Eli Game Lore Indicates Trend Towards More Liquor, Less Fervor

In 1931 the New York Daily News reported "Sweaty exorcists are having less and less success . . . at the self imposed job of routing students out of their dormitories to burn red fire in the Square and mutter gibberish in unison the night before a so-called big game." The Daily News as right, for it has been spirits not spirit that have typified football weekends in the past two decades. Before the Yale game in the year of the News article the Harvard Provision Company advertised special scotch for the big game at $2.89 a fifth. A Crimson of the early '30's reported that "Today's Yale contest is the last of the season. From now on the boys will have to do their drinking inside." The stands were behind the team down to the last drop.

"Disk of Limp Rubber"

However, things were not always this way. In the days when "a particularly desperate scrimmage flattened the ball into a disk of limp rubber"--in the days when the New York Times said that the "Harvard punting was immense, the handling of kicks without a flaw, the plunging irresistable and the end running brilliant, all in the same game," students were "football-conscious." Old CRIMSONS report that in 1909 over 1500 students cheered the scrimmage the week before the Yale game.

Those were the days of the red handkerchiefs. When the students signed for their tickets before the big game, some in the choice sections would get tickets marked RED HANDKERCHIEF. Just before game time the boys would don their raccoon coats and rush over to Brine's, Leavitt and Pierce, or the Coop to pick up their Crimson cloths.

Courtesy of the Taft

When the band struck up the Marseillaise, they whipped them out of their pockets and a Red H appeared in the stands, waving gaily at the astonished adversaries.

Post-game goal post riots got their start back in those days when a man wasn't considered "at the game" unless he was seen, bleary eyed, hanging on to a piece of the uprights. A CRIMSON of 1928 stated, "One goalpost was traced to the railroad station, half of the other drove into a ditch after it had failed to gore four citizens and a ticket post, and a member of the second post was checked for Straus Hall by the unfailing courtesy that is the Taft Hotel."

Crimson 'H'

This tradition is definitely out now as for as the Yale Bowl is concerned for the Eli management has seen fit to erect steel-pipe goal posts filled with concerto. However, there are other outlets for enthusiasm.

West Rock, the remainder of the glacier age that stands over New Haven, has been the goal of Crimson mountaineers during recent years. Although the Yalies had been able to stave off attacks by valiant Crimson supporters in the past, 1947 saw a great Harvard victory. A band of students climbed the heights under the cover of darkness and painted a large crimson H on the old stone.