The History Of Harvard Sports

During the next three weeks, the CRIMSON will present daily articles about some of the great men and great moments in Harvard sports. The series was prepared by Pat Hindert.

I: "Savior Harvard"

Fair Harvard has received copious recognition for its contributions to the humanities and the sciences, but few people realize that the University is the savior of modern football.

In October 1873, the Harvard University Foot Ball Club received a letter from Yale asking for delegates to a convention of the five colleges which had shown the most interest in football--Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton, and Yale. The purpose of the convention was to form an association which would set up a code of rules to govern intercollegiate football.

Fundamental differences existed between the Harvard rules and those used by the other colleges.

Harvard's rugby-like rules permitted a player to pick up the ball and run with it or pass it, unlike the Yalies' kicking game. Masculinely, the Harvard rules allowed a player to tackle an adversary regardless of who held the ball.

The other four schools had already been tangling for about four years, before they realized how much they needed Harvard. They all played by soccer-style regulations, so the Harvard system probably would have disappeared by a four-to-one vote.

Rather than abandon such a marvelous aggression-outlet--especially as it was well-established around Boston,--the Harvard team declined Yale's invitation to join the new Intercollegiate Association. Harvard's dramatic decision secured the continued existence of rugby-style football in America and led in time to the development of the modern game.

The early history of Harvard football is both strange and exciting. The first recorded account of a Harvard football game is an epic poem entitled "The Battle of the Delta." These verses, attributed to Rev. James C. Richmond 1827, sing mock praise of a fierce football fight between the freshmen and sophomores in the autumn of 1827.

This annual freshman-sophomore football game was apparently the successor of another annual contest, a wrestling match between the two classes, a Harvard custom in the eighteenth century. Because the freshman-sophomore affair usually ended in a brawl, students got to calling game-day "Bloody Monday."

The annual slaughter increased in brutality each year until finally in 1860 the Faculty outlawed its existence. There were, in that year, better ways for Northern gentlemen to vent their spleen. With an air of defiance, a group of players held a funeral service--complete with procession and eulogy for the sport. They dug a grave and buried a pigskin. Football at Harvard was officially dead.

Although the embalmed football remained in its grave of honor the sport experienced a renaissance in 1873. Students who had learned to play football in the Boston preparatory schools organized a game on the Cambridge Common without Administration protests. In no time, the new "Boston Game" became quite the Cambridge rage. Although the rules had changed little since the era of "Bloody Monday," the action was somehow less brutal. The players organized the Harvard University Football Club in December 1872, electing officers and codifying the traditional rules. Shortly afterward, Harvard declined Yale's desperate invitation to the Intercollegiate Association.

Harvard finally entered intercollegiate competition in the Spring of 1874, when the captain of the McGill rugby team proposed a series of matches between the two universities. This University accepted the bid and agreed to play two games, one under Harvard rules and the other under strict rugby rules.

As the Harvard Faculty would not allow students to leave Cambridge during the term, both games were played on now-bulldozed Jarvis Field, near the Charles.

More than 500 spectators, most of them curious students, paid 50 cents a head to watch the historic struggle. The McGill team was neatly dressed, after the English fashion. Seeing their opponents so nattily attired, the Harvard players were mortified for they wore no special uniform. The players had not felt called upon to indulge in such extravagance. Each man wore dark trousers, a white undershirt, and a magenta handkerchief tied around his head, as was the custom with the Harvard crews.

In the first game, played under Harvard rules, the Canadian visitors seemed totally confused. A contemporary newspaper account described the McGill players as "standing in the field merely as spectators of their opponents' excellent kicking." Scoring at will, Harvard fulfilled--for the first time--its 10,000 men's most fervent desire.

The next afternoon, using the rugby rules, the two teams played to a scoreless standoff. Boastful spectators attributed Harvard's successful adaptation to rugby to "Yankee ingenuity and aptitude." In a rematch the following year in Montreal, the Harvard team, sporting flashy new uniforms, trounced McGill soundly at the Canadians' own game.

The long-awaited Harvard-Yale extravaganza finally took place in 1875. The game was played in New Haven and through some ingenious "compromise"--characteristic of this University's administrators--Harvard's rugby rules reigned. Harvard dominated the contest, taking full advantage of Yale's inexperience with an unfamiliar manly sport. The Harvard Advocate, a student periodical, summarized Yale's performance in the following words: "They showed very little discipline on the field, the different players not seeming to know their positions, and above all, failing in almost every instance to back each other up properly."

As might be expected, Yale showed infinite improvement the next year, successfully avenging Harvard's initial victory. However, the Yale win was marred by the ungentlemanly conduct of the Blue spectators. When a Yale player kicked the ball over the goal in the final period to give the Bulldogs a slim lead, the partisan New Haven crowd pranced onto the field and used up 20 minutes of precious playing time carrying the Yale players around on their shoulders. Although football has changed considerably since these early times, the Yalies--sadly-have not.