The Game: Harvard, Yale, and America in 1968

 

The Game: Harvard, Yale, and America in 1968

George Howe Colt (Scribner, 2018)

         Of all the thousands of college football games that were played in the 1960's, the 1968 Harvard-Yale game seems to be uniquely memorable. This isn't even the first book to be written about it: George Howe Colt was inspired to write it after seeing the masterful documentary, Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, which has its own companion book. There was also, already, an older book about Harvard in the 1968-69 school year, by E. J. Kahn, Jr. It's called Harvard: through change and through storm, which was Kahn's working title even before he experienced the anti-war protests and other uproars and perturbations of his year in residence.

        That is to say, these were interesting times. The Vietnam War had gained new salience on both campuses because, in July 1967, the rules of the draft had changed. It was no longer possible to extend one's college deferment by sticking around for a master's degree, nor to take time off from college without becoming eligible for military service. "Now that there was a very real chance they'd have to fight the war themselves, many more students felt the urgent need to stop it. The ranks of the SDS swelled." In October of '67, the Harvard-Radcliffe Students for a Democratic Society picketed a recruiter for the Dow Chemical Company, occupying the chemistry building for some hours. Other students were still participating in ROTC, in order to pick up some spending money, and to qualify to serve as officers when the military called them.

        The football team at Harvard included both SDS and ROTC members, who somehow forgot their differences when they crossed the Charles River to practice. There was even a Marine veteran playing for Harvard, who had enlisted after getting into academic trouble in his sophomore year. Pat Conway had not only been in Vietnam, he had spent the winter of 1968 in Khe Sahn, the last couple of months under North Vietnamese bombardment. Two-a-day practices weren't really such a big deal after that.

      On the Yale side, there were a few legitimately famous athletes, like the quarterback, Brian Dowling, and the halfback Calvin Hill. Hill was just as good a passer as Dowling, but he was too useful all over the field to play him at quarterback. Both went on to play in the NFL, though Dowling never achieved the success his college glory had seemed to promise. The 1968 team was featured in bull tales, the Yale Daily News strip that gave rise to Doonesbury. The fictional B.D. took on a life of his own, over the years, but the original was the star quarterback they called 'God'.

        As Colt profiles these players and a dozen or so more, he also walks us through the season, in which both Harvard and Yale beat every team they faced. Not without close calls, at least for Harvard, and not without injury. Although the players were smaller in those days, football may have been even more dangerous than it is now, because it wasn't yet illegal to tackle headfirst. On the Saturday before Thanksgiving, the two teams met in Harvard Stadium, before a capacity crowd that included fourteen-year-old George Colt, whose father was a Harvard administrator.

        Yale dominated, as had been expected. Late in the first half, the Bulldogs were up by twenty-two points when Harvard's coach sent in Frank Champi, his second-string quarterback, who managed to hit a second-string receiver for a touchdown before the half ended. Even though hobbled by fumbles and a few unfavorable calls, Yale held a comfortable advantage of 29-13 with forty-two seconds to go. "By now it was getting dark....The word gloaming would appear in the accounts of several Boston sportswriters the following morning." Fans from both sides had been leaving the stadium in a steady stream when Harvard scored, made a two-point conversion, and recovered an onside kick. Harvard's offense had first and goal with three seconds to go, and scored on a broken pass play. Two point conversion? Yes! Final score, 29-29. This was before overtime rules came in, so both teams went undefeated on the season, and shared the Ivy League title. Harvard, understandably, saw it as a victory for the ages.

       Calvin Hill met his future wife at a party that night, a Wellesley student who, you guessed it, roomed with Hillary Clinton. A Vassar sophomore named Meryl Streep had a boyfriend on Yale's team. Piquant as all that is, it's really worth our while to hear about the boys from greater Boston for whom athletics made a profound difference in their educational and social prospects, boys from factory towns like Everett and Haverhill whom Harvard wouldn't have looked at otherwise.

       You'll probably enjoy this book more if you like football, at least a little, but if you'd simply like to time-travel back to when our world was young, it's a good ride.