In Connecticut: The 100th Classic

By John Skow

The level of play would not have ensured a winning season in a Mid-western high school league, but never mind that. The place to be three Saturdays ago, for football traditionalists who cared about history with a crust on it, was the Yale Bowl. Here in New Haven, Conn., Harvard and Yale footballers played, somewhat haphazardly, for the 100th time. What they played, of course, was The Game. (That Stanford and Cal call their annual collision The Big Game is, surely, an indication of desperate social insecurity.) The two Ivy League schools met first in 1875, fielding 15-man teams that played a kind of paleo-football. Harvard kicked four goals and won, 4-0. The series was interrupted several times before the turn of the century, and war canceled The Games of 1917-18 and 1943-44.

As the 100th Game approached, college sportswriters too young to shave knocked out misty-eyed pieces about Charley Brickley, the legendary Harvard dropkicker of the 1912-14 teams, and Albie Booth, the wispy Yale back of 1929-31. It was murmured occasionally during this gentle rain of nostalgia that, although Yale led in the series, 54-37 (there had been eight ties), its '83 warriors had underwhelmed eight opponents thus far and won only once. Harvard, with an upper-middling 5-2-2 record, loomed like a superteam.

A noodly sort of tension began to develop, especially after the Bulldogs caught an understandably inattentive Princeton team napping the week before the big 100th. It was not, to be sure, the sort of anticipation that had preceded the 1968 Game, toward which both teams had swaggered without a loss. The '68 astonishment still reverberates: Quarterback Brian Bowling, the model for Garry Trudeau's B.D. in the Doonesbury comic strip, and big Calvin Hill, the star halfback who went on to play pro football for the Dallas Cowboys, led Yale to a 29-13 advantage with less than eleven minutes to go. Yalies in the crowd began waving their handkerchiefs at the Harvards across the field, in The Game's customary gesture of well-bred derision. Then Harvard's Frank Champi, a substitute quarterback, confounded probability and Yale by producing two touchdowns and a couple of two-point conversions in the last 42 seconds. Harvard proclaimed the 29-29 tie a victory.

Thus The Game had produced heroics before; was it not possible now that Yale would arise from the sod and gnaw the Crimson? Maybe, but it was clear even to an observer new to these rites that other matters were more important. Take the matter of the handkerchiefs. A society of pragmatists has decided that Kleenex is handier and more sanitary. The day when every gentleman carried two handkerchiefs is gone, as are most of the gentlemen. That seems to be the point. The old boys of the Eastern Establishment, waving in languid mockery at the foe, are also wigwagging a message to those of us plebes who are watching: "We still have our handkerchiefs and our standards, and don't doubt for a minute that we still have our power too." Handkerchief-waving is in the spirit of the Harvard cheer held in readiness for losses to lesser schools than Yale: "That's all right, that's okay. You're going to work for us some day!"

Old-boyishness was more evident than economic royalism, however, at the 100th Game. It was a boyishness that seemed to hark back several decades to an innocent never-never time when all Harvard and Yale students were male and, at least in legend, privileged, lazy, outrageous and perpetually booze-fogged. Such qualities cannot have wholly dominated undergraduate life at these colleges--somebody must have done some studying--but they were very much on view in the parking lots around the Yale Bowl before Game time. The sun shone, and the old grads capered in a golden haze. Elderly stockbrokers wore caps printed with VERB HARVARD! or YALE VERBS! and smiled benignly as they sloshed status-label Scotch. Thirty-two-year-old lawyers who had just made partner inflated huge helium balloons, tied them to their cars with ropes hundreds of feet long, and then stood there grinning and drinking. Fifty-year-old business honchos got mud on the knees of their gray flannels playing touch football among the parked cars and joshed one another loudly about bifocals and bald spots. The older wives wore mink, and the younger wives wore ski sweaters and down vests. They helped with the elaborate tailgate picnics everyone brought, but otherwise stood somewhat aside from the gamboling with their plastic cups full of Chablis. The two colleges have been coed for well over a decade, but the woman grads are not yet old enough for three of them standing together on dry ground to produce a swamp of nostalgia. This was a day for the old boys, gray-haired men called Red and Curly, to stand knee-deep in love for one another.

Outrageousness is clearly necessary to prevent this mistiness from reaching the boohoo stage--no one wants to wave a soggy handkerchief--and by tradition the two bands have been designated to provide the desired vulgarity. A month before the 1962 Game, held in Cambridge, Mass., members of the Harvard band paraded through New Haven at 4:30 a.m., concertizing at full volume; seven of them were arrested. This sort of thing is expected, as are naughty formations and cheers of startling crudity. A fungus of tastefulness has formed in the past few years on both sets of musical pranksters, however. An overrefined dignitary from the dean's office has objected to Harvard's best formation--the word PROCREATE!, more or less, spelled out on the field at half time. In 1980 at the Perm game, the bandsmen compromised by forming the same message in Arabic script. This, too, was deemed unacceptable. This year the subdued bandies did march into the bowl singing "To hell with Yale" to the tune of O Tannenbaum, but that was all. The Yale band also did not sink to the occasion. Had marauders from M.I.T. prepared an appropriate prank--last year they spent three weeks engineering the implantation under the midfield turf of a 4-ft. balloon, which they inflated and exploded by remote control in The Game's second quarter--the occasion might have been lightened, but this year they, too, failed to find inspiration.

Thus it was necessary to watch The Game, an erratic affair in which the opposing quarterbacks spent most of their time scuttling about behind their own lines trying to avoid destruction. Greg Gizzi of Harvard generally succeeded in this effort, and Mike Curtin of Yale generally did not. Penalties and inadvertence often had the effect of causing each team to move 20 or more yards backward, not forward, in a series of downs. Yale steadied briefly in the third quarter and moved determinedly in the customary direction to tie Harvard with a touchdown. When Harvard fluffed the extra point after its next score, it seemed possible that if Yale could cross the goal line once more, it might stagger to a victory that would embarrass the Crimson for decades. Wobbles and bobbles dissipated this thin hope, and Harvard kicked a field goal to produce an emphatic if not excessive final score of 16-7.

Here the Harvard band redeemed itself. Mired in propriety throughout the day, give or take an occasional shouted grotesquerie ("Break their arms off, break their legs off, we love football!"), they finally came to life. Champagne was produced for the hanky-waving ritual, and the flow of Mumm inspired Will Moore, the 6-ft. 6-in. drum major, to pour a quart or two into his size-13 sneaker and drink from it. Other bandies joined him.

The sneaker circulated, the shadows crossed the remaining yards of the field, leaving only the Harvard cheering section in sunlight, and the clock ticked away the last seconds of the 100th Game. Exultant Harvards tore down both sets of goal posts (the playfulness soured when a Harvard freshman, Margaret Cimino, was seriously injured in the confusion). As they left the bowl, the old grads, practiced in their ancient animosity, jeered or muttered, according to school. Undergrads seemed to take victory or defeat casually, but seniors were beginning to practice their lines for the years that would follow graduation. Fred Anscombe, Yale '84, did not seem truly disheartened, but he managed a sneer ("The Harvard guys I know are all creampuffs") that had almost the right ring to it. A Manhattan bank executive, Yale '56, did not have to search for emotion. After The Game, looking as woeful as if Brazil had defaulted on its notes, he said, "It took me years to get over being really depressed when Yale lost." His voice broke for a moment. "But I managed it. I'm not letting it bother me." --By John Skow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.