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Going to The Game in Middle Age
March/April 2004
by Charles McGrath '68
Charles McGrath is the editor of the New York Times Book Review.
Attending the Harvard game properly entails a certain amount of collective suffering: umbrella-hoisting, scarf-tightening, foot-stamping, arm-thwacking. We undertake these hardships in solidarity with the team, shivering down there on the field, and also to justify consumption of midday alcohol. In 1987, for example, it was so cold that flasks were emptied before the second half, and I recall hearing little cracks and tinklings in the stands—the sound of people’s fingers and toes falling off.
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This year the sun shone with an almost unnatural heat. |
But this year the sun shone with an almost unnatural heat, and cast a Keatsian glow on Harvard-Yale day. The weather was so warm that it literally took the steam out of the lightweight crew, which had enterprisingly arranged for a mobile hot tub to be set up outside the Bowl. Under such balmy conditions, sadly, the spectacle of a bunch of skinny bare-chested guys in their bathing suits was not nearly as arresting as the team must have hoped. Long before the kickoff, students were pulling off their hoodies to reveal T-shirts emblazoned with the ritual slogans: “Harvard Sucks,” of course, but also “Harvard—the Yale for Dummies” and—this on a med student, of all people—“Don’t Be Afraid to Boot.”
In the parking lots, meat sizzled, fired by charcoal and propane, and rock music thumped—especially over in the rent-a-truck section, where the students funneled beer and danced on the roofs of their Budgets and U-Hauls. There were enough trucks, parked side by side, to evacuate a small town. Frisbees were tossed, and there were numerous demonstrations of intergenerational slo-mo football: Dad goes out for a pass, arms stretched, in exaggerated, loping steps, and his long-suffering offspring drops back, looks, pumps once, twice, and then lofts a wobbly spiral into Dad’s waiting fingertips. (If Dad then wants to tuck the ball under his arm and straight-arm an imaginary tackler, well, that’s up to him and to his family’s tolerance.)
These events take place every year, of course—or every other year—as do the alumni brie-nibbling, Bloody Mary-pouring, and Chardonnay-sipping. But this time, under the cloudless sky and late-maturing sun, they took on a particularly cheerful aspect. The parking lots outside the Bowl resembled nothing so much as the precincts outside a medieval city on a special feast day (or one of those thrilling occasions when they used to burn the heretics). It was a day for celebrating how much fun it is to get together and celebrate.
Inside the Bowl, there were more somber lessons, for those who wanted to study them. In the first half, despite amassing prodigious amounts of yardage on the ground and in the air, Yale failed to get into the end zone and had to settle for a pair of field goals, proving, yet again, that effort is not always rewarded, and that the Crimson’s Dante Balestracci (who helped stiff the Elis at first-and-goal from the five and also engineered a key first down on a fake punt) may be the best linebacker in Ivy League history. Toward the end of the second quarter, the warming sun began to sink below the press box and the shadows lengthened, as they always do, across the field. Whose idea was it, anyway, that the visitors always get to sit on the sunnier side?
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You had become the sort of person you once made fun of. |
At this point, if you were a member of the famous Class of 1968, let’s just say, it probably occurred to you, as you were entertaining a few autumnal thoughts—seasons coming, seasons going, golden bygone days, etc., etc.—that you had become the sort of person you once made fun of. When I was an undergraduate, my friends and I liked to go on what we called “fart patrol” before the Harvard game, roaming around and competing to see who could spot the most ridiculous Old Blues, of whom there seemed to be no shortage in those days: geezers in their raccoon skins or camel-hair topcoats; jowly, red-faced guys with lockjaw accents booming out to one another, “Hey, Jack, how’s the bride?” They actually took this Harvard-Yale stuff seriously!
So do we, it turns out—seriously enough that we keep coming year after year—and not only are we now the same age as most of those ancient-seeming valetudinarians, the sad truth is they were a lot more colorful than we are. In our Land’s End jackets and our Rockport walking shoes, not a stitch of raccoon or camel among us, we have become sensible and boring, and the same, alas, will happen to those blissed-out young people dancing on top of their trucks.
Harvard opened the second half with another, mood-deflating TD, to go up 24-6. Alex Cowan, at quarterback for Yale, was pressured constantly by the Harvard line, but nevertheless connected time after time with Ralph Plumb in the flat, and actually set a school passing record; on every drive it was just those last few yards that proved unattainable. At the end of the third quarter, after Yale failed to get in from the Crimson three, Harvard’s Fitzpatrick, on a busted play, hit Brian Edwards for a 79-yarder and a 31-13 lead, and that was pretty much it. The final score was 37-19. The shadows grew longer; the clock ticked down; the bands packed up; the teams left the field—the seniors for the very last time—and the rest of us filed out, back to our cars and to fires gone cold. Another year hastening to its end.
As I eased the station wagon out of the lot (the fourth family wagon to have made this trip, I suddenly realized) and my wife and I headed homeward, I thought of all the years when the kids used to make the long losers'—or, sometimes, winners'—drive with us. (They have now graduated—one Harvard, one Yale, as it happens—and drive, or don’t, on their own.) One year we went with a couple who had made their own mead, which is the kind of self-conscious thing people used to do in the old days. Another year we traveled with a couple who brought an Oriental rug and a silver candelabrum: ditto.
I remembered with particular vividness the year in the late 70s when we went with our friend Ralph and narrowly avoided a conflagration on the Merritt Parkway. Ralph was—overmedicated might be the kindest way to put it. (That used to happen back in the old days too. People would sometimes take too much medicine and then operate motor vehicles.) Ralph was also smoking a foot-long victory cigar, and he had the stogie in one hand and the gas nozzle in the other when he got into an altercation with a station attendant who he felt was disrespecting his new Mercedes. It took three of us to subdue Ralph and fold him into the back seat, where for most of the way home he extolled his alma mater. Ralph is a Harvard grad. That probably goes without saying.  |
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