Hating Football, Tolerating "The Game"

Yale Trounces Harvard in a 2017 Matchup
Photo by Tim Clayton/Corbis

Despite my strong aversion to football or sports of any kind, one game every year rattles my indifference and appeals to my sentimentality. I refer to the Yale-Harvard contest, which is always held the Saturday before Thanksgiving.

Some people put Harvard first and refer to it as the Harvard-Yale game. Those people probably have some affiliation with the haughty little town of Cambridge, Massachusetts. (I may have spent a year at Harvard, but my loyalty will always be to Yale—my undergraduate alma mater and the superior of the two schools.)

For Yalies and those Crimson snobs to the north, this matchup is simply known as "The Game."

My first such matchup, in 1980, required a train ride to Cambridge from New Haven. We partied like animals on that train. Details are fuzzy. I never so much as glimpsed at Jack Daniels again after that day. I know it involved a reunion with high school friends over Chinese food in a dodgy, dimly lit Harvard Square joint that is long gone and crashing in the apartment of my roommate's high school girlfriend. 

After The Game was held in New Haven during my sophomore year, I never attended it again. But the “Harvard” weekend was always filled with ambient one-upmanship and competition.

Yale students do not take things too seriously. Those games involved the ironically named Yale Precision Marching Band, which made a mockery of its own genre through stunts that once included dropping their pants on Holy Cross. You won’t see anyone from Harvard dropping their pants.

Pranks against Harvard have gone on for years. Yale routinely gets the best of Harvard because the Crimsons’ brains don’t allow for fun. According to the Boola, a 2004 prank involved Yalies disguising themselves as the "Harvard Pep Squad" and handing out placards to 1,800 Harvard fans who believed that when held up, they would spell out "Go Harvard." When it came time to hold up the signs, Harvard's fan section spelled out a message proclaiming, "We Suck." The stunt gained significant media attention and caused humiliation to Havard.

In the decades since I graduated from Yale, the Bulldogs have lost more games than they’ve won. There were horrible losing streaks, like the nine-game one from 2007 to 2015. This and other stretches almost made me a defeatist. But then we won four of the last six years. Digging deeper, I also discovered that of the 137 games played since 1875, Yale has 68 wins—just about half.

Two days from now, I will check the score on the internet and smile if the Bulldogs prevail. I might even do a social media post, but nothing too elaborate, lest my ignorance of football give me away.

Like other traditions, this one marks the passage of time and brings back fond memories of “bright college years.” It is also a reminder that win or lose, Harvard will always suck.

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