It's a Family Affair

On Sundays, before church, as my father knotted his tie and put his cuff-links on, we would crowd around his dresser for the privilege of seeing my grandfather's gold football charm. The charm was two small footballs linked together, each proclaiming in blue engraving: Y.U.F.B.A.C.S. Flanders. Below that, on one of the miniature spheroids was etched, 1904: Yale 12, Princeton 0 Yale 12, Harvard 0; on the other, 1905: Yale 23, Princeton4, Yale 6, Harvard 0.

We have nothing else besides that concrete keepsake and a remarkable earnest portrait in the family album to remind us of Carl Stanley Flanders' Yale football career. He was a large man, six feet four and over two hundred pounds, nicknamed "The Big Swede," and his playing ability earned him a spot on Walter Camp's Second Team All American Squad. My brothers and I learned this all secondhand; my grandfather died in an oxygen tent fighting pneumonia, his body ravaged by time and too much alcohol, when my father was still a young man. By all accounts, he led an active and unusual life: prospecting in the Far West, hunting trips in Canada, a lucrative law practice in Boston and New York, the summer home in Cotuit. (only when we were older were we to find out that he was plagued by alcoholism, that he had divorced his wife, our grandmother, to marry another woman, that he was careless with money--usually money he had lent; in short, we discovered that he also had his flaws.)

My father never made it to Yale, or Harvard: instead, with little money after his father's death, and the Depression a sudden force in his life (as it was to millions of thers), he went to work, then into the National Guard, then into Patton's Third Army.

All of which has very little and a great deal to do with tomorrow's Harvard-Yale game (or Yale-Harvard, depending on which side of the Stadium you sit.) That my grandfather, and his teammates, beat Harvard 6-0 seventy years ago doesn't mean much to me; that I have a link, in some way with him (a man I never met) when I sit down on that concrete touches me inexplicably. I make no claims of being unique. Perhaps that is the strength of The Game, thousands of others who find they have links to the past, to relatives even to friends, when they enter the Bowl or the Stadium.

There is the danger, of course, of becoming too serious about the whole thing and sound like Hanry James extolling the merits of Memorial Hall or Harvard Stadium as repositories of a cherished tradition. I offer this story in defense.

Last year, my father drove to New Haven and met me there for the game. He confessed at the start that because of his father, and his childhood memories of attending Yale games in the Bowl (I think the last he remembers featured Albie Booth running wild against a horde of West Point plebes), that he would root for Yale. Chance, or luck, however, placed a particulalry vitriolic Yale fan behind us who insisted on labeling every member of the Harvard squad as a bum, without discriminating between one player or the next. Harvard misfortune produced more glee. My father endured through close to four quarters of the Yale partisanship behind us, until the last few moments when I noticed he had begun to cheer for Harvard. When Mike Lynch kicked his famous (or infamous) field goal my father turned around and winked at the glum Yale fan.

I don't think my grandfather would have minded.