Justin Whittington

Justin Whittington has an identity problem.

It's not the way the Crimson senior defensive end looks at himself; rather, it's the image he tends to project to others. To the casual observer, he just doesn't seem like a football player. And to the other guys on the football team, it seems just a little bit odd that he is a classics major.

But in the Classics Department, they have no doubts.

On Saturday mornings before home games, the whole squad gathers in the Union for breakfast. Since normal breakfast hours are over before the team eats, the Crimson must pass through a separate serving line, set up especially for it by union bureaucracy.

"But three times this year the ladies have stopped me and told me to get out of line," Whittington says. "They say, 'You're not on the football team, are you?' It must be my glasses, but it has happened three times this year."

The Union servers aren't the only ones who fail to make the connection between the 6-ft., 3-in., 200-pound senior and the right side of Harvard's defensive line. A supervisor at Lamont for the past two years, whittington laughs, "At Lamont I get people calling me to work for them Saturday afternoon, because they want to go to the game." He has a previous commitment, he tells the callers.

Part of that is because of his size, which is not outstanding for his position--"I'm the smallest defensive end in Division I," he jokes--more of the non-recognition however, comes from the peculiarities of football at Harvard.

"A lot of the guys on the team get that [lack of recognition]," Whittington says, "because you're not a big person at Harvard if you play football, especially if you're a lineman. But that doesn't bother me...because you realize when you come here you won't be a compus hero."

Whittington obviously revels in the team concept. "The team aspect of it is definitely the major part of it. I'm not an individual player, I'm not a star. I like everyone pulling along together, trying to make it work."

This stress on team unity bears the impress of his religious background; he graduated form Gonzaga College High School, a Jesuit institution in downtown Washington, D.C. "There is something religious about [the team working together for a common goal], or at least for someone with a religious background it seems like something of an affirmation.

"If you're religious sort of person, you just associate it with the religious feeling you're used to having. It's not that everyone gets down on their knees or anything, or bows to Mecca.

"You'll find a lot of guys on the team are pretty religious. I don't think most people at Harvard are as secular as they appear--for the most part there aren't that many channels to show their religiosity. But if you could ever see how many football players are at church on Sunday, starting with the five-o'clock Mass on Saturday..."

Perhaps because of these feelings, he insists that he doesn't really stand out. "Writing a profile about me would be pretty much the same as writing about most other guys," he says. "I'm just one of 11 guys trying to get the job done."

But still--if just because of his academic proclivities--Whittington does seem to attract a certain amount of attention. "Sometime at the beginning of the year, Restic was having everybody announce their majors. There were a lot of economics, maybe a history scattered here or there, a pre-med. And then he said 'Justin Whittington,' and there was total silence, and then everyone just burst out laughing, even though they knew damn well what I was majoring in. People on the football team think, 'This guy's an anomaly.'" And if so, he seems to enjoy it, chortling about when the coaching staff asked the team members whether they had any other afternoon commitments. "I said I had no labs, but one late class--Latin prose comp--it meets 2:00-4:00. They love it in the Classics Department."

Thomas martin, assistant professor of the Classics, once got up in the middle of tutorial and announced that the Classics Department was proud to have a football player in its midst, while Richard F. Thomas, the head tutor, calls Whittington "one of the more serious concentrators," because he does work in both Greek and Latin, while most students do work in one or the other.

Thomas--who is currently instructing Whittington in Latin 112a, History of Classical Latin Literature--says, "He attends faithfully, except when the buses are leaving early for Cornell or something like that, and that's understandable."

Whittington says Classics was a natural choice. "It's just something I did a lot of in high school. Gonzaga, as a Jesuit school, sort of concentrated on that.

"It's not much more irrelevant than economics or something like that. You might as well spend four years doing something at least mildly enjoyable," he says.

Although academics here remained a very important part of Harvard for him, Whittington has structured his four years primarily around football. Entering with sophomore standing because he anticipated taking a semester off--but still playing four years of football--he trains hard both in and out of season.

About his semester off--which he spent in Cambridge working in the Widener microtext/government documents section--Whittington says, "I knew I was going to be here in the fall, definitely, for football. I would have been a fool not to come back in the fall, because, frankly, football has been the biggest and most satisfying thing here for me."

That's not surprising, because he does have talent. He had enough skill and determination to be a two-year starter, in spite of the fact that Harvard didn't recruit him. "All the other schools I applied to recruited me--Army, William and Mary, practically every team we played this year recruited me--but not Harvard. Harvard didn't have its act together in Washington that year," he jokes, "but that didn't matter, because I wanted to go to Harvard."

Since coming to Harvard he has made the transition from tackle to end--"No more three-point stance for me"--even though he doesn't really have the size for that position.

"His biggest asset is running plays down," Crimson head coach Joe Restic says. "His strength is recovery, getting back in the action. He doesn't give up. He continues the play until it's finished, and that's the same with practice. He continues until it's finished."

"I was never called a jock until I came to Harvard; but when I came here, just because I played football everyone called me a jock. And personally, I don't consider myself a jock at all," Whittington concludes.

As if to emphasize his point, he relates an anecdote about athletic director John P. Reardon. Two years ago--in the middle of the Crimson's six-game losing streak--Reardon had a little chat with the team, telling them that he was concerned about their image, and said that it was alright for Harvard's football players to be friends with cellists.

And in fact, Whittington is very good friends with one cellist, HRO president Joyce Jacobsen; the two of them were part of a quartet which split the rent on an apartement last summer. "He's really quite domestic," Jacobsen says. "He makes a mean corned beef and cabbage."