The making of the 100th Game

Preserving The Game's integrity--that was the goal. Some find that surprising.

A friend of Yale football had wanted to market a hat in the shape of the Yale Bowl with models of crimson and blue gridders towering over the miniature stadium.

"We said. 'No, we're not going to do that one,'" recalls Yale Athletic Director Frank Ryan. "We tried to find an appropriate way to recognize the occasion without doing anything gaudy or offensive."

So when Nathan Garland first constructed the official logo. Ryan sent the New Haven graphic designer back to the drawing board for fine tuning several times. He wanted Garland to measure the total square area alloted to both the block H and block Y.

Says Garland wryly. "I've been intrigued and surprised about how passionate people are about this occasion."

The occasion in question is nothing less formidable than the 100th playing of the Harvard-Yale game, a game so momentous, so important that its organizers proudly say they have spent several months trying to do practically nothing.

Sure, Saturday's big event features The Official Logo, and The Official Program ($5), and The Official Handkerchief ($2), and The 100th Game Ticket in Lucite ($30), and The Golf Shirt ($29.50), and The Tote Bag ($12.50), and the pre-game descent by the U.S. Navy's Shooting Stars parachute squad, and special jerseys, and the commemorative coin-toss featuring about 50 former captains.

But, organizers assert, all the planning for the 100th game has been done in an effort to avoid overshadowing The Game itself.

Garland, for example, recalls Ryan "was interested in expressing in a certain style and appropriateness the special occasion."

"His basic concern in expressing the Harvard-Yale game was to do something judicious and even-handed."

"I really was aspiring to do something that was appropriate...I fall back on the word appropriate."

Garland's logo, which intertwines an H and Y, was just one component of a master plan for the 100th game, which had three underlying principles, according to Carroll Lowenstein '53, who served as the Harvard liasion on Yale's organizational committee.

In addition "to preserving the integrity of The Game" and making the action on the field "the focus of the occasion," Lowenstein said. "This occasion should reinforce the virtues of athletics concentrated within and nourished by an educational perspective shared by Harvard and Yale."

This concern for integrity, tradition and education was responsible for what organizers consider to be a modest list of 10 official memorabilia items (Since drawing up and publishing the list. Harvard and Yale have stopped offering two items, because of little interest. Women's Stick Pin ($65) and the 14k gold cuff links, whose price had been available upon request.)

The desire, as one Yale planner says, "to preserve the integity of The Game and yet increase it" was similarly the impetus for the oversized game ticket, also designed by Garland.

The ticket features likenesses of John Harvard and Elihu Yale and a 19th-century Sir Walter Scott poem: Then strip, lads, and to it, though sharp the weather. And if, by mischance, you should happen to fall. There are worse things in life than a tumble on heather.

And life is itself but a game of football.

Joan Ryan, a Yale administrator and the wife of the athletic director, discovered the poem several years ago.

"It seemed to catch the special qualities of football," she says. "One of the special qualities of football," she says. "One of the special qualities of the 100th game is that it gives people time to reflect on the institutions and the incredibly important role the schools have played in the history of college football."

Although Harvard and Yale officials speak in near unanimity of the role reflection and restraint played in the planning process, a number of diehards have apparently differed about the results.

One point of contention is the ticket price: $20 by mail. Although some other tickets have become available at reduced prices, many feel the unprecedented charge is not in keeping with history. "$20 for a seat at the Yale-Harvard football game? A hard wooden seat with the paint peeling off? At the mercy of the elements and the drunks sitting behind you at the Yale Bowl?" wrote Yale grad David Holahan recently in The New York Times in an article explaining why he would be listening to the radio November 19.

Another sore spot is Garland's specially commissioned logo, which one respected New Haven Register columnist described as "a hideous design which emphasizes the crimson H over the blue Y." Or, as Harvard Varsity Club President Bob Picket matter-of-factly notes: "Harvard is more prominent than Yale in the Logo, which helps." Garland explains that H is simply a larger letter, adding. "We just arrived at the most equal and optically pleasing design...We don't want to be unjudicious hosts."

Yale Sports Information Director Mark Curran says. "We have the official logo, but I must have seen at least 10 other ones (around New Haven). They all dreamt them up."

Noting that the official logo "is very hard to read," one insider says the Yale Co-op offers a more standard football-shaped emblem crafted by a clerk there. In fact, Co-op President Dick Ballard reports brisk business, listing the numerous items on which their logo appears: "It is on everything. From the preppy button-down shirts to the LaCoste-looking shirts to the sweat-shirts to t-shirts to glasses--highballs and shot glasses--to lucite letter openers. These are sold exclusively at the Yale Co-op."

In another recent Times piece, Harvard Charles M. Needle responded to Holahan, saying in part: "Being present at The Game is a yardstick of one's existence." It is to this status-conscious crowd that the vast number of private entrepreneurs aim, some wags note. "It's unbelievable," says Michael Cox. Yale's manager of consessions operations. "I'm sure the day of The Game there are going to be so many pirates and bootleggers." Cox, nevertheless, reports healthy sales for official memorabilia, including the $30 Ticket in Lucite, for which one company recently placed a large order "to give all their junior executives or something."

Falling somewhere between the official and unofficial 100th game offerings in terms of propriety and good taste are the many events sponsored by individual Harvard and Yale support groups. A series of trains and buses are departing from all over the East and Midwest. And former Harvard sports information director David Matthews says a late spring conversation with Harvard coach Joe Restic gave him the idea to organize the Luxury Coach Express, a $100 per person roundtrip bus ride with an open bar, special lunches, a tape of interviews with famous Harvard-Yale game greats and a limited edition Cross pen. Proceeds go the Friends of Harvard Football and Yale's equivalent, the Y association.

The Harvard 50th Reunion class is similarly organizing The Train to The Game, which unabashedly offers. "Traveling musicians, Harvard-Yale programs at cost, bus service to and from the Yale bowl entrance, an absolutely delicious gourmet box brunch to include fruit and cheese, pate Maison, chicken breast Parisenne, Waldorf salad. French bread and petits fours, roundtrip surprises (some planned, some unplanned), return trip snack of clam chowder and croissant sandwiches, unsurpassed camaraderie."

The cost? $50 per person.

The underlying irony to the planning, or careful non-planning, that has gone into this historic chapter in the tradition-laden. Game is most unexpected and altogether unplanned: its absolute meaninglessness. Most previous contests played some hand in determining the relative standing of the two, or a league title for one. Never before has a Yale team entered the season-ending clash with eight losses.

The Elis' brutal season has drastically slowed ticket sales, with thousands still available just days before. The Game Harvard will send its largest-ever contingent to New Haven--nearly 18,000--because Yale had extra tickets to allocate. This ebb, some suggest, puts the schools in the awkward situation of having to drum up last-minute interest at the same time that the event's guiding philosophy discourages what Ryan calls "a lot of hulabaloo."

Which places people like Pickett in a predicament. While he says firmly. "In no way will Harvard or Yale do anything to commercialize it, they just want to make it special," it's precisely the absence of some lure that threatens to leave Yale bowl seats vacant and the specially designed tickets with the commemorative logo and poem untorn