The Goalposts: Sic Transit Gloria

The Stadium goalposts have come down for the last time.

Without so much as an intoxicated crowd to help them along, or a press release to mark their passing, the last set of wooden goal posts left the Stadium last week. The usual accompaniment of the Harvard University Band was missing and there were no undergraduates triumphantly waving splinters. This was an official orderly ceremony: in their place H.A.A. workmen created] unyielding metal structures.

Once the victim of nameless assaulters every Saturday, the wooden posts have taken their place among the former traditions of Harvard College. Their passing might signify the end of gracious living here, except that there was never anything gracious about the struggling mobs.

$75 for a New Set

It cost the H.A.A. $75 for a new set of goal posts after every home game, and this is an economy move, maybe not so apparent as the higher price on the football tickets themselves, but perhaps more depressing; it seems like a shoddy way to save a buck. For the old goal posts did more than serve as a target for an occasional extra point kicker or a field goal hopeful.

To anyone who ever pulled a distraught Yalie from the very foundation of a post, to anyone who raced down on the field after seeing Harvard upset Army 22 to 21 there were more than four quarters in a football game, and the post game battle of the goal posts was sometimes as important and often as exciting as the 60 minutes just completed.

There were two styles of goal post play. If Harvard won, local fans ripped down their own structures: if the Crimson lost them undergraduates would mass to save the posts, perhaps thrown for a greater loss by the pickpockets than the opposition. Back in 1951 a Harvard defensive unit held off a swarm of righteous Princetons for a full 20 minutes. That same year when the Crimson beat Brown officials had attempted to foil the raiders by covering the posts with a thick coat of lard. But blue blazers were used to wipe the posts clean enough to permit razing.

Nevertheless, barring the unforeseen-- the appearance of aceteylene blow torches for instance--future generation of Harvard men will return from a victory over Princeton and Yale soberly or otherwise, as the case may be, tack their program covers to the wall in deference to the tradition of while goal posts their predecessors fostered. Perhaps a dishonest few will sneak behind the Stadium and knock down the wooden goal posts on the practice field. Perhaps others will chip away the concrete in the Stadium itself. Or there might be a sudden rash of postgame helmet thefts.

That the basic good nature of the goal posts scramble may have saved many a post game riot, that a more suitable solution would have been to erect one steel post and cut the financial loss in half makes little difference now. The days of Barry Wood and Goal Post Wood are gone forever.