Real College Football

By Jeffrey Hart | Monday, October 30, 2000

Down the practice fields behind the hockey rink you can hear the sounds of football. Thwunk. A punt curves upward into the dry autumn air. Thwack, thwack. Shoulder pads smack. A coach is hollering over a bullhorn. On the hills in the middle distance, among the always dark green pines, the red, golden, and brown leaves of another fall season mesmerize us with their color.

I'd better say it right off: I don't care about any other college football except for the Ivy League.

No doubt Joe Paterno of Penn State would say that Ivy League football isn't football at all, even though he was once a decent quarterback at Brown.

I'd reply that big-time football, specifically, isn't college football. It isn't even played by college students, even though they wear the colors of various 'educational institutions.'

Why should I care what Florida State does on the gridiron? Or Ohio State for that matter?

During the O.J. Simpson trial, a handwritten note that O.J. had written became part of the evidence and was flashed on the TV screen. The writing was illiterate, the script kindergartenish. O.J. can't spell. He can't write a grammatical sentence. And he graduated from USC or UCLA, I forget which. Does it matter? It's like he never went to college.

I said that I don't pay attention to any college football outside the Ivy League. Eccentric, I suppose. And I know that excellent undergraduate programs are provided by Stanford, by Virginia, and so on. But I can't get interested. I can't even name their opponents, unless my eyes accidentally fall upon their scores when I peruse the sports pages.

But it matters to me what happens in the traditional opening game between Princeton and Columbia, and between Dartmouth and Penn. Of great importance is what happens in the traditional final game between Dartmouth and Princeton, which I first witnessed in 1938 with my mother and father.

The best book about Ivy League football was written by Thomas Bergin, a professor of Renaissance literature at Yale. Its title is The Game. Of course, 'the game' can refer to nothing else but 'The Harvard-Yale Football Rivalry, 1875-1983,' which is also the book's subtitle.

Harvard's Soldiers Field is still there, and so is the great Yale Bowl, but Princeton's Palmer Stadium is gone. It opened in 1914. The headline in the New York Times read 'Princeton Humbled by Dartmouth.' There had been a last minute trick play. Princeton lost, even though the great Hobey Baker was playing for them, and though President Woodrow Wilson sometimes attended their practice sessions while old stars demonstrated special plays. F. Scott Fitzgerald put Hobey Baker into his first novel, This Side of Paradise, as the football star Allenby.

I have always been immersed in the Ivy League. I recall as a child the special Dartmouth train, full of alumni, pulling out of Penn Station, heading down to Princeton for the game: raccoon coats, gardenias, booze, songs, hilarity. I'm not sure everyone made it off the train at Princeton Junction. Some might have stayed on all the way to Washington. In the fur-lined Palmer Stadium, during the moment of silence before the national anthem, you might hear a whiskey bottle shatter on the concrete. Single-wing football, where are you?

Immersed in the Ivy League. After high school in New York, I went to Dartmouth, stayed for two years and sought out the great English department at Columbia.

With my Columbia bachelor of arts degree, I had to choose between Columbia and Harvard for my Ph.D. After much thought, I chose Columbia for having, marginally, the better English department. To my surprise, Columbia immediately hired me to teach in their department. In my seventh year there, a tenure opening appeared in a timely way elsewhere, and I accepted a position at... Dartmouth. No surprise in that, really. I had rejected offers from good places outside the Ivy League.

As a faculty member at both Columbia and Dartmouth, I found that football players showed up in my classes, just like the other students. They took exams and wrote essays, just like the other students. Their work was quite satisfactory. During football season, they had a training table, but it was in the regular dining hall with the other students. In the off-season, they ate at the regular tables. They were going to college just like everyone else. Some of them did go on to play professional football (Dartmouth's Jay Fiedler '94 is now quarterback for the Miami Dolphins), but most Ivy League players were headed for law, medicine, and often business school. Just like real life.

When, as frequently happens, I am in New York City, I stay at the Yale Club, to which Dartmouth belongs. This is a marvelous place, redolent of tradition.

Among the oil portraits on the walls in and around the Main Lounge is one of William Graham Sumner. The Yale professor was a pioneer in the development of sociology. I am one of the few members who knows something else important about him: His daughter married Walter Camp, the legendary Yale football coach.

Knute Rockne once said that Camp had pretty much invented football. When Camp happened to be ill or out of town, his wife took over and ran Yale practice sessions. Egad. Albie Booth, 'Little Boy Blue,' once dazzled fans in that Yale Bowl.

Yale is famous for its undergraduate singing groups. Everyone has heard of the Wiffenpoofs, but there are dozens of them. Every year during the Christmas season, they all show up and 'sing through the club.' There's a group singing in every lounge, dining room, library, all over the place, and finally ending up together in the Main Lounge where they conclude by singing all together. Spectacular.

Legend has it that Percy Haughton, the great Harvard coach, once announced to his team before the game with Yale, 'Gentleman, this is the most important thing you will do in your lives.' That deserves a smile. But, you know, he might have been right.

Real College Football

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