Deserves credit, shuns dessert

It had fallen apart a few weeks before, but reality set in on this night somewhere between the steak and ice cream.

Yale football team Captain Tom Giella had just finished the main course at the post-Cornell game team dinner but was still hungry. Yet Cornell's 41-7 destruction of the Bulldogs just a few hours earlier lingered. Giella removed himself from the table.

"That game was just absurd," Giella recalls. "We made them look like the Dallas Cowboys and made ourselves look like we'd never been coached"

"I didn't deserve any ice cream."

That pounding administered by previously winless Cornell left the Yale squad 0-8 and earned Giella an honor he'd just as soon do without. With the loss, Thomas Joseph Giella earned the dubious distinction as the captain of the worst football team in Yale history.

That fact hurts nobody more than Giella. You can't help but feel for the East Meadow. N.Y. native, who in his 10 years of organized football has won five championshps and never experienced anything this humiliating

"Every week I try to tell the guys not to give up, and then we go and lose another game," says the 21-year-old defensive tackle. "It really hurts me inside I feel like I've let the team down a bit."

"It's been an unfortunate thing," adds fellow senior Kevin Kalinich, of the squad's misfortunes. "But anyone can be a good captain when you're winning all your games. If takes a lot more courage and a lot more heart from the captain when you're not."

In what has undoubtedly become Yale's longest season ever, courage and heart have become Giella's calling card.

"If I knew over the summer last year that we were going to be 0-8," Giella says. "I don't think I'd have run one less mile or done one less push-up."

Yale coaches and players admit Giella's commitment to his team has been one of the season's few bright spots.

"He keeps plugging away, pushing himself to the brink," an admiring Yale Coach Carn Cozza says. He a hear fighter and that feat helped every one here during the tough times.

"This year hasn't been tougher on anyone than Tom." Defensive Live Coach Bill Samko says. "He's been hit with hard problems and hard questions both on and off the field and yet, he's the first one to come back every week and try that much harder."

What coaches and players unlike are quick as stress about the 6-ft., 2-in. Giella, who has never missed a day of practice in his four years at New Haven, is that he is the hardest working Bulldog around these days.

"Your just don't give up," Giella says. "Once you start giving up, you're finished. You just keep on trying, trying like you never tried before. At least that way you'll have a fighting chance in every game you play."

All of this from the man who admits he's certainly not the finest player on the Yale squad. "He doesn't have an inordinate amount of ability," Samko adds, "but he gets more out of himself than anyone."

Giella obliged when the call came the summer before his sophomore year, asking if he'd move from offensive guard to defensive tackle when he returned to campus. All he wanted was a shot to play, and though hw spent much of that sophomore year behind two All-Ivy tackles, the move proved a blessing in disguise.

Gaining valuable playing experience in mop-up appearances. Giella spent the year under the tutelage of then All-Ivy tackle Serge Mihaly "Serge gave so much of himself." Giella says now, "especially to the younger guys. He spent time with me, showing me the very things I use today."

The leadership that Giella saw in Mihaly during that Ivy championship year of 1981--a year in which the Elis amassed a remarkable 9-1 record--is what he now gives to the younger players.

The last two years have been far from easy for Yale's 107th football captain, though.

Injuries and losing records have taken their toll on him. "There have been a lot of firsts." Giella says of this year in particular, "like the first time Columbia has won in the Yale Bowl since I was born and the first time Brown has won since I was born. That's pretty hard for me to take."

But through it all there still remains a quiet confidence in Giella, a knowledge that virtually none of this in his fault and that this is just another of life's learning experiences.

"To me football is life on a small scale, says the strongest member of the Elis who will close his football career against Harvard.

"A lot of times in your life you're going to have a lot of problems, you'll be trying hard and you'll fail. But it's not the end of the world, you just have to pick yourself up and work harder."

It is with that very belief that the History major approaches his teammates. And as the squad continues to suffer, he preaches something he has learned from Cozza. "I always say that if it works out, fine. But if it doesn't it doesn't make you any less of a person. You just get back up and try again."

"When you're winning, everything's fine," he adds. "Life's a lot harder when you're losing."

Giella will give it one last try this Saturday when Harvard visits the Yale Bowl. "I've been thinking about this game since my freshman year," Giella says, "and now here it is--the climax of my entire atletic career."

"A win there would set off the whole season," he adds. Like the great coach at Yale [T.A.D. Jones] said before the Harvard game: 'Men you're about to play Harvard; this is the most important thing you'll ever do in your entire life.'

"Well I don't know if it's the most important thing you ever do in your entire life, but as far as anything I've ever done in my life so far, it'll all culminate in that game."

Adds Cozza: "He's suffered more than anyone connected with us. But not once has he ever given up--anything."

Except perhaps a bowl of ice cream