Out in Greene County, Iowa

Bull-dog! Bull-dog! Bow, wow, wow! Eli Yale! We'll be there, Harvard vs. Yale, “The Game”

By CHUCK OFFENBURGER
November 17, 2009
COOPER, IOWA

I have seen some big college football games through the decades, played in some of the shrines to the game – Notre Dame Stadium, the Rose Bowl, Memorial Stadium at Nebraska U, Neyland Stadium at Tennessee and some others.

But I don’t think I’ve ever been quite excited about a college football game as I am about the one I will see this Saturday – Harvard vs. Yale in the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Connecticut.

It will be the 126th playing of “The Game,” as New Englanders and many others call it, the oldest continuing football rivalry in the U.S.

I guess I’ve been hearing about Harvard vs. Yale since the mid-1960s. Henry Hecht, a friend of mine at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, had grown up in New Haven. We were both staff members of the Vanderbilt student newspaper, and Hecht – who later became a big time sportswriter for the New York Post – would regale us with tales about Harvard vs. Yale. Recently he told me that in his youth, he even served as an usher at the Yale Bowl. He talked about warming his hands on a particularly tough day by putting them on “Handsome Dan,” Yale’s bulldog mascot, who was down behind the players on the sideline. And he told of marching out of the Yale Bowl behind the Yale band after a victory.

In the late 1970s or early ’80s, when I was a columnist at the Des Moines Register, our sports columnist Maury White was a regular at the biggest college games around the U.S. Then one week he told me he was heading off to Connecticut to do several columns about the Harvard-at-Yale game that year. They were riveting reading for those of us back in Iowa who love college traditions. My goodness, our Maury even went to Mory’s, the legendary Yale eating and drinking establishment, and carved his initials on a table!

But it was since 1992 that I’ve really been paying attention to Harvard vs. Yale. That was the year that my great friend since our college years, Douglas T. Bates III, of Centerville, Tennessee, and his then-13-year-old son Douglas IV began a tradition of doing a “big game” nearly every autumn. Around those games, the Bateses have tried to spend time on both campuses, sampling the traditions, hearing the schools’ songs, meeting some of the characters. You’ve read about many of their football adventures here on this Internet site. They started with the ’92 Yale-at-Harvard game. Since then they’ve experienced Texas vs. Texas A&M, Army vs. Navy, Michigan vs. Ohio State, Georgia vs. Florida, Stanford vs. California, Texas vs. Oklahoma, Wabash vs. DePauw, Alabama vs. Auburn and last year, West Virginia vs. Pittsburgh. This year, Doug and Douglas, now his 30-year-old law partner, are doing Georgia vs. Georgia Tech in Atlanta on Nov. 28.

“Every year, when we’re setting up our trips and people hear about our ‘big game’ tradition, they say, ‘Oh, man, I’ve always wanted to do that!’ ” Big Doug Bates said. “And for anybody who decides to go to the big rivalry games like we have, you must start with Harvard vs. Yale. This is Ground Zero of college football, and really, this is Ground Zero of American colleges if you want to get right down to it. Both of them are more than 300 years old. In fact, I can go on with this and say that Harvard and Yale are really Ground Zero of America herself, sitting right there in New England like they do. It’s where the nation started.”

He now looks back in amazement at how their Harvard vs. Yale experience unfolded back in 1992.

“We started thinking about it late in the fall of 1991 when Douglas and I were watching the college football scores late on a Saturday afternoon,” Bates said. “The announcers talked about Harvard vs. Yale, and Douglas said, ‘Why’s that a big deal?’ So I explained how it’s the oldest rivalry, and how both schools have been great football powers in earlier times. I made up my mind as we talked that we’d just go to the game.

“So in the fall of ’92, we started thinking about going up there. The game was at Harvard that year, but we wanted to go to Yale’s campus, too. We didn’t know a soul at either place. But I got on the phone, dialed up Information, called a number at Yale and learned I was talking to Judy Cole at ‘Alumni House.’ I introduced myself and told her what my son and I wanted to do. She paused and then said, ‘I think this is wonderful. Let me do a little work on this and call you back.’ When she called back, she had tours set up for us both at Yale and through her counterparts at Harvard. She had the game tickets arranged and told us where we ought to stay. Then I mentioned that since Mory’s is so famous, we’d like to eat there when we were at Yale. She said, ‘Ooooo, I don’t know if I can arrange that, because you have to be a member or the guest of a member to get in there. But let me see what I can do.’ She called back a day later and said she’d checked with her own father, George McCorkle, who lived in New York City, and he was still a member at Mory’s. She said as soon as she told him what we were up to, he said he’d drive up from New York to New Haven and take us to lunch at Mory’s himself! I about fell over!”

In fact, McCorkle took things to a higher level. He gathered a bunch of his Yale Class of ’42 pals, and they inducted the Bateses as honorary members of their class!

The Bateses also took in the joint concert of the Yale and Harvard Glee Clubs that is always held the night before The Game.

That’s how it’s gone for them at all their stops for “big game” experiences. At Ohio State, they had a long conversation with Archie Griffin, the former Buckeyes running back who won the Heisman Trophy twice. At Texas A&M, they got to meet another Heisman winner, A&M’s John David Crow, and then-coach R.C. Slocum at a post-game party. The Bateses have also taken time to sit with a lowly freshman at Wabash College in Indiana who had stayed up most of the night before the annual game against DePauw, ringing the old locomotive bell that is the game’s traveling trophy.

My wife Carla Offenburger and I hope to do some of those kinds of things this weekend in New Haven. We’ll be there to spend Thanksgiving week with our son Andrew, a Ph. D. student at Yale, his wife Maria and our 2 ˝-year-old granddaughter Lindsay. We’re all going to The Game on Saturday, and at least some of us will be doing the concert by the glee clubs on Friday night.

The game itself matches 6-3 Harvard, which is 5-1 in the Ivy League, against 4-5 Yale, which is 2-4 in the Ivy. The Crimson of Harvard have beaten Yale’s Bulldogs the last two years, and seven of the last eight years. But when new Yale coach Tom Williams took over, he promised way last January that one of three top goals he had for his team was “to beat Harvard.”

The Game will probably fill the historic, 64,000-seat Yale Bowl, meaning it is one of the biggest venues in NCAA Division I-AA football, which the Ivy League teams play. They don’t do bowl games, and they choose not to take part in playoffs.

So, tickets? We are paying $15 per ticket – and that’s for reserved seats! If we wanted to go general admission, we’d be in for $10 apiece. Imagine that, one of the greatest games in college football, and it’s a bargain!

As you can imagine, Harvard vs. Yale means lots of tailgate parties. So much so that there are strict rules established by both schools. Here is Yale’s rule No. 10 for tailgating this Saturday, from the Internet site of the Department of Athletics: “All Yale and Harvard student tailgates will be closed at the start of the third quarter. It is the expectation that all fans enter the Bowl by the start of the third quarter. Shuttle buses will be available throughout the game and in adequate numbers after halftime to accommodate any fans wishing to return to campus.”

Don’t worry, while we Offenburgers may do some browsing through the tailgate parties, we will be in the Yale Bowl in plenty of time to see the opening kickoff, and we’ll doubtlessly stay to watch the Yale Precision Marching Band (that’s its name!) march out of the stadium afterwards.

And we’ll do some singing, too. You undoubtedly have seen little Lindsay Offenburger starring in YouTube videos, singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” and more recently “Now I Know My ABCs.” They are the first songs she has learned. This weekend, Grampa will be teaching her another one:

Bull-dog! Bull-dog! Bow, wow, wow,
Eli Yale!
Bull-dog! Bull-dog! Bow, wow, wow,
Our team can never fail.
When the sons of Eli break through the line,
That is the sign we hail,
Bull-dog! Bull-Dog! Bow, wow, wow,
Eli Yale!


You can write the columnist at chuck@Offenburger.com.