Number 64

It is common knowledge that the Volstead Act, several depressions, and the invention of four-wheel brakes have become part of history since a Harvard-Yale Game settled a major championship or demonstrated the best in football. Almost unendingly one hears that these late November meetings are self-sufficient entities--complete whole football seasons synthesized into three hour, red and blue capsules, to be swallowed only in the Yale Bowl or Harvard Stadium. What more can be said? The 75,000 spectators, the sounds and colors, the brandy and Chanel-scented air--all the riotous and mellow components of the Weekend are, above all, tributes to a football game that year after year begins with little, brews for sixty minutes, and produces greatness.

This year the familiar pattern has again been--unwillingly but faithfully followed. The Harvard and Yale teams have fallen far short of preseason hopes or expectations. But, as in the past, both conscious strategy and the insidious but unconscious aura of the game inexorably combine to save the special play, the hardest tackle, the all-out effort, for today. The explosion that inevitably follows produces exciting football, unexcelled football. It is touched of when two ordinary teams suddenly find their particular niche in the unpredictable common denominator that is football and become part of a legend.

At kickoff time, 75,000 individuals will jam the huge Bowl for the first "formal" New Haven Harvard-Yale Game since before the War. Together with their colored feathers and old fur coats, they bring traditions and memories of Mahan and Heffelfinger, Booth and Wood, Frank and Struck--great names of ten or thirty years ago. But more than that, they come anxious to bask in the spirit and participate in the festivities of the occasion; to join with the two teams in writing a new chapter in the unique legend of this day.