Boosting the game, and The Game Dick Friedman ’73—proud alumnus of both Fair Harvard and Sports Illustrated, where he toiled for many years—covers contemporary Crim- son football for this magazine each fall, in lively, nuanced accounts resonant with the sport’s history (see page 28). Now he has dived deep into the glory days, a century and more ago, when big-time college football meant Harvard vs. Yale. In this excerpt from chapter eight of his new book, The Coach Who Strangled the Bulldog: How Harvard’s Percy Haughton Beat Yale and Reinvented Football, Friedman recalls the now unlike- ly-seeming origins of the industrial-strength “amateur” contests currently featured on campuses across the land (and national television broadcasts) each autumn and early winter. vThe Editors panning the Charles River from vard president Charles W. Eliot decreed that Boylston [now Kennedy] Street to Dick Friedman his school would no longer play major football the entrance of Soldiers Field, the Larz by games at neutral sites, but on campus only. Anderson Bridge opened in time for the 1913 season. Sup- Within 20 years the Big Three all would have colossal stadiums, planting a narrow, rickety, wooden drawbridge that had and game day had become a ritual, complete with spectacle, song, Sbeen a choked, dust-kicking trial on game days, the sturdy, paved and spirit. For good or for ill, these institutions set the pattern that structure made the march from Harvard Square to the stadium has been followed and refined by universities to this day. more tolerable, especially for the multitudes who trekked across There were many carpers, at Harvard and elsewhere. Muckraker and back for the big games and championship games. Its very so- Henry Beach Needham, in his 1905 McClure’s exposé, had put his lidity and permanence also symbolized that the relationship—per- finger on the win-at-all-costs mentality and the creeping realiza- haps unholy—between colleges and sports was now set in stone. tion that the cart was pulling the horse: “The physical development Beginning as early as the 1880s, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale had of the student body is neglected, that eleven men of the university decided that it was part of their mission, educational or not, to may perform for the benefit of the public.” The disdain for the im- provide sporting entertainment for the masses. In the 1890s, Har- mersion into the muck of so-called big-time college sport drips From the book The Coach Who Strangled the Bulldog: How Harvard’s Percy Haughton Beat Yale and Reinvented Football. Copyright © 2018 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Used by permission. www.rowman.com. Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 from the comments of the eminent historian Samuel The Game, 1911, curately identified the emerging self-aggrandizing sports Eliot Morison, A.B. 1908, Ph.D. ’12, Litt.D. ’36, in Three ending in a less apparatuses. (Today the self-perpetuating athletic depart- glamorous tie score Centuries of Harvard, his official history published for than in the 1968 ment expansion is labeled “the gold-plating of college the University’s tricentennial in 1936. These includ- version; and “big- sports.”) “The vast scale of the public games has brought ed a swipe at another son of Harvard, Percy Duncan time” coach Percy its problems,” declared Lowell in his annual report for Haughton, A.B. 1899. “Haughton was the first of the Duncan Haughton 1912. “They have long ceased to be an undergraduate di- modern ‘big-time coaches,’ and he certainly ‘delivered the goods,’” version, managed entirely by the students, and maintained by their sniffs Morison, “but it may be questioned whether his talent for subscriptions. They have become great spectacles supported by the picturesque profanity made the game more enjoyable, or whether sale of tickets to thousands of people….Money comes easily and is his strategical and tactical developments turned football in the easily spent under the spur of intense public interest in the result of right direction.” Give the man his “H”—for Harrumph! the major contests, and a little laxity quickly leads to grave abuse.… Morison did concede a positive aspect: “The growth of athletics Graduates, who form public opinion on these matters, must realize tended to integrate college life in the [Charles W.] Eliot era; partici- that intercollegiate victories are not the most important objects of pation in them, both as players and as managers, brought together college education. Nor must they forget the need of physical train- men of the widest social origins, and victory over Yale in the ing for the mass of students by neglecting to encourage the efforts four ‘major’ sports of football, baseball, rowing and track was recently made to cultivate healthful sports among men who have something that the entire College prayed for.” no prospect of playing on the college teams.” Those who deplored what football had wrought Many within the Harvard community complained that aca- were bowled over like a would-be tackler in the way demically many of the star athletes were unworthy. These of Haughton’s gang of interferers. The athletic horse were not the functional illiterates who festoon too many had left the athletic barn; though it would be reined college rosters today. The Crimson players had passed the in some after World War II, the rest of America took entrance exam….most had, anyway. Many were admit- note, especially of the financial windfalls a mighty ted “with conditions.” But would they have been dozing team could generate. The school had become depen- through classes in Sever Hall if not for their ability to punt dent on ever-burgeoning football receipts to fund its or carry a football? entire athletic program. In 1917, receipts for all of the The schizophrenia was illustrated by the Harvard Alumni school’s athletic events would be $155,608.72, with foot- Bulletin.* At the same time that it was breathlessly printing ball delivering all but $12,461.53 of that total. (Football play-by-play of the football games (complete with photos and netted $106,688.34 that year, the athletic program as a whole diagrams), the publication also moralized. “Are our colleges and only $38,302.64.) Thus football was funneling more than six universities being injured or aided by the recruiting of boys who figures in profit to the athletic association, keeping the rest are brought to them because they are athletes…?” it editorial- of the department afloat. ized in 1913. “We believe that this type of undergraduate…may Even amid unparalleled success on the field and at the be in every way a sound and wholesome person, and on the gate, Harvard’s leaders—including those who championed way to become a useful, and perhaps a leading, citizen; but if the Crimson teams—acknowledged unease. Foremost was the college attracts him chiefly as an athletic club and a place President A. Lawrence Lowell, Eliot’s successor, who ac- to earn a sweater decorated with a precious letter, his path to Stadium photographs from the Library of Congress; *It is today Harvard Magazine, where the author is a contributing editor. Haughton photograph from Harvard University Archives Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 usefulness should not lie through the college….The fact is that, driven dropkicked the Elis into submission in 1913, one correspondent, on by the enterprise of our sporting editors, we are as a people losing calling himself “Sporticus Antiquus,” was concerned about...the our balance in the matter of athletics.” tone. “Whenever Harvard had the ball on the Yale side of the field Then as now, some were indig- during the recent game in the Stadium, nant about the “almost scandalous” the Yale crowd set up a great noise, amounts spent to equip footballers. in order to drown, if possible, the sig- Proclaimed the Bulletin in 1911—right nals given to the Harvard men. So also, after the Crimson had been declared whenever Brickley prepared to make national champion, and shortly after a drop or place kick, the Yale ‘rooters’ Dean LeBaron R. Briggs had issued a burst forth in shouts and cat-calls in report criticizing the athletic depart- their effort to ‘rattle’ him…. Not only ment’s management—“Some months Harvard men, but neutrals who belong ago the Bulletin asked why it cost to neither university, and a saving rem- $1000 per man to put a football squad nant of Yale men themselves, deprecate through a seven-weeks season when a practise which mars the pleasure of that amount is more than it takes to witnessing athletic contests.” carry the average student through UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES HARVARD Well, then. Did this concern engen- an entire year….Why der widespread guilt? If should not the ac- “The Bulletin asked why it cost $1000 per man to put a so, it was drowned out counts of the athletic football squad through a…season:…more than it takes by the shouts of vic- organizations be made to carry the average student through an entire year.” tory. Fred Moore, the public in detail?...We Harvard Athletic Asso- daresay there would no longer be large ciation graduate treasurer, summed up items of expenditure for ‘taxicabs as the prevailing sentiment. In his report the sole means of getting about, and for for the fiscal year ending on July 31, 1915 costly dinners with wines and cigars.’” (and thus encompassing the 1914 Yale Others were aghast at the coarsening game), Moore wrote: “When the score of spirit engendered by the desperation is 36 to 0, and the receipts from the game to beat Yale.