The Weekly Screed (#988)

Brusveen was here

by David Benjamin

In a period roughly between 1974 and 1983, I was an editor and columnist for the Mansfield (Mass.) News, where I served in a plethora of roles that included reporter, photographer and columnist. In the latter capacity, I wrote an opinion column called The Fourth Estate, a sports column called The Fifth Quarter and, later, a theater column — covering the stage in the Boston area — Expeditions. 

Thanks to my old News sidekick, Bill Breen, I’ve begun to recover some of those essays from an archive at the Mansfield Public Library. Most of my columns are best left buried in the library’s basement. But as Bill unearths these youthful indiscretions, I’ll be reviving a few of my better efforts here — with the caveat that they’ve been “edited for content,” mainly to alleviate the garrulity, arrogance and pretentiousness that marked my newspaper days. Here’s one:

(The Fifth Quarter, 29 May 1975) 

Perhaps more poignant than my departure from these pages, where I commune with cheerleaders and project myself into the heavy-breathing reaches of physical fitness, is the end of the high-school athletic career of Harvey Brusveen. 

To those who have faithfully read the box scores I’ve faithfully compiled since my first sports page some fourteen months ago, the appearance of the name Brusveen at the bottom of some opponent’s scoring total has been occasional, but steady — and entirely fictional. Harvey is a common sportswriters’ device, one of those phenomena — used to fill a gap in a statistical synopsis — that takes the place of an anonymous benchwarmer from Someplace Else who didn’t get his name on the program. 

For example, at the end of a basketball game in which the home team wins by thirty points, the last kid on the visitors’ bench — maybe a junior varsity scrub whose main job is to hand out Gatorade — enters the last minute of the game. He gets fouled and misses both free throws. His stat line reads “0-0/0-0/2-0-0.” He accomplished nothing but, by virtue of those two bricks from the charity stripe, he has blundered his way into the box score. The tyrants in re-write at the sports desk expect a complete box, which means that the stringer on the spot has to track down this nameless kid and append his John Henry to his stat line. If the kid can’t be found, well…

Harvey first saw the light of my imagination in the summer of 1966, when I found his slightly ludicrous name among the punchcards at the time clock in the Waunakee branch of the Oconomowoc Canning Company (producers of Teeny Weeny Peas).

Harvey lay dormant in my brain until 1972, when I was relaying a Beloit College football defeat — called in to me from Northfield, Minnesota — to a Rockford Morning Star deskman named Osborne.

“This eighth touchdown,” says Osborne. “Who scored it?”

‘‘Beats me,” I reply. “They didn’t know when they called me.”

“Well, we gotta have a name. Whaddya wanna call him?’’

I pause. 

Here I faced something of an occupational crisis. I was the cubbiest of cub reporters, instilled with the belief that — even in matters as insignificant as St. Olaf, 56, Beloit 0 — the news was the Truth. I was under the gun from a vastly senior journalist, weary, grizzled and in a hurry — asking me to invent a name where existed only a void. He needed me to “fill,” needed me to do it now and was willing — demanding — to accept a fib.

“Well, let’s see. Ah…” Into my mind crept the ghost of Teeny Weeny Peas. “Okay! Brusveen.”

“Spell that.” 

“B-r-u-s-v-e-e-n.” 

“Gotta first name for him?”

It was on the tip of my tongue, ready to come into the game.

“Harvey.”

“Harvey Brusveen. That’s pretty good.”

Osborne, whom I knew well, but only by voice, was not a guy to blithely toss off compliments. His approval was a moment of pragmatic fabrication that marked progress toward my admission amongst the sly brotherhood of ink-stained wretches. 

After that, Harvey had cameos in a couple more Beloit College football and basketball games, always for the other team, causing nary a ripple among the all-league choosers at the Milwaukee Journal. As a matter of sportswriting necessity, Harv then followed me to Massachusetts, adjusting humbly to his demotion from college to high school sports. He bided his time ’til this winter, when a box score came across my desk, compiling the results of an indoor track meet. 

In a 56-30 loss to Mansfield, North Attleboro High had won the high jump, but the winner had no identity other than “NA” (which I took to mean either “North America,” which hardly seemed applicable” or “not available”). Harvey, who proved himself eminently “available,” came to the rescue with a triumphant leap of five feet, six inches. 

Meanwhile, Harvey was also working out with Oliver Ames High School’s undefeated basketball team. He got into two games against Mansfield and racked up four points. Harvey also played a bit part on Franklin’s cage team, entering a game against Mansfield in the waning minutes, driving the lane and cracking the box score for another basket. He finished three games for two schools with a 2.0 average. Go, Harv. 

Along came the spring track and field season, where Harv again came through in the clutch. After a lightning transgender metamorphosis, he joined the North Attleboro girls team, placing second to Maura Tighe in a meet against Mansfield. Apparently weakened by his surgery, Harv couldn’t match his five feet, six inches of several months before, failing to beat Tighe’s victorious four-foot-eight leap.

Burning his candle at both ends, Harvey then reverted to his male persona and went out for baseball. In Canton’s 9-3 loss to Mansfield, Harvey went one-for-three for the Bulldogs. He also batted once, hitlessly, in Oliver Ames’ 8-5 victory over the Hornets. Alas, this ineffectual at-bat was Harvey Brusveen’s last hurrah. An eternal vagabond, he returns with me now to the Midwest, destined never to be a-first-stringer and leaving behind him — scrawled in invisible ink on the walls of a dozen locker rooms — three enigmatic words: “Brusveen was here.”