Harvard Football

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer, will names be withheld.)

To the Editor of the CRIMSON:

Harvard football as it is run today, is it for the best interests of Harvard graduates and undergraduates as a whole? Certainly they are the ones to be considered,--far more so than athletic directors, paid coaches, and the many others benefiting financially from the football season at Harvard as it is today.

The things that endure and are worth while in life are done openly, not secretly. Harvard wins some years and Yale some years, and in looking back, what difference does it really make whether we win or lose, as compared with the combined pleasure of all Harvard graduates and undergraduates during the autumn football season? Should such great athletes in Harvard rowing as Gerry Cassedy, Bob Saltonstall, Mac Bancroft, and Benny Bacon ever be debarred from seeing Harvard football teams practice when they, themselves, rowing, cannot see sports in other seasons of the year?

Secret practice, as I remember it, was introduced at Harvard in the autumn of 1893, when Bart Waters was captain of Harvard and Loring Delano, of flying wedge fame, was an active coach. Everything was secret that year. No undergraduates had the pleasure of seeing their team practice. I saw no practice at all that year, as it was secret, even with my own brother, a Freshman, playing right end, opposite Frank Hinkey of Yale, on that team. I backed the team, and with my allowance went to Springfield at considerable expense for an undergraduate, and saw Harvard lose, and the much-talked-of secret practice worthless.

People often quote Percy Haughton as a great football coach, which he was, but I knew Percy well and intimately in sports for many years, and it was not secret practice which made him famous as a winning football coach, because secret practice was in vogue before his years as coach. It was his personality, his thoroughness in detail, and his perception and realization that to have a winning team the combined support of the undergraduates for the team's success was very necessary. Graduates and undergraduates alike would enjoy together many a weekday afternoon watching football practice on Soldiers Field and they are entitled to that pleasure. They would benefit football and the Harvard team in their loyalty.

When Harvard football has come to such a pass that the football season becomes simply a mercantile transaction, to be so conducted that the receipts from the ticket gate go to pay football coaches and expenses, when games are broadcasted or not broadcasted, according to financial benefit, when former Harvard graduates and present undergraduates are deprived of seeing and enjoying afternoons of football of their own Alma Mater, and when you go to the games Saturday afternoon in a rough, hustling, jostling crowd, it calls to my mind more a motley crowd at a prize fight in the old days of Coney Island than an intercollegiate athletic event.

How can this be remedied at Harvard?

1. Cut out all professional coaching and let those who want to see professionally coached teams go to professional games. The honor of coaching Harvard teams is enough.

2. Do away with all secret practice and let graduates and undergraduates enjoy the sports at Harvard to which they are entitled.

As we all know, many colleges have become prominent through their successes and news-paper popularity of their successful football teams and victories over Harvard and Yale, but what glory to them with their big expenses if Harvard and Yale adopt truly amateur methods and amateur coaching. The Harvard-Yale games will be just as exciting and just as good sport and fun. The atmosphere will be a purely amateur one and what pretends to be amateur sport will be in fact worthy of that name.

Let's have loyal graduates and undergraduates run Harvard athletics in the future as they used to in the past and get away from professionalism and commercialism:

Professional atmosphere for profess- ional sport.

Amateur atmosphere for amateur sport.

The rowing atmosphere is excellent and might well be copied in other sports at Harvard. Then throw open the gates that those entitled to, may walk in. Who are those who are most entitled to walk in?--the loyal graduates and undergraduates of Harvard University.  Tom Stevenson '96