Crimson, After Victory and Defeat, Is Finally a Team

The man writing behind the by-line has covered Harvard football for a Boston newspaper from the Valley Forge of Coach Dick Harlow's postwar informals right up to today's Yale game. Perhaps better than any other undergraduate he knows what has to be done to make a football team out of a group of half-a-ahundred first day candidates.

I'd like to tell you about the Harvard football team, I mean the way they really became a team.

In the hot days of last Spring when I was making time on the Charles River's banks, they were over at Soldiers Field every afternoon listening to a new coach explain a new system. And as the days became lazier, they put on pads and helmets and put into practice a strange system of football. At times they wished that they had never come out. A half dozen quit. Yet in the end, they slowly became aware that they were learning to move the ball. Spring practice was over, and soon after, they were off to Summer jobs.

They came back to Cambridge when I was at Provincetown teaching a lovely blonde the difference between existentialism and activationism. It was cool there.

Sweltering in Cambridge

But here it was sweltering, with days so hot they wondered how they could hear it. Each day that passed, a few of them found some excuse for going back to the cool spots they had just left. Or others, like Johnny West and Carl Bottenfield, were eliminated for reasons beyond their control. Still others with brittle legs found themselves in hospitals. But most of them stayed on, were off fat, and beat the hell out of each other.

So then later in September they played a full game in the Stadium. About that time, I was getting ready to kiss off the Provincetown blonde. There was no capacity crowd watching, them that particular day. Overhead, grey clouds turned black near the end of the first period. I wish I could tell you more about how they kept on playing for three more periods when electric lights were going out in Boston. But then I'd have to tell you how Bill Henry, a guy who kept statistics at last year's Yale game, showed the stuff that made him Harvard's offensive quarterback.

Well, you all remember how we won the Columbia game. We moved up into national prominence overnight. It always makes me laugh when I think that everyone forgot to listen to Coach Valpey's words: "We're far from being a team yet." The most significant single factor towards helping the Crimson in that opening game was discovery of a young man named Phil Isenberg, a backer-up.

The day finally comes around when the honeymoon is over. It was over for me in the Ritz bar one hour after the Cornell game. For the team, it wasn't a honeymoon on the long train ride from Ithaca to Cambridge. It wasn't a welcome home for Paul O'Brien, Sam Butler, and Ralph Bender when I ignored them at the Monday morning eleven o'clock because I blamed them for letting Cornell backs get through the center of the line. I forgot that they were playing their first year of varsity ball.

Something Deeper

The next week at West Point I was cheering for O'Brien, Butler, and Bender. I out-howled the Army major next to me watching the mighty efforts of Howie Houston. I thumbed through my program to find out that number 77's name was Willie Davis. When Army center Bill Yeomans was flattened by Crimson guard John Coan, I slapped the major on the back. And at the end of the game, I saw the Crimson, standing at attention, better than the Cadets, while the Band played "Fair Harvard." I didn't gave a damn that we'd lost the game. We'd gained something deeper.

I saw the end, who was off-side in the Dartmouth game when one of our backs scored the second T. D. which would have given us at least a tie, walking alone after the game, like a guy who gets an E in the final. And I saw the dreadful look in his eyes when he walked into the medical room where the rest of the team was. Everyone on the team, including the back, shook his hand.

The Saturday we beat Holy Cross I saw two guys I'd never heard of, and another that I'd forgotten, torpedo those huge Holy Cross linesmen. They were Dick Guidera, Jerry Kanter, and Nick Rodis. I could not imagine, too, how I had forgotten number 77's name because he was getting endless tackles. Then there was little Hal Moffle who took a handoff from Nick Athans and went 80 some yards for a T. D. None of these men individually was a hero, it dawned upon me: they were a businesslike team.

The Provincetown blonde wanted to show me the Village, and I showed her Palmer Stadium. She wanted to know why Harvard never carried the ball. It was too much to explain to her. She never did understand that Art Hyde, despite getting a rough going over, was buzzing the Princetons like a fighter plane after a flock of heavies. She couldn't comprehend either that it was possible to make every mistake in the game, and still remain a team.

She got the point last Saturday. It took her and a lot of other people a long time to find out that the Harvard team doesn't have a bellyful of jelly. Those weren't emergency rations that we pulled on Brown. It was now about time for some of that long hard work beginning last Spring to start paying off. There were a lot of things that were good, like Paul Shafer's running, and Jim Noonan's passing, and Chuck Rocho's kicking, and Hal Mofilo's faking, but there was something that meant even more. That was when the whole team sitting on the bench gave Bob DiBlasio a hand after he came off the field just having missed a couple of neat forward passes.

That's the Harvard team I've tried to tell you about. They were battered and beaten away from home. They sweated before the season and during the season. They were weak and powerful. They were great in flashing moments. A stirring greatness at West Point. A day of shame at Princeton. But they are still a team