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" Oh, at Princeton you've got to swallow everything the first year. It's like a damned prep school. " Amory agreed. " Lot of pep, though, " he insisted. " I wouldn't have gone to Yale for a million. " -"This Side of Paradise"

Just like Scott Fitzgerald, who attended Princeton more than half a century ago, Ray Ollwerther, Princeton '71, wouldn't have gone to Yale in the first place. By last November, three years of losing to the Elis in football had further embittered him-Yalies are damn poor winners, you understand-and with another important Big Three clash imminent, Ray decided that the Princeton community needed inspiration.

"Just because Princeton is playing Yale tomorrow in football, that's reason enough to want to win," Ollwerther wrote in the Daily Princetonian . "Simply out of revenge, out of a gut reaction after three years of humiliation, after three years of cocky pre-game statements that the Tigers didn't believe in the 'Yale mystique,' and then succumbing to it, Princeton football wants to win tomorrow."

It is comforting, in these days when all the old values are crumbling, that institutional hate as Scott Fitzgerald knew it still beats in some breasts. And not just at Princeton, either.

"I don't know whether it's the Stadium or Harvard period," Yale coach Carmen Cozza said last November, after his Eli football team had lost at Cambridge for the fifth consecutive occasion. "Harvard is the only place people at Yale-from the administration to the players-are ever concerned with. I can't for the life of me figure out what's so great about it."

Yale Daily News sports editor Mike Goodman agrees. "Harvard is no place for a Yale man. Everyone is much too serious, much too intense, and much too unreal. Playing Harvard at Harvard is like battling all divinity and nature as well."

Harvard does not exactly attach world-shattering significance to beating Yale-or anyone, for that matter. I don't think many people in Cambridge walk around believing that Frank Champi salvaged the 1968-69 academic year with his 42 seconds worth of athletic bravado. But then, in retrospect, the 1968-69 academic year was probably a lost cause to begin with.

But with the possible exception of Harvard, which regards almost anyone with unaffected scorn anyway, and Cornell, who few really know much about, each Ivy brother holds another in undiluted contempt for one obscure reason or another.

Columbia feels that Princeton is entirely filled with prep-school snobs. Princeton thinks that Harvard is a haven for latent homosexuals. Brown believes that Harvard is entirely too close to Providence for any good relations to exist.

The fact that Yale men "all wear big blue sweaters and smoke pipes" was sufficient to foster Fitzgerald's dislike for the institution, and no one at Princeton appears to have come up with any more solid reason than that since 1915. Yale feels inferior to both Harvard and Princeton, Dartmouth feels inferior to Harvard, Princeton and Yale, and everyone entirely dislikes Pennsylvania. Institutional hate keeps the alumni going. It gives one something to do in New Haven.

But upon occasion, it destroys the college careers of young men like Ray Ollwerther, Princeton '71. Despite Ollwerther's poignant plea to Tiger pride last November 13th, Yale defeated Princeton again, 27-22, for the fourth consecutive year. It's enough to make even Amory Blaine reconsider.