Former Tackle Making A Difference

Thanks to a sharp-eyed reader who spotted an interesting story in the Washington Post built around the efforts of former offensive tackle Dave Murphy '91, founder of a food advocacy group. From the story:

Murphy, 40, runs Food Democracy Now out of his home in Clear Lake, a town of 10,000 that is a 90-minute drive from the nearest natural food co-op or Whole Foods Market. Though he is a fifth-generation Iowan, Murphy never saw agriculture as his calling. After college he moved to New York, where he got a master's degree in creative writing. When writing novels wouldn't pay the bills, he moved to Washington and found a job as a technology consultant at the Department of Labor.

Murphy was a three-year letterman under Buddy Teevens at Dartmouth. At 6-foot-4, 250 pounds he played on both sides of the line, earning second-team All-Ivy League recognition as a senior for helping the Big Green win the Ivy League title. Murphy was part of a line that helped Dartmouth have two of the three leading rushers in the Ivy League (No. 1 Shon Page and No. 3 Al Rosier) and claim its first Ivy crown in eight years.

With the Dartmouth track team at the Arizona State Invitational yesterday was sophomore placekicker Don Kephart, who competed in the discus, hurling it 143-05.

If you happened to be channel surfing yesterday afternoon, you may have stumbled across former tailback Chad Gaudet and the top-ranked University of Virginia lacrosse team taking a 10-9 seven-overtime victory against Maryland. Watching the game go on and on, I joked that University of New Hampshire ice hockey fans were getting hotter and hotter as the scheduled broadcast of the UNH-North Dakota NCAA game kept getting delayed by lacrosse. That game wasn't joined until midway through the second period, but the joke was on me because viewers who stuck around until the hockey game came on were in for a treat. Trailing by a goal with 5.7 seconds left and the season hanging in the balance, UNH came out of a time-out and, unbelievably, knotted the contest with one-tenth of a second left. The Wildcats then moved on with a goal in the first minute of overtime.

As if that weren't drama enough, I had the laptop updating the Dartmouth-Penn baseball doubleheader while I was watching hockey and there was plenty of drama there as the Big Green rallied from five runs down in its last at-bat of the opener. A three-run homer by James Wren with two out in the seventh tied the game and Dartmouth put it away with six runs in the first extra frame. The Green then took the nightcap, 9-6. Dartmouth visits Columbia for a twinbill today in a rematch of last year's Ivy League Championship Series.