The Baltimore Game

For former Oriole Superstar Frank Robinson, who is now with the California Angels, the return to Baltimore's Memorial Stadium for the first time in two years was something of a homecoming. Less than two miles away, however, Johns Hopkins University was host to Navy in another homecoming game that outdrew the Orioles at the gate-- 8,200 fans to 7,177. Robby and the Orioles need not have felt slighted. The big campus contest was nothing so mundane as baseball. It was America's oldest organized sport: lacrosse.

Ever since the ancient Indian game was introduced in Baltimore, it has been as much a local institution as crab cakes and H.L. Mencken. Each spring the city's schoolboys break out their lacrosse sticks the way kids in other cities limber up with Louisville Sluggers. At Johns Hopkins, foremost of the more than 100 U.S. colleges now competing in the sport, lacrosse is the No. 1 athletic attraction, drawing twice as many spectators as football and basketball combined. Thus it is no surprise that the Blue Jays enter the first round of the N.C.A.A tournament this week with a strong chance of winning their 30th national lacrosse title.

Lacrosse, as one aficionado puts it, is "basketball played on a football field with a club and a slow whistle." The ten-man teams are constantly on the move, passing and catching the hard rubber ball in the triangular nylon net at the end of their sticks. The game puts a premium on speed, deception and the kind of guts it takes to run a gauntlet of flying sticks and wing the ball at the 6-ft.-sq. goal at 100 m.p.h.

The modern version of the game follows the spirit if not the rules of the old tribal pastime. Called lacrosse by French missionaries because the curved hickory sticks reminded them of a bishop's crosier, the game as played by Iroquois braves or Blue Jay undergrads is more riot than religious rite. Civilization and 300 years have brought such refinements as helmets and shoulder pads. Even so, the basic game plan still holds that the next best thing to scoring a goal is ad ministering a crunching body check. Johns Hopkins Coach Bob Scott, a former Army ranger, says that football has its more jarring moments but that "lacrosse is rougher than any other sport, including hockey."

At most Johns Hopkins' homecomings, the old grads gather in the Lacrosse Hall of Fame, which is attached to the fieldhouse, guzzle National Bohemian beer and reminisce about the glory years, like 1932 when the Blue Jays won the Olympic lacrosse title in Los Angeles before a throng of 80,000. The beer was flowing as usual this year, but the talk was about Junior Jack Thomas, an All-America who is considered the school's most explosive scorer since Assistant Coach Joe Cowan starred for the old blue and black in the late 1960s.

Thomas, nicknamed "Popeye" as much for his heroic feats afield as for his jut-jawed resemblance to the cartoon character, was too much for the real-life sailors from Navy. Though off his customary dodging, quick-cutting form, the wiry (5 ft. 11 in., 170 Ibs.) Thomas scored one goal, set up four others and scooped up twelve ground balls--a skill roughly akin to recovering a fumble in a free-swinging football pileup. Backed by Goalie Les Matthews, who made twelve saves, and Defenseman Jim Ferguson, who meted out his share of bruises, the Blue Jays outlasted the midshipmen 12-7 to register their ninth consecutive victory.

For Thomas, whose father is a high school lacrosse coach in the Baltimore area, it was back to the drawing board --the family's dining-room table in Towson, Md. There, like retired British officers re-enacting the Boer War, the Thomases use ten salt shakers to diagram new plays. Young Jack, who quarterbacks the Johns Hopkins' football team mainly because he wants to stay in shape for lacrosse, explains that "I'm not interested in anything else. We Thomases just go to school to play lacrosse and then to coach. It's like a religion."

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