Et in Arcadia Ego

Harvard football remains worthy of appreciation

By Patrick T. Brennan

Amid all the tributes paid to Senator Ted Kennedy ’56 after his passing, perhaps the most moving was the no. 88 jersey hung in the Harvard football locker room in the days after his death. To a conservative, the one unequivocally admirable trait of Senator Kennedy was his unerring devotion to Harvard football over the years.

From his segmented career as a passable fullback to his faithful attendance at Crimson games throughout his life, Kennedy represents one of a storied generation of Harvard football players, including his Senate colleague and Crimson teammate John Culver ’54, who went on to significant achievements but remained devoted to the football team.

Some of my earliest memories of Harvard football include seeing Ted Kennedy in the Stadium and at tailgates, when my dad would inform me as to whether he had gained or lost 50 pounds in the past year. The senator, for all his flaws, was a product of Harvard back when the virtues of loyalty, manliness, and touchdowns, were still inculcated in its students. Harvard, with its spiritual and moral deconstruction of Memorial Church, lack of legitimate curricular requirements, and amoral attitudes, has strayed considerably since 1956, but the football program remains one aspect worthy of appreciation.

While Harvard football has fallen a long way in athletic prestige since the 1920 Rose Bowl and its seven national championships, its glorious history has endured in memory. It stood at the center of American collegiate athletics for a half century: the program recorded the first American football game in 1874, the first use of a football scoreboard in 1893, and the construction of America’s first college athletics stadium in 1903. Harvard essentially forced the adoption of the forward pass in 1906 because the stadium field could not be widened.

Harvard Staidum is one of the world’s great athletic venues. As the world’s first reinforced concrete stadium, it broke new ground in stadium design. This was not without a healthy respect for the past, as its resemblance to the Flavian Amphitheatre and the Circus Maximus attests. It is easily one of the world’s most beautiful stadiums: the Tuscan columns of the colonnade and the Classical arches give it a dignified air and sophisticated aesthetic that subterranean burrows like the Yale Bowl or modern abominations like the new Cowboy Stadium lack.

Many fans, particularly the more apathetic students, rue the spartan hardship of its concrete benches. This almost comically plain design, however, allows for very steep rows, making the stadium one of the greatest places in the world to watch a sporting event. No venue with individual seats can keep 30,000 fans so intimately involved in an athletic spectacle. Fans higher up in the stands can gain enough elevation above the field to observe the unfolding of Coach Murphy’s intricate plays, but still be nearly right on top of the field.

The success of the Harvard football program since Tim Murphy’s arrival in 1994, while largely unnoticed by the student body, cannot be overstated.

But of course, as generations of Red Sox fans can attest, a team needn’t win to be worthy of appreciation. From the haute spreads of alumni to the cold kegs of Coors enjoyed by undergraduates, tailgating may be on a Lilliputian scale in comparison to the Brobdingagian affairs enjoyed by Bowl Championship Series schools, but quality is always more important than quantity. The football game has always been important, but the accompanying revelry and fellowship are of equal or greater significance.

I can no longer remember too many scores from the dozens of Harvard football games I attended in the 1990s, but I will never forget touch football on the O’Donnell Field with my brother and lox and capers with my father and his classmates.

Perhaps one of Harvard football’s greatest charms is precisely its small scale: while I yearn for the days of a full Colonnade and Harvard-Yale as the premier American football game, the program has benefited from a narrower scope over the years. The diminutive crowds sporting bowties and raccoon coats may be a source of derision from “real football schools,” but Harvard football hearkens back to a nobler era of collegiate athletics.

The days of the three-sport varsity athletes, rosters filled with New England players, and national championships may be long gone, but Crimson football retains a dignitas and gravitas that has long forsaken American sports. As tired a cliché as it is, Harvard football players are still students before athletes, and manage to avoid the cheating scandals and violent incidents of big time college athletics.

Unfortunately, in the past decade or so, since the departure of William Cleary ’56 from the athletic director’s office and the selection of Bob Scalise as his successor, Harvard football has undergone an unfortunate period of commercialization. “Event staff” in horrid green windbreakers have replaced Cambridge community members as ushers, the cacophony of the Dropkick Murphys plays across the public address system, and a “jumbotron” now looms across the turf. Such developments may increase attendance, but these “improvements” diminish the sanctity of the event, roughly akin to the Boston Symphony Orchestra allowing denim in order to sell tickets. Perhaps most emblematic of misguided modernization is the replacement of the Harvard H and Veritas shield with the new athletics shield, which briefly blighted Gate 1 at the corner of Soldiers Field. But despite the best efforts of the chirping sectaries of the Athletic Department, Harvard football’s charm remains resilient.

While Emma Watson may have replaced Ted Kennedy as the most famous attendee at Harvard football games, and somehow we lost to Holy Cross, I’ll still sing “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard” as loudly as ever. Harvard may now be winning national championships in the Putnam math competition instead of the NCAA, but the football program has managed to remain a rare part of Harvard that still has yet to forsake true virtues like loyalty in the blind worship of ambition, efficiency, and success. Harvard football is one tradition undulled by the abominations of modernity.