Word: whaled
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...Saturday. Although Harvard picked up its second consecutive win in the Tigers' barn, it wasn't able to leave entirely unscathed, as freshman winger Tyler Kolarik suffered a knee injury against Princeton that kept him on the bench against the Elis. The Whale--infamous for hosting a rare defeat of Harvard's 1989 NCAA championship squad--snapped the Crimson's three-game winning streak. However, the Elis' task was alleviated somewhat by the absence of Kolarik and classmate Tim Pettit. Without the freshman tandem, the Crimson was effectively denied its dominant second line--one that has combined for 24 goals...
...extraordinary effort, but then again, this was no ordinary cetacean. The 22-ft.-long, 10,000-lb. orca with the droopy dorsal fin was none other than Keiko, the star of the 1993 hit movie Free Willy. In the film, Keiko plays a killer whale condemned to a life in cruel captivity until released to ocean freedom through the efforts of a small boy. The part came easily to Keiko, whose real life story paralleled Willy's, and the movie inadvertently made his plight known worldwide. Now, in an ambitious experiment, a dedicated team of scientists, animal behaviorists, trainers, divers...
...spot. For the uninitiated, it was hard to make out what was going on. A drug-smuggling bust? A search-and-rescue operation? The filming of the next James Bond movie? The reality was odder still: all these humans were scurrying around in an effort to take a killer whale for an ocean walk and find him some of his own kind to talk...
...least, says Vinick in tones of relief, "Keiko speaks killer whale." Long years alone in a concrete-sided pool--which, unlike the open seas, quickly bounced back any of the sounds Keiko made--did little to hone his conversational skills. Keiko was only a juvenile of two in 1979 when he was captured in Icelandic waters by the Gudrun, a ship that, ironically, is based in Heimaey's harbor, next to the bay that is Keiko's present home. Shipped to a marine park in Canada, Keiko did not respond well to captivity, and lesions started appearing on his skin...
Producer Richard Donner's Free Willy saved him. The 1993 Warner Bros. movie was a hit and was followed by an international public outcry, led chiefly by children, when it turned out that Willy in real life was Keiko, a sick and far from free whale. In January 1996, UPS helped pick up the tab for flying him in an ice-water-filled crate to a new home in Newport, Ore.--a $7.3 million pool, four times the size of the Mexican tank, with pumped-in, 37[degrees]F seawater deep enough to dive in. The pool was built with...