MIT is a very tough school for athletics because the students who take athletics seriously have no time to practice. So MIT does not field a lot of Division 1A teams. However, MIT regards athletics as part of the education. If you can gather enough people to form a team, MIT will provide equipment, facilities, and coaches. Thus MIT usually leads the nation in the number of active varsity sports.
MIT also required four terms of participation in sports as a degree requirement. This was usually fulfilled by taking a variety of classes — swimming, archery, sailing, etc. In addition, every MIT student must pass a swimming test, probably because MIT is concerned with students falling off the Harvard Bridge and drowning. (That was not really a problem back then since the Charles River was so polluted you could walk on it.) I recall my swimming test where one kid who could not swim decided to fake it by walking along the bottom of the pool. With this caliber of student athletes, it is hardly surprising that MIT teams were not known for their winning ways. (Actually, MIT has produced a surprising number of All-Americans in sports like pistol shooting and track & field.)
P1, P2, and I took an archery course. We didn’t do really well because it was outdoors and we were trying to see if we could reach the grounds keeper riding a mower about a hundred yards behind the targets. MIT was not that dumb; the heaviest bow they provided was only 36 pounds, which wouldn’t quite reach. However, that class resulted in one of my favorite P1 stories. P1 was not a big guy, maybe 160 lbs. and 5’10”. He had selected the heaviest bow. A big guy, in the 6’2”, 220 lb. range was stuck with a 30 lb. bow and wanted to trade for P1’s 36 lb. bow. P1 didn’t want to trade, and the guy said that P1 was too small for the bow. P1 fits an arrow and holds the bow horizontally while he pulls the string back. As it happens the arrow is pointed right at the guy’s navel. P1 says, “Seems OK to me.”
P1 may not be big but he is the toughest guy I know. He played goalie for the PK hockey team. No one on the PK hockey team could skate backwards, so there was a notable lack of defense in front of him. Nonetheless, P1 played without a mask. P1 was also a stalwart of the Iron Eight, our intramural flag football team, as our center. A lot of living groups took sports a tad more seriously than we did. We played teams whose guards outweighed our whole team. One game we had to push the opposing ball carrier over the goal to avoid losing 69-0. (It was good training, though. When MIT broke intramurals up into A and B divisions, the Iron Eight ended up winning B.)
Then there was the Paradise Cafe softball team that played in the MIT Summer League. It was made up of several students on the Ten Year Plan for graduating who hung out at the Paradise Cafe, appropriately located across the street from MIT’s nuclear reactor and the Atomic Diner. (The Atomic Diner had the only short order cook in the world who took his lunch break from 12-1.) The team also had ringers who never attended MIT but worked around MIT. It was actually a very good team and dominated the Summer League for years. I was the weak link because I was overseas when US kids played baseball, and I learned field hockey and soccer instead. However, I had a lifetime batting average over .750 because I choked up on the bat so much and swung so late that I kept hitting Texas Leaguers into right field over 2nd base. Alas, my fielding lacked finesse, largely due to my being in the Paradise Cafe three hours before game time. One day I was playing 2nd base and a guy hit a shot right at me. I took a bit too much time analyzing the trajectory and it knocked my baseball cap off. That got me relegated to being 1st base coach.