Valpey Puts Football on Road Back

Some men are natural leaders, others shove it down your throat. Arthur L. Valpey, Jr. has never shoved anything down anyone's throat. He just explains in his relaxed, quiet way what he would like to see done, and they try to do it, and more--"they" meaning not only the 44 men on the Varsity football squad, but also the assistant coaches, team doctors, grounds keepers, sports writers, and, in fact, everyone who knows him and his job of football.

A lot of people have tried to analyze how he does it, but they all end up by saying, "I don't know. He's just a great gay." It seems much easier to make a character study of a dramatic, Dick Harlow-type or an eternally pessimistic, Frank Leahy-type coach.

Art is neither demonstrative nor buried in gloom. He is more likely to pat an end on the back as he comes out of the game after missing a sure-fire pass than to laud a halfback in hopes of making him an All-American. And he always figures Harvard's chances in any game at about what they should be.

Honesty Is His Policy

His biggest drawing card is an easy-going but sincere honesty. He deals with you straight-forwardly and expects the honor returned. And he has been winning friends without apparent effort ever since he came East.

Harvard's new head coach arrived in Cambridge last spring to be greeted by 50 demoralized football players, a group of sports analysts who honestly wondered if he was a lamb being thrown to the wolves, and an undergraduate body which cared less about football than in any school he had ever seen.

He told the disgruntled athletes that he would consider it a good season if they won four games. He not only taught, but explained to them a system of play which had proved itself at Michigan. And he made them want to be part of a team--his team.

He took the sports writers, showed them his team in action, and had them printing such items as greatest young coach in America" and "best in New England since Leahy."

The students? Well, Art suspects that the way to win fans is to win football games--big time football games. That's why the blackboard outside the varsity dressing room each fall Saturday carries not strictly scores of Ivy League games, but those of big games throughout the country. He's never said it, but you get the idea that the day Harvard beats Michigan is a bright and not too distant day in Art's plans.

To the 33-year-old protege of the H. O. Crisler Training School, football is a business. It is an inspiring one, or else he would not have accepted $8,000 per annum to work a 94-hour week during the fall, cutting out lunches to squeeze in the time, and a regular 40-hour week during the rest of the year.

Joined Michigan Staff

But as in any business, efficiency and thoroughness pays off. Art has thought that way ever since he definitely decided to become a football coach in 1941. At the time, he was only a few hours from his Master's degree at Michigan, but he dropped work on the degree because he figured it would be of little use to him in his new business.

The following year he returned to Michigan, where he had played first string end in '36 and '37, and became a member of Crisler's coaching staff. "My whole idea was to get experience at the various coaching positions," Art says. The next five years were spent in preparation for the business of football with Crisler as tutor.

Sees Horween

Nor did Art fly blindly into the open arms of HAA Director William J. Bingham last year when the latter offered him the head coaching job at Harvard. Instead he went to Chicago, where he spent two full days discussing the values of the Harvard job with a local leather manufacturer named Arnold Horween. "Horween had been head coach at Harvard at the age of 28, and I wanted to get his viewpoint on a young coach's chances there," Art explains.

Art is just as methodical in his approach to a specific team or game. He figures that the coaching staff can "bring up" a team for only two games a season, and plans beforehand which two games these will be. In these calculations, he does not include the games for which a team will bring itself up, as Harvard always does for Yale, and vice versa. His "game plan" also is much more complete than most coaches use. Others may tell their quarterbacks to use a certain group of plays which scouting reports indicate will be effective, but Art teaches Bill Henry the whole game plan series, from beginning to end. For instance, against Brown last week it was straight down the middle for the first ten minutes to draw in the defenses, and then around them with end runs and over them with passes.

Jinx Worries Him

But all this precision in the business of football does not make Art the perfect scientific man. He is, in fact, quite superstitious. He will not sit in a certain chair at the Monday morning Gridiron Club luncheon because he thinks it is a jinx. The last time he sat in it, his team ended up the week by losing to Connell, 40 to 6. He doesn't want pictures of the team taken in game uniforms--another jinx. He was even afraid this very article might be a jinx, until he was assured that a story on the rival coach, Herman Hickman, would appear in the same issue. And he admitted that he was more concerned over the Hickman story being good than this one.

Art's superstition is only one phase of the nature which keeps his precision plus a 13-hour work day from turning him into an automaton. His sense of humor also helps. When a fan asked him after the Princeton game if Harvard had lost because it had not spent enough time on defense, he answered, "What do you mean? We spent all Saturday afternoon on defense."

His family doesn't know too much about Art's life as a coach, and that's exactly the way he wants it. He figures existence around a football field is somewhat glamorized and unnatural, and he doesn't want the children mixed up in it.

But more than all this, what truly keeps Art stable is his stoic philosophy about the business he is in. He best expressed this philosophy himself, when he addressed a student rally before the Columbia game: "When 22 men are chasing a pigskin spheroid, it's hard to tell which way the ball will bounce. And when that spheroid is not even round, the variables are unlimited." All he can do as a coach, he feels, is get his 11 men in a better position to chase the ball--and then pray it isn't jinxed. A mortal can do no more.

This philosophy keeps Art relaxed all week, but on Saturday it only serves as oil slick on rough waters. Except for indulging in his only vice, cigarettes, to the limit of chain smoking, he appears perfectly collected. He has a quiet, good word for everyone, and once the game is started, he never raises his voice unless it is to call in a substitute over the roar of the spectators. In the locker room between halves, he also wants quiet. When the boys are at such an emotional pitch, the effect of an exhorting coach can only be harmful, Art feels. This reassuring coolness lasts until the winning team picks up the ball and carries it off the field. Then, and only then, can he ease up and let the inner tension seep from him. And when it is gone, as he has admitted at several post-game press conferences, "I'm numb!"

You can explain and explain Art Valpey, but it doesn't seem to help you figure out how he walked into Cambridge unpublicized last spring and six months later had a team playing better football than anyone had thought it capable of.

This much can be said. He gave Harvard football players a reason for winning--not for the name of Harvard (that had been tried by his predecessor), not for personal glory (he didn't expect to win enough games to make anyone an All-American), but for their coach, Art Valpey