College Sports Information Directors of America

By COREY KILGANNON
The New York Times

In December 1968, Baruch College's men's basketball
team played its first game and a 1956 Baruch graduate
named Burt Beagle was on the sideline as the official
scorer, recording every basket, assist, steal and
rebound.

Mr. Beagle missed the seventh game of the season (he
was stuck in Ohio on business and he's still
apologizing for it), but since then, he has not missed
scoring a Baruch basketball game - men's or women's,
home or away.

On a recent Friday night, Mr. Beagle, 71, a retired
accountant, worked as the official scorer for his
900th straight men's basketball game. Baruch officials
said it was a collegiate record for most consecutive
basketball games worked.

Mr. Beagle, then, is a sports statistician who has
become a certain kind of New York sports legend - not
for his athletic prowess or his halftime pep talks,
but for his acuity and perseverance with a sharp
pencil and a scorer's ledger. He has scored more than
6,000 games, ranging from youth league to college. He
has worked every City University tournament basketball
game since the tournament started in 1970. He does
Catholic school games, too - like every football game
at Mount St. Michael's High School in the Bronx since
1974.

He has, of course, never employed a computer. Indeed,
no one has even suggested he use a laptop.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," said Dima
Kamenschchik, the assistant sports information
director at Baruch, one of the senior colleges of the
City University of New York. "The man has done 900
straight games. That's insane."

Mr. Beagle is a lifelong Bronx resident. He has lived
in the same apartment in the Pelham Parkway section of
the Bronx since 1965, and since he does not drive, he
takes mass transit to games, often to several in a
day. He has been mugged several times returning from
late games on the No. 2 train.

He never married and has no family to speak of. He has
no hobbies, not even movies or television, he says,
preferring to devote his evenings, weekends and
holidays to scorekeeping for hundreds of games each
year, often more than a dozen a week.

But his relationship with Baruch is the most
remarkable. Until two years ago, the school never had
a true home gymnasium and borrowed courts for home
games. Mr. Beagle faithfully followed the team through
their years of wandering through small and drafty
gyms. Recently, he spent $19,000 of his own money to
buy the athletic program a van.

On this Friday, Mr. Beagle was at his regular spot at
the scorer's table, dressed in his usual zebra-striped
official's shirt, khakis and sneakers and his
oversize, bent glasses. He keeps a bunch of sharpened
pencils next to his stat book, which is filled with
handwritten lists of players and hieroglyphic
statistical entries. The bag at his feet is
overstuffed with dog-eared manila folders of team
schedules and standings.

He rattled off statistics about Baruch players,
including their former high schools and SAT scores.
Pointing out a player for the opposing team, Lehman
College, he said, "He's 26 years old and has a
6-year-old kid."

Next to Mr. Beagle is Mr. Kamenschchik, 22, who tapped
away on a laptop to record game statistics for the
school's computer system.

But Mr. Beagle has his own system, which is more
thorough than the computer's, and he often winds up
making corrections to the computer's final printouts
of game stats. He keeps a separate chart for
turnovers.

Ray Rankis, 51, Baruch's men's basketball coach since
1983, tells a story about Mr. Beagle's remarkable
recall.

"I remember driving him home after we lost a close
game and saying, 'Not tonight, Burt, I don't want to
hear about our turnovers or lousy shooting
percentage,' " Mr. Rankis said. "So after he got out
of the car, he leaned in and said, 'Thanks Ray, and by
the way, this was your 200th coaching loss at Baruch.'
"

Mr. Beagle has been known to watch replays of games
and on the rare occasions in which he has credited the
wrong player with a turnover, he has corrected it on
the official score sheet.

At halftime during the game against Lehman, Baruch
officials presented Mr. Beagle with a commemorative
basketball, emblazoned with a photo of him poring over
a stat book.

As Baruch graduates stopped by to say hello, Mr.
Beagle rattled off their stats. A former Baruch men's
basketball coach, Hal Rosenberg, stopped by with John
Steuer, a Baruch forward from 1973 to 1977.

"Burt used to have a first-half stat sheet in my hand
by the time I walked into the locker room at
halftime," said Mr. Rosenberg, 61, of Warwick, N.Y.
"The only problem was that he'd give it to the
opposing coach too. I used to say, 'Burt, do you have
to be so efficient?' "

Mr. Steuer, 50, described Mr. Beagle's scoring skills
as transcendent.

Mr. Beagle began rattling off Mr. Steuer's basketball
statistics. He came out of Archbishop Molloy High
School in Queens and at Baruch he averaged 5.7 points
his freshman year, 19 as a sophomore, 14 as a junior
and 20 as a senior. He scored more than 1,000 points
and had back-to-back 30-point games. In the first half
of a game against Queens College in 1977, he made 11
straight baskets without missing, still a Baruch
record.

At a chaotic point in the second half, with coaches,
players and fans screaming and chaos erupting on the
court after a controversial play, Mr. Beagle barked
out his ruling to the other scoring table officials:
"Turnover No. 53, steal 14." They all nodded.

In an age when referees sometimes fall back on taped
instant replays to review questionable calls, Mr.
Beagle says he has trained his mind to record plays.

"I can't write them down while the action is going on,
so I photograph the whole sequence in my mind, then I
write it down," he explained.

Lehman won the game, 81-72, for its 12th straight win
this season, Mr. Beagle said. The leading scorer,
Lehman's center, Sekani Francis, finished with 18
points, 14 rebounds and 5 assists. Baruch's shooting
percentage was 30 percent and they turned the ball
over 23 times.

"Too many Western Union passes," Mr. Beagle
pronounced. "They telegraphed them."

As usual, he was the last person to leave the gym,
except for a Baruch student cleaning up trash, who
congratulated him on his milestone.

Mr. Beagle said, "Well, in four years, I'll have a
thousand. That will be a milestone."