Armies of the afternoon

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29

Crit

In 1968, when I was 14, the Tet offensive ended significant U.S. popular support for the Vietnam War, and, essentially, Lyndon Johnson's presidency; Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis; Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles; Chicago police bashed in young people's skulls and a party's soul; Richard Nixon was elected president; and then a football game was played in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Young fans of college football might be surprised to know that Harvard-Yale ever meant anything to anyone who didn't spend four years in Cambridge or New Haven, but it is so. By '68, though, that era seemed to be past--except that Yale somehow managed to attract a running back good enough to star for the Dallas Cowboys afterward, and a quarterback who could throw, run, and lead (and who had enough personality to become a character in a comic strip being started by another Yalie at the time), and the Elis entered the final game improbably ranked 14th in the nation, and heavily favored to complete a perfect season at the expense of the Crimson. But even more improbably, Harvard was 8-0 also--the first time since the teens both teams had brought perfect records into what they like to call The Game.

Only one could remain perfect, though, and with Calvin Hill and God, as teammates called Brian Dowling (before Garry Trudeau started calling him BD), on the Yale roster, the Elis made it clear which team would leave 9-0 by taking a 22-0 lead in the first half. With 4 minutes left, Yale was driving toward a score that would pad its 29-13 lead, and even the fumble that short-circuited that drive didn't really matter: Harvard was 86 yards and another touchdown and two two-point conversions away from tying, and the clock showed 3 minutes left.

The title of the film (lifted from a Harvard Crimson headline the next day--a better headline than I ever wrote in my 13 years of writing pretty good headlines) is a spoiler, of course, but even knowing that, you won't believe what transpires. Two people in the audience with me were at the game, and one commented after the film that it was so effective that she kept hoping maybe it would turn out differently this time.

The filmmakers--who, granted, would have to work hard to screw up material like this--do a masterful job of interweaving the television footage with interviews of players (including Dowling, a Harvard guard named Tommy Lee Jones, and Frank Champi, the backup Harvard quarterback sent in to mop up after Yale built its insurmountable lead). The politics of the time is a big part of the text--one Harvard defensive back, Pat Conroy (not the author), was a 24-year-old Vietnam vet, and other members of both teams held predictably conservative views, but most seem to have been antiwar, at least by November 1968, and some--like Dowling--were avowedly apolitical, and just wanted to be left alone to play the game.

The flip side, of course, is the admission by more than one participant that this was "just a game." Right: just a game people still talk about and replay and argue officiating calls from and agonize over 40 years later. Well, see the film before you judge their priorities.