The final weeks of Indian Summer have seemed particularly mellow this year, and I have enjoyed one particular aspect of them in a special way. I make no claim to being a serious “sports fan”, but I continue to enjoy and admire certain aspects of Ivy League intercollegiate competitions. Football is very big business in this country, and far too big a business in American universities and colleges. There is something truly grand about American collegiate football. My teaching career began at the University of Wisconsin, and I acknowledge what one must call the cultural awesomeness of a Big Ten Saturday afternoon. Huge crowds, parking mayhem, industrial-sized marching bands in flashy uniforms, grotesque operatic renditions of the “Star-Spangled Banner”. That is the model that defines professional football, as well, and seems to be the ambition of half the country’s high schools. Once the dynamism of the American commercial spirit invades an institution, there is no turning back. I never actually attended a Wisconsin game; but you hardly needed to be at the stadium to know what was happening. The whole city of Madison shook to the roaring of the crowd. But here in the old Ivy League there are still some vestiges—and they are only that, vestiges—of the genuinely amateur and gentlemanly ambiance in which the collegiate sport was born. As is well known the first ever recorded football game in this country was played on November 6, 1869, between teams from Rutgers and Princeton. Handlebar moustaches are no longer the vibe, but it’s not quite the Dallas cheerleaders either.
It was probably about forty years ago that I served briefly on the university’s Committee on Athletics. This was hardly a heavy assignment, and it had a great perk in the option to purchase season seats on the fifty-yard line. So I secured two, and have renewed them every year since. We are not talking a Notre Dame VIP box here. A ticket costs about as much as a stadium hot dog, and may well taste better, though I have not run a test. I used to make it to a game or two each year. Since retiring I’ve done a little better, though the whole program was shut down for Covid. In our socially constrained world, I make a bit of a thing of it. The walk to the arena from my house is a tiny bit over a mile, approaching my huffing and puffing limit these days, especially when packing a nice lunch and a book or two in a cloth bag, as I like to do. We used to have a small gang of retired faculty sitting together, but that play has been broken up by one thing or another, the main thing being the Grim Reaper. I am now just another fish in the sea of students and alumni.
If in retrospect the Harvard-Princeton game was declared to be the “game of the week” by the National Collegiate Athletic Association, as it in fact was, the explanation is to be sought in the curiosity of the play rather than in its uniformly high quality. Princeton began bravely but ingloriously with a self-inflicted wound—a lengthy forward pass thrown with absolute precision to a Harvard defender. But honors were pretty much even on this kind of thing, making for an exciting and suspenseful struggle in which, for a time, neither team seemed to be able to score a touchdown. Would it be a duel of field-goal kickers? After all there is presumably some reason the game is called football.
The Princeton stadium has something of the sol y sombra features of a Spanish bullring. The home team (west) seats grow ever cooler and shadier as the afternoon progresses, the visitors’ (east) side ever more bright and sunny. So I did what I sometimes do on chilly game days—I moved over to the corner of the visitors’ side during the Covid-abbreviated halftime high jinx. This would allow a quick exit when the game ended and warm sunshine until then. There were maybe twenty of us scattered among a half acre of empty seats. I could not have known that my excellent view of the north end zone—not usually considered a desirable vantage point—would on this occasion be decreed by fate to allow me a superb view of all the important action.
I forgive myself for not knowing exactly what happened from this point in the game, because as it turns out the officials in charge of it didn’t know either. But early in the fourth quarter there was a sign from Heaven registered on the electronic scoreboard. With thirteen minutes and thirteen seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, Harvard scored its single touchdown, evening the game score at thirteen to thirteen. Now, that is a lot of thirteens, and it should have been enough to make everybody happy if wary. When the score was still thirteen to thirteen at the end of four quarters, it should have been a tie.
My view of American popular sports harks back to a Golden Age around 1950. But there are all these new rules, designed to pander to fans requiring non-stop drama and impatient with all ambiguity. First, they sissified baseball by coming up with the nutty notion of a “designated batter”. The sudden death overtime innovations in football are even worse. The tied teams compete, rapid fire, in simulating a post-touchdown conversion until one of them wins. Now all gladiatorial combat is required to end in death, and as quickly as possible, since the fans still may have a long drive ahead of them. My view is that sometimes there really is such a thing as a tied game between equally matched adversaries, a result bringing honor to two teams and disgrace to neither. This truth, which is recognized in chess, the supreme game of all games, ought to continue to be recognized in football. In short, I do not like these innovations, and yes, I know the “lightbulb joke” on this topic—a joke obviously easily adapted to any institution of the teller’s choosing. How many Princetonians does it take to change a lightbulb? The answer is of course three. It takes one guy to change the lightbulb and two others to lament about how much better the old lightbulb had been. But if you absolutely insist on new bulbs, make sure they are bright ones.
Five, yes five overtime periods now played out at the goal line just beneath me. Presumably some folks in the stadium knew what was happening, but I was not among them. The decibel level of the shouting drowned out the PA system. It was all quite satisfactory from the partisan Princeton point of view. So far as I could tell. Harvard kept making winning plays only to have the referees decide, upon mature consideration, that they had in fact not won. Harvard made a good kick. Princeton made a good kick. Then Harvard won again, except that somebody failed to notice that the Princeton coach had called for a time-out. When the call was revised, the Harvard coach threw a hissy-fit—a bit of drama in itself worth the price of admission. He threw his cap to the ground. He stamped his little feet. Princeton completed an end zone pass. A Princeton defender knocked away a Harvard pass that would have evened the score. I had no idea that the game was over, but a couple hundred Princeton fans concluded that it was and rushed onto the field in a victory frenzy. Final score: Princeton, 18; Harvard, 16. I began my bemused walk home. I presume that large, fuming buses full of large, fuming football players, headed north on the New Jersey Turnpike in the direction of New England. A day or so later Ivy League officials, with Princeton now at the league’s top, actually re-read their new rules and discovered that under prevailing circumstances the crucial time-out had been inadmissible. Oops, their bad. One for the books, but by that time the book had already been printed. The stuff of legends.
