RINK RAT IN CHIEF?(The Talk of the Town)

John Kerry's prep-school alma mater, St. Paul's, is sometimes known as "the cradle of American hockey." There, in Concord, New Hampshire, on the black ice of the Lower School Pond, boys from the school's three intramural clubs--Old Hundred, Delphian, and Isthmian--gathered to play shinny as far back as Reconstruction. One legend holds that the first-ever organized hockey game--south of the border, that is--took place at St. Paul's, in 1883. Well into the twentieth century, the school continued to groom the ice on the pond--eight, maybe ten rinks' worth--using a sort of horse-drawn Zamboni.

Senator Kerry, for those not paying close attention, has been lugging his bag of sweaty gear--skates, garter belt, mouth guard--around the country, making pit stops at ice rinks along the way; he is the first hockey-playing Presidential candidate since Eugene McCarthy. As a senior at St. Paul's, in the winter of 1961-62, Kerry played on the varsity team. The captain and best player was a guy named Bobby Mueller, who is now better known as Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I. Another senior on the team was John (Scuffy) Whitman ("Scuffy because he had the world's most highly polished shoes," a teammate says). Whitman married Christie Todd, who became the governor of New Jersey.

"That was the worst team in the history of St. Paul's hockey--ever," Dr. Stan Resor said last week. "We tied tiny Hebron Academy, and that was it. We lost all the rest." Resor, whose father was Stanley Resor, the Vietnam-era Secretary of the Army, and who is now a neurology professor at Columbia, played defense. A glance at the old yearbook--the player names (Chubb, Pierpont, Whitney) suggest a rather rarefied squad--confirms Resor's recollection: shut out by Exeter and Andover; smoked 10-1 by the Harvard J.V. team, and 8-0 by Yale's freshmen; beat 10-0 by the Swiss Junior National Team. ("It became quickly obvious that the scheduler had made a mistake," Resor remembers of the Swiss game. "I think they thought we were a college.")

Forty-two years is a long time, and there is some confusion over the specifics. More than one person has recalled, if ...