages of the local newspapers.

The organization which is promoting the new soccer franchise appears to be a group of overweight, entirely male surburban white men, who have absolutely nothing to do, and who have organized themselves into an organization for the promotion of professional soccer in the Delaware Valley/Philadelphia/South Jersey area, known as the “Sons of Ben.”

I only mention this parenthetically, because as it well known, most people who attend soccer games are world/ethnic—they are Latino, Italian, Greek, Caribe’, whatever—anything but white suburbanites.

If these fat white suburban guys driving SUVs buy season tickets to professional soccer, I’d be greatly surprised—and if they do show up, they’ll find a league composed almost entirely of foreign players, for the most part, with a few Americans sprinkled in for show.

Not to mention a stadium full of ethnic segments waving various flags of different countries for their favorite players from those countries, whether it’s Brazil, Germany, Greece, Holland or wherever.

It won’t be the U.S. Flag, I know that.

The Beckham experiment in LA is pretty much par for the course, except that it proved that MLS soccer is so far below the standards of English Premier League, that a guy like Beckham isn’t worth having on your team—it’s like playing Alex Rodriguez in sandlot ball. He doesn’t really help you because people just pitch around him, since all your other players are awful.

Let’s get to the awful LATIN. The logo for the new team is as follows:

PHILADELPHIA UNION
(Picture of Snake)
Jungite aut Perite

see also, the team’s new website,

http://www.philadelphiaunion.com/

which also displays the mistaken latin phrase “Jungite et Perite.”

The organizers assured the press conference that the snake and the latin phrase “Jungite aut Perite” were taken directly from the Newspapers of Benjamin Franklin, and that the phrase means “Join or Die,” and the snake represents the Join or Die emblem employed during the times of the American Revolution.

Ok, except for one huge problem. As Henry Beard, author of “Latin for Even More Occasions” (Villard Books, NY, 1991), states at p. 111 of his very humorous book,

“CONSONANTS….”

“J, W AND Y don’t exist in Latin.”

Beard, Id. at p. 111.

There is no letter “J” in the Latin language.

I believe what the Sons of Ben meant to say was the following:

“IUNGITE AUT PERITE.”

Latin for All Occasions by Henry Beard

As is well known to those of us who have either studied the arcana of the Latin language for several years (I won the Latin Prize at Haverford School) (twice, actually) (now I’m just showing off) (thanks to Steve Dall, by the way, a great Latin teacher), or have gone to Catholic School and been forced to take Latin,

THERE IS NO J W OR Y in the Latin alphabet.

The letter J is approximated by the vowel combination “IU” as in “Iuno,” “Iuvenal,” and so forth.

Thus, there actually was no “Julius Caesar.” His name was “Caius Iulius Caii filius Caii nepos Caesar Imperator” (see wikipedia article on “Julius Caesar”) meaning “Gaius Julius Caesar, son of Gaius, grandson of Gaius, Imperator”. See? No “J”.

Gaius Iuilius Caesar

Thus, in Latin, there would be no “Dr. J”, only a Dr. “Iulius”

And you couldn’t jam the ball, you could only “iuam” the ball.

anyway, I think you get the fundamental point–there is no “j” in latin, either in the alphabet or in the everyday usage of the language. All of the “J”s you see in modern day latin (as when you see “Julius Caesar”) are added as approximations to the ancient lation usage of “Iu” for “J” which is the proper latin.

Now let’s see if the “Sons of Ben” (none of whom claim any actual lineage from Ben Franklin) actually know their Latin:

Iungite, “Join!”, is the plural imperative form of iungo, with principal parts iungere, iunxi, iunctum, “I join” (from which we get many english cognate words such as “conjunction” or “injunction”). The imperatives are “iunge”, join!, singular, addressed to one person, and “iungite”, join!, addressed to two or more persons. (See J. Wohlberb, 201 Latin Verbs, Barrons, NY, 1964, at pp. 94 & 63, the verbs “iungo” and “eo”) (see infra).

See? No “J” in “Iungite”. “Jungite” is just plain WRONG. The proper word is “IUNGITE”. That would be RIGHT.

Are these guys morons or what? Maybe they should try speaking latin in a Latin American soccer league! (I shudder to think what their spanish or italian is like).

Clearly, no matter how much money the Sons of Ben spent on their advertising, logo and presentation budget, it wasn’t enough.

I, along with numerous others like Victor Davis Hanson, have been lamenting the deconstruction and utter loss of the classics, e.g. the loss of the required learning of Latin and Greek for many years now; here is a pertinent example of WHY everyone should known Latin and Greek.

End of Sparta by Victor Davis Hanson

It is completely embarrassing that a major sports team should hold a press conference, insert a logo on their press team that draws from the Latin language, and then GET IT WRONG, when simple fact checking with a high school latin teacher could have straightened them out.

Here was an opportunity to show lots of schoolchildren that latin still matters–but the growups get it wrong. how embarassing.

On the rest of the slogan, they’re ok—aut means “or,” and “perite” is the plural imperative of “per-eo”—I kill—the root verb being “eo, ire, ii or ivi, itum,” with imperatives “I and ite” singular and plural—you just add per- in front of those to get “per-ite.” (201 Latin Verbs, id., cited supra, p. 63).

I guess I conclude here with a translation of the title of this piece, which was supplied by Mr. Beard—”avaritia bona est” can roughly be translated as “greed is good.” (The slogan from “Wall Street”, 1980s, Charlie Sheen, Michael Douglas). (see Beard, id. at p. 14).

Here some other great latin sayings from Beard (id. at p. 24):

Tu, rattus turpis! -
You dirty rat! (Jimmy Cagney)

Ei fer condicionem quam non potest repudiare –
Make him an offer he can’t refuse – Vito Corleone, the Godfather (Marlon Brando)

Age. Fac ut gaudeam. –
Go ahead. Make my day. Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood).

Fuit mulier quae me potare egit. Nunquam steti gradum ad ei gratias agendas. –
It was a woman who drove me to drink. I never stopped to thank her. (W.C. Fields).

Fasciculum nicotianum fumificum meum quoque amo, sed aliquando eum de ore extraho. –
I like my cigar too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while. (Groucho Marx).

See you all in remedial Latin class!

Art Kyriazis, philly/south jersey
Home of the World Champion Philadelphia Phillies