Word: 100th
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...