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Youth & Consequences
In the game most people were watching, Yale lost to Harvard. But in the places where football and life intersect, the contests were more complicated and the victories harder to call.
January/February 2005
by Carlo Rotella '94PhD
Early in the morning, geese forage in the strip of park along Memorial Drive on the Cambridge side of the river. The leaves are mostly down and it’s almost cold. A scattering of homeless men sleep on the grass, having spent the night wrapped in blankets, their possessions assembled around them. The Yale band, hauling cased instruments and carryout from Dunkin' Donuts, straggles across the Larz Anderson bridge, which connects Harvard to its athletics complex, business school, and burgeoning real estate empire on the Boston side of the river. One musician, a dark-haired lass, says, “Okay, the party scene here sucks! I was in taxis all night, and we used up all our money.” Others commiserate, but they all seem to have found parties that lasted well into the morning. They cross the river, headed toward the high concrete bulk of Harvard Stadium.
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Those close-fitting caps with ear guards make rugby players look like medieval henchmen. |
If you continue over the bridge to the stadium, circle around behind it, and cut through a parking lot in which the first alumni tailgaters are already setting up, you arrive at a muddy field where the Yale Women’s Rugby Football Club is playing its opposite number at Harvard, the Radcliffe Rugby Football Club. The players wear striped shirts and shorts. Their legs look cold, but they don’t care.
The game kicks off at 8:04. At 8:10, a pile of struggling bodies surges across the try line and a blue-and-white arm touches the ball down on the ground: 5-0, Yale. A stumpy little Harvard bruiser has to leave the game, clutching her ribs and smiling apologetically. One of Yale’s coaches says, “We’re knocking them around pretty good.” Phillippa Thompson, Yale’s flyhalf, who wears one of those close-fitting caps with ear guards that make rugby players look like medieval henchmen, crushes a Harvard ball carrier and then scoops up the ball, racing far downfield before being tackled. Soon it’s 10-0, Yale.
Drums start up somewhere out of sight, a band warming up. The November sun comes out, bright but weak. Harvard mounts its best scoring chance in the game’s final minutes, pushing across the try line as time runs out, but the Yale defenders get their arms under the ball and prevent it from being touched down. The referee blows his whistle, ending the game in a shutout. This, it turns out, will be Yale’s athletic high point of the day.
In the shadow of the stadium, a middle-aged supervisor in a red windbreaker lectures a group of young local jocks who will serve as ushers. They look like regular guys; buzz cuts and Irish faces predominate. The supervisor, who has a ripe Boston accent, is trying to prepare them for the shock of encountering Harvard and Yale types in extremis. He says, “You will see levels of intoxication you’ve never seen before.” This can’t possibly be true, but he’s speaking for effect. “They’re handing out free beer across the street there,” he says. The young guys exchange glances: Free beer! Now that’s the place to go to college. “Another thing. The students run this place. Not the police, the students. This isn’t like anything you’ve seen before. Brown is bad, but this is worse than Brown. And every one of these people has a lawyer on speed dial, you know what I mean? So be polite, keep 'em moving, and if there’s trouble just back off and get a supervisor or a police officer.” The ushers appear to be wondering what they have gotten themselves into, but they also seem eager to get a look at the exotic animals they will soon be herding.
At 10:20, Yale’s football team arrives on three Peter Pan buses and files to its locker room like a company about to go over the top in a decisive battle of the Great War—hushed, grimly intent, eyes fixed on the middle distance.
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Beer pong players hit the game’s signature loft shot with gestures of exaggerated care. |
Across North Harvard Street from the stadium, at Ohiri Field, which has been set aside for undergraduate tailgating, cops and security guards check tickets and IDs at the gate. You get your wrist tag here, you get your beer there; no money changes hands. Music cranks. Couches and tables have been hauled out onto the grass. Beer pong players hit the game’s signature loft shot with gestures of exaggerated care.
Yale students congregate at the far end of the field. The party has built up more momentum here, young men and women already packing in close, talking loud, greeting new arrivals with shouts and hugs as if surprised to run into them so far from home. The visitors always get drunker than the home team’s fans. Their greater excitement derives from the root logic of a college road trip: We were there, now we’re all here. it’s amazing. A clever-looking fellow laughs and laughs, staggering, half-slain with mirth. He wears The Uniform—khaki pants, blue blazer, red tie—and holds a torpedo of St. Ides in one hand.
Several Boston police officers and firefighters move through the crowd, impassive and largely ignored. One cop frog-marches a postcollegiate guy in shades and ball cap across the field toward an exit. Every time the cop says, “You jumped the fuckin' fence,” the guy interrupts him, saying, “I did not jump a fence. “ But most of the police and firefighters have nothing much to do. Nobody’s going to touch off a riot with a sucker punch or torch a car just to watch the son of a bitch burn.
No matter how much talk there might be about going crazy at The Game, nobody’s going to do anything . crazy. Yes, a few thousand young adults liquor up well before noon, but it’s a ritual suspension of norms rather than a burst of spontaneous troublemaking—a carnival, not a mob scene. There are plenty of people, some of them college students, who regularly get drunk and mean before noon and go looking for trouble, but none of them appears to be on Ohiri Field this morning. And crowds, even crowds of college students, do go wild, but not this crowd. Everybody present, including those who have reasons to feel genuinely alienated from their own Ivy status, has too much to lose.
Back on the stadium side of North Harvard Street, where the alumni have set up camp, the atmosphere is quieter, even serene. A swelling hubbub of genial talk, wafts of cooking-meat smells, and crisp November air combine to produce a distinctive tailgate synesthesia. The faces at this party are road maps of life after college, bearing the marks of marriage and divorce, houses, jobs, money management, sickness, success, disappointment, kids, grandchildren. Compared to them, the attractive and accomplished undergraduates across the street seem like the blank pod people from outer space in Invasion of the Body Snatchers; they have yet to take on features and become somebody.
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Harvard quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick has attracted a lot of attention from the NFL. |
A hickory-carved septuagenarian in khakis, walking through the tailgate area with a friend, is seized by a coughing fit so violent that he gags and throws up. He tries to catch it with one gloved hand. Tendrils of vomity spit dangle from his fingers and chin. His companion asks if he’s okay. “Yuh,” he says with a curt shake of his head, wiping it off, ready for more.
At 11:40, the Harvard team, in uniform, files from its locker room to the stadium, cleats clicking on the paved path. It’s almost game time.
Up in the press box at the top of the stadium, reporters and functionaries occupy two rows of seats looking down on the field. There are also a couple of pro scouts. One of them, himself only a few years removed from college ball, says that while Ryan Fitzpatrick, Harvard’s fine quarterback, has attracted a lot of attention from the NFL, he has an eye on three Yale prospects: Rory Hennessey '05, the offensive left tackle; Ralph Plumb '05, a wide receiver; and Barton Simmons '05, the free safety. “Guys like this,” the scout says, “they got a chance to get to a training camp maybe as a late-round guy, or a free agent. They’ll get a look from some teams. They’re smart, and smart guys get better faster.” Playing on the road, the Yale prospects have a special opportunity to impress the pros today. “It’s easy to look good when they’re at home in front of five thousand people, but under pressure on the road in their big game, if they step it up and do well here, that tells me something.”
On the field, Harvard’s seniors are being introduced one by one. Almost all of the seniors on both teams will end their football careers today, but a select few will go on to take a shot at the big time. Coming out of Division I-AA programs, seeking to prove themselves against Division I-A stars, those who do take that shot will be underdogs, an unfamiliar position for a graduate of Yale or Harvard. If they succeed, against the odds, in turning a schoolboy pastime into a profession, the consequences of playing or coaching football will deepen for them, the stakes going up as the years go by. You look up and suddenly you’re 30, or 40, and the roads you took mean other roads not taken. It gets harder to change your major in life, even if you went to Yale or Harvard.
When the game begins, shortly after 12:30, two separate dramas get under way. In one of them, the familiar drama of Yale vs. Harvard, the players arrive at the climax of their seasons and, in many cases, their football careers. Yale can redeem its disappointing 5-4 record with an upset, spoiling Harvard’s chance at a 10-0 season. In Ivy League sports, silver linings abound and character formation trumps statistics. Yale can’t win the league title this year, but with a victory it can still win the Harvard-Yale-Princeton title, avert a four-year sweep of its Class of 2005 by Harvard, and deny Harvard perfection. Or, if Yale loses, its players can take solace in striving nobly in defeat and knowing that Yale is still 15 wins up on Harvard in their long-running series. One way or another, no matter how bad the losers may feel at the moment the clock runs out, everybody wins. Nothing that happens in the game will prevent any of the players from running for the Senate in 30 years or so.
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Simmons gets back to work, ballhawking, hitting, trying to read Fitzpatrick and make him pay for mistakes. |
In the day’s other drama, a handful of prospects show their wares to the scouts, antisentimentalists who do not hold office hours at which you can ask them to reconsider a grade. The dramas will occasionally intersect—when a prospect makes a game-changing play, for instance—but they are about different things. One is about college; one is about the world beyond it.
On the third play of the game, Ralph Plumb catches a pass in the flat for a first down. The scout says “Plumb” and makes a notation on his game program. Plumb catches another ball for a first down before the offense stalls and Yale has to punt. “He moved the sticks,” says the scout, nodding. Asked about Rory Hennessey, who blocks with his usual Herculean aplomb, the scout says, “Won’t know about him until the third or fourth quarter.” Let’s see how consistent he can be in a big game, after the initial burst of adrenaline gives out.
On defense, Barton Simmons plows like a bighorn sheep into guys wearing red and looks for a chance to make a big play. Late in the first quarter, Ryan Fitzpatrick hangs a pass up in the air too long and Simmons almost intercepts it, reaching the ball at the same time as the receiver, but they bump each other and it falls incomplete. Early in the second quarter, Fitzpatrick misses a receiver with a pass and Simmons gathers in the ball just before it hits the ground, but the referees rule it incomplete. Simmons gets up and gets back to work, ballhawking, hitting, trying to read Fitzpatrick and make him pay for mistakes.
Harvard scores three touchdowns in the first half—on a run, a punt return, and a disastrous error by Yale’s quarterback, Alvin Cowan '05, who, after guiding his team to the goal line, throws the ball directly to a Harvard defender who runs it back the other way 100 yards for a touchdown. Yale manages only a field goal in response. At halftime, it’s 21-3, Harvard.
By halftime, the scout has written next to Plumb’s name the following laudatory notes: catch—turned for ball, catch over middle, catch in crowd over middle, and inside guy. There is also one demerit, a drop, which seems unfair, since the ball in question was thrown into the turf at Plumb’s feet. Next to Simmons’s name he has written an approving Big Hit. Next to Hennessey’s he has written Beaten off edge pressure, an instance of stern grading. Hennessey blocks well throughout the first half, but on just one play he allows a Harvard defender to fight past him and hit the quarterback after Cowan has thrown a complete pass to Plumb. Hennessey is Yale’s leading prospect: 6'4", 300 pounds, and his coaches claim that he has not allowed a sack in his entire collegiate career. But he allows himself a single lapse in the first half, a lapse that doesn’t even hurt his team, and that’s all the scout’s notes have to say about him.
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Ivy League women and men play rugby for love of the game, for the exercise and camaraderie. |
From the press box, if you turn away from the stadium field and look into the distance through the rear windows, you can see the rugby pitch, where the games continue: Yale men vs. Harvard men, Harvard alumni vs. the current Harvard teams. There are no prospects on display. Most major cities have club teams, but there’s no professional American league to aspire to. Ivy League women and men play rugby for love of the game, for the exercise and camaraderie, for the bracing jolt of sporting collisions. If they continue to play after graduation, those same reasons will have to do, because there aren’t any others.
The sun goes away behind a thickening overcast and does not come back. Seagulls and pigeons circle above the open bowl of the stadium. A potent chill spreads upward from concrete seats into bodies in which alcohol is dying a slow death.
In the second half, Ryan Fitzpatrick settles into a heroic groove, making unimpeachable decisions with the ball and improvising shrewd, twisting runs for first downs. The game rapidly moves out of reach for Yale, which fights hard on defense and gains ground on offense but cannot stop Harvard or get into the end zone. At the end of the third quarter, Harvard leads 35–3.
It’s Stover at Yale time. In the great American college novel of 1911, a halftime pep-talker addresses a Yale team that’s losing badly to unbeatable Princeton. “‘You can’t win,’” he says. “‘You never had a chance to win. But, Yale, you’re going to do something to make us proud of you. You’re going to hold that score where it is! Do you hear me? All you’ve got left is your nerve and the chance to show that you can die game. That’s all you’re going to do; but, by heaven, you’re going to do that!’”
And, by heaven, they do. Yale doesn’t score in the fourth quarter, but neither does Harvard. Barton Simmons angles in to nail ball carriers, trying to force a fumble. Rory Hennessey keeps his man away from Cowan. Ralph Plumb catches every ball thrown to him, and one that wasn’t.
The note-taking scout may see all this, or he may not. He and a colleague representing another team leave the press box at halftime and never return. Maybe they move to a different spot in the stadium, maybe they call it a day and make for the nearest Hooters. Whether or not the pros notice, Simmons, Hennessey, and Plumb play out both the Stover at Yale scenario and the prospects' drama to the bitter end.
When the game ends, some fans jump down from the stands and run around. Mounted police ride onto the playing field. Premature evening descends, and everybody starts thinking about what comes next: more tailgating, traffic, the evening’s round of dinner and parties, life after football.
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The tenderness of fresh hurt makes the players look like enormous 12-year-olds whose dogs have died. |
At the post-game press conference at the Varsity Club, Yale’s coach, Jack Siedlecki, sits with three of his players at a table. The players have not yet changed out of their game gear; their cleats leave disklike clods of mud and grass on the red rugs and polished wood floor. The players slump deeply in their chairs, vacant-eyed. They may well believe that they are inconsolably desolate, but they are impossibly young—the tenderness of fresh hurt accentuates it, making them look like enormous 12-year-olds whose dogs have died—and they will recover quickly. The coach, an intense bald man whose nightmarish day at the office appears to have put new lines on his taut face, will take much longer to get over it. He praises Harvard’s team and his own players' effort, his voice thickening when he says, “I’m disappointed in the team, but not in individual performances. They’re great kids, they’re going to go on and do great things, and I’m proud of them.” But he can’t resist revisiting his quarterback’s one big mistake, which led to an interception and a Harvard touchdown. Yale was about to score to close within seven points, then suddenly Harvard was up by twenty-one. “That put us in a hole,” says Siedlecki. “Big-time hole.”
Alvin Cowan, sitting at the table with the coach, manfully takes responsibility for the ill-advised throw. He also notes that Yale has been running that particular play at the goal line all year, perhaps suggesting that Harvard knew it was coming. It could be that a little tension moves under the surface of both men’s comments. If Mister Hotshot Quarterback hadn’t made that dumb throw . If Mister Offensive Genius Coach hadn’t called that predictable play. But they both try to do the right thing. Mustering their will at its lowest ebb, they rise above the temptation to squabble in defeat.
Dink Stover would approve. “He went out, head erect, back to meet his college, no longer shrinking from the ordeal, proud of his captain, proud of his coach, and proud of a lesson he had learned bigger than a victory.”
In the margin of his program, in no obvious proximity to the name of any of the prospects he was observing, the scout wrote Bad decision. Perhaps he referred to Cowan’s goal line throw, or one of Fitzpatrick’s two long passes that Simmons nearly intercepted, or something else—a blocker’s error, a defender’s misreading of a formation. Oops. Sorry, coach. Won’t happen again.
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What happens on the field can shape budgets, application yields, professional futures. |
Bad decision. Ideally, collegiate athletics creates situations in which young people must make decisions, must act and be acted upon in character-shaping ways, without external consequence beyond the course of the game and the school’s rah-rah fortunes. It doesn’t work that way, of course. What happens on the field can shape budgets, application yields, professional futures. Still, a bad decision in even the most important Division I-AA football game seems almost without consequences when compared to bad decisions like marrying the wrong mate, choosing the wrong job, getting behind the wheel of a car after the 15th drink. Ask the homeless people who spent the night camped on the grass along the Cambridge side of the river.
Actually, maybe you shouldn’t ask them. Maybe you should ask the alumni at the tailgate. Most people feel, rightly or wrongly, that their lives are shaped by what the world visits upon them, rather than by what they choose to do. But, rightly or wrongly, most people who graduate from Yale and Harvard feel that they hold the course of their lives in their own hands, that good or bad decisions matter more than good or bad fate. Part of what draws alumni to the Yale-Harvard game every year may well be nostalgia for a feeling of cozy distance from the consequences of one’s own decisions—nostalgia for a long-lost undergraduate moment of insulation from the fact of an increasingly irrevocable life course already beginning to form beneath the surface of classes, parties, and games.  |
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