THWACK! THUD! Tom Lincoln, a senior fullback, saw McInally kicking and asked what was going on.

"Do you know Tony?" McInally said, referring to the kicking specialist in Milford. "Well, he's convinced me I could kick soccer style. I'm the worst. I'm the worst in the world. I have no instep."

Lincoln delivered news about mutual friends--graduates, people with jobs, people at medical school. McInally was hungry for details, maybe because he now lives in a midwestern boondock through which few Harvard paths cross. Cincinnati is not New York or Washington, and if not for his roommate John Keogh, who works in Cincinnati for Procter and Gamble and once played second-string tackle, McInally would almost be starved for familiar faces.

His Cincinnati life has been sedate so far, partly because of the injury, but partly because he has wanted it that way. "Girls from the neighborhood come to our door asking to see the Bengal, the celebrity," says Keogh, who was here Saturday for the Dartmouth game. But he says McInally only talks with them and nothing more.

"I don't tap the resources I could," McInally says. "There are groupies. But I don't feel like going out with a quote unquote 'beautiful chick' who's eight on a ten scale." He laughed. It was a reference to a Crimson article last year that reported McInally liked to rate women according to their looks. He says now it was all a joke.

Even though he isn't an active player, McInally keeps a football schedule, working out every day with the Bengals. He says the players don't resent the elitism of his Harvard background. "They never hold it against a Harvard guy," he says. "I always feel they wish they could have had the experience I had. There's a lot of intelligence on the Bengals." The teasing he gets because of Harvard is good natured: Isaac Curtis calls him "The Wizard."

The camaraderie of the Bengals is the only part of pro football that has surprised McInally so far. He says the team has the esprit de corps of a college team. The same kidding around he remembers from Harvard football.

THWACK! THUD! McInally shook his head, upset that he still hadn't mastered the business of kicking soccer balls with his instep. He would practice a few with a football. "It's hard after all these years," he said to Lincoln and Brynteson. "And I was never coordinated."

"We all knew that. Pat." Lincoln said.

* * *

After the workout, McInally returned to take a shower in Brynteson's room; Brynteson stopped off at Elsie's to get his friend a Turkey Deluxe.

An hour later they were at the game, sitting high up in section 32 near Derek Bok and Edward Kennedy and other VIPs.

By the second half, with Harvard firmly ahead, it was raining hard. McInally's corduroy racing cap was soaked, and he tilted his program down every few minutes--"to drain it," he said.

"Boy it sure is raining," he said several times.

He was in a giddy mood, even though Bob McDermott had tied a record McInally shares for most touchdown receptions in one game (three).