The Only Book That Matters This Weekend

Sports and historical writing usually attract very different audiences. The topics are on opposite sides of Barnes and Noble’s: 13-year-old boys with Yankees caps and cracking voices pour over A-Rod stats in one aisle and 50-year-old bespectacled men in tweed make pithy comments in another.

As such, it is truly impressive that Bernie M. Corbett and Paul Simpson managed to create a captivating sports narrative with great historical context in their new book, The Harvard/Yale Rivalry: The Only Game that Matters.

In 300 pages and 10 well-constructed chapters, Corbett and Simpson interweave the history of football’s “greatest rivalry” and the progression of the 2002 Harvard and Yale teams as they work their way towards The Game. Corbett, the play-by-play announcer for Harvard football for the past seven years, not only manages to document in detail the evolution of football at the two universities, but also the creation of a national pastime.

The Game has been played for 121 years between Harvard and Yale and is both the definition of Ivy League football and of the totality of the rivalry between two of the nation’s greatest schools. “To Harvard and Yale, The Game is the Rose, Sugar, Fiesta, and Orange bowls rolled into one glorious face-off, a starched New England epic fraught with history, honor, and a hoary, proprietary blend of intellectualism and intensity. The Bulldogs and Crimson know who the enemy is and when he will be met. They know that win, lose or tin, the game will shadow them the rest of their lives,” the book states on page 47.

The Harvard-Yale Game is arguably the start of modern sports rivalry, in which two teams so closely on par in talent and longevity can manifest their quarrel in a measurable three-hour match. Throughout the book, Corbett stresses that without the competition between Harvard and Yale, there would be no modern football, on the college level or otherwise. “There’s no Big House in Ann Arbor without Harvard Stadium!” he says.

According to Corbett, the book will give its reader a real education about how football began, how it developed and how “it got to be the game it is today.” The need of Harvard and Yale men to rebel against rigid campus life through vigorous physical activity, and to prove their superiority against one another in athletic skills developed into the “Boston game” of football.

In speaking with Corbett, it becomes evident that the author knows nearly as much about Harvard and Yale history as he does the stats of the 2004 football team. “You can put these two schools as rivals since the beginning of the institutions themselves,” he says. “Quite simply, the people that started Yale were people that attended Harvard and had gone down to the New Haven colony. One of the main reasons they started the school was that they wanted a place to send their children, without making the trek to send their children to Cambridge. It was a little more dangerous than just a Connecticut State trooper pulling you over!”

The writing of the 130 years of relatively obscure sports history is a daunting task, but The Only Game that Matters is packed full of trivia, fast-paced sports analysis and broad comprehension of American history.

The book’s breadth is evidence of the extensive research and interviews conducted by the authors. “One of the things we realized in our research,” Corbett says, “if this book was a DVD, we’d have an extra disk of stuff that ended up on the cutting room floor.”

Corbett cites one primary source he found as a major inspiration throughout the writing of the book, making the analogy of “Linus with a security blanket”: a letter from 1892, written by James Kivlan of Notre Dame to Yale’s Coach Walter Camp.

Kivlan begs for Camp’s guidance and advice as to how to start-up a football program at Notre Dame. Camp, a man once described as “everything to football that George Washington was to the country,” truly revolutionized football, establishing a team as 11 players per side, the size of the field and the current standard of rules of the game.

The book is largely biographic, a description of characters past and present who have invested themselves into the playing of football and the winning of The Game. Highlighted players include those who have gone on to greatness beyond the gridiron like Senator Edward M. Kennedy, ’54-’56 (D.-Mass) and Tommy Lee Jones ’62; monumental coaches like Camp and Percy Haughton of Harvard; and football legends like William W. “Pudge” Heffelfinger, 1891, of Yale and Milton A. Holt, ’75, of Harvard. It is evident that men who suited up for Crimson or Blue have had a veritable impact on the sport and on history.

Telling the story of amateur athletes largely differs from the recounting of historical moments. Corbett’s rule of thumb is to treat players with respect, and to remember to “keep the student in front of the athlete.”

The authors went into the 2002 season with no expectations of how it would stand out from the 118 before it, but as Corbett asserts, “you put yourself in that position to chronicle a season, something is bound to happen.”

While receiver Carl E. Morris ’03 became the golden-boy of the Harvard season and was the man to watch as a NFL prospect, it was the unforeseen quarterback controversy between the injured Captain Neil T. Rose ’02 and then-sophomore Ryan J. Fitzpatrick ’05 that added an interesting dimension to the Crimson side of the story.

The Fitzpatrick segments in the book are particularly relevant to any current Harvard football fan who has watched the captain lead Harvard to its amazing capture of the Ivy League title.

Captain Jason Lange of the Yale roster stood out as not only a strong quarterback, but, as Corbett calls him, “the real poster boy of everything that has been great from Ivy League since the beginning…certainly a renaissance man.”

Lange had stayed on an extra year at Yale not just to throw for the Bulldogs, but also with the intent to make it into The Whiffenpoofs, the most prestigious Yale a capella group.

It is this personal approach that makes the book so readable. While the on-field descriptions are written with the play-by-play style that is customary to sports announcers like Corbett, no real knowledge of football is necessary to genuinely appreciate this survey of the sport and exploration of character. ESPN fans, for whom vocabulary like “inside reverse run” is second nature, may appreciate the book on an additional level.

Corbett vibrantly captures the best games in Harvard-Yale history: in particular, the miracle Harvard “win” of 1968, in which Harvard came back from 29-13 to tie 29-29 in the last three and half minutes. In the 1974 game, dubbed “The Best Game,” Harvard not only beat Yale in The Game, but also for the Ivy League Title in a last minute perfect touchdown by the concussed quarterback Milt Holt.

But the book is far more than a compilation of unbelievable passes and touchdowns, just as The Game is much more than just four quarters of football. Corbett seems to have a deep understanding that the Bulldogs and Crimson teams are not just talented players, but also destined for greatness outside of athletics. “For two squads of gridiron combatants that were destined to become stockbrockers, investment bankers, corporate lawyers, and doctors, this was a taste of what it was like to play in the Super Bowl,” he says on page 21.

The stories of Ivy League are of leaders on the playing field who will go on to be leaders in many other fields. It is unfortunate that more attention is not paid to the fantastic current generation of Crimson and Blue players.

While the book could be taken simply as a pleasurable read for Harvard and Yale students and alums and football fans, it might also be a real galvanizing tool to reinstate the popularity of the nation’s original football teams. There is a void in the popular consciousness and media exposure of Ivy League sports, especially, as Corbett says, when “ESPN has been overrun by dollars.” Harvard’s own Ryan Fitzpatrick confessed to the authors on page 118 that he “didn’t even know they played football at Ivy League schools until I started getting letters.”

With the nearby Boston College playing on the 1-A level and the New England Patriots soaking up tailgaters each Sunday, there is a very small crowd for Crimson home games and even less space on the pages of The Boston Globe and The Boston Herald. Corbett, as both a participant in and a proponent of Harvard football, believes that if people come in to Soldiers’ Field and give the game a chance early in the season, they will want to keep coming back. Widespread reading of his book may just be the ticket to attracting a local audience and clueing Harvard students into the living history that is played across the river.

The book becomes particularly important with The Crimson’s so-far undefeated and titled season coming to a close this Saturday with the 121st Game. While Corbett refuses to give his prediction for fear of jinxing The Game, he does advise readers to keep an eye out for the Fitzpatrick vs. Cowan match-up, the second meeting of two phenomenal quarterbacks.

Spectators looking to understand the significance of Alvin Cowan and Ryan Fitzpatrick should turn immediately to The Only Game That Matters and learn about the formative years of the team captains.

Harvard and Yale alums will read the book and relive their glory days on the field or in the stands. Harvard and Yale students, regardless of familiarity with university history or even football, should read the book to know why exactly they are braving late-November weather and mediocre Cambridge tailgates.

The Game is much more than a flagrant display of drunken college revelry or unabashed school spirit: it is an essential tradition in history and a chance to see some really great football played.

Corbett entreats the local audience and student body alike to “please come to a game. You’re going to be the original stadium. You’re going to be in a magnificent stadium. They’ve been a great team to watch.”