SEES AND DESIST: Watching For The Very First Time

I am a senior, and I have never been to The Game.

Freshman laziness kept me from the Yale Bowl in 2003, and a spiking fever did the same in 2005. And then there was 2004, when the funeral of my grandfather—fittingly enough, Yale class of ’41—kept me from the Crimson’s trouncing of the Bulldogs that capped Harvard’s perfect 10-0 season. It was, in retrospect, a fortuitous miss, since circumstances might have complicated my loyalties.

But now it’s November of 2006, and all signs point to yes—this will be the year I see The Game. But I have to admit that as I picked a path between the hordes of student groups hawking themed shirts near the Science Center yesterday, I felt none the worse for my lack of Game experience. You can’t tell a non-Gamer by sight, after all. I’ve not been tagged with a scarlet H-Y. Have I really missed so much?

A quick polling of some friends revealed mixed results.

“Best experience I had at Harvard last year,” declares Walt, now a sophomore. He describes the final play of the 2005 triple-overtime triumph in New Haven, after which he rushed from the stands, faked out a security guard, and “dance[d] on Eli’s field.”

“It felt,” Walt recalls, “like glory just had sex with me.”

Tim, a 2006 graduate, describes his final Game experience in similar, if not so colorful language. He and a roommate achieved relative fame last year when they snuck onto the field and kidnapped Yale’s bulldog mascot, Handsome Dan XVI.

“Um, yeah,” they told the handler, “we’re going to need the dog for a special halftime finale.”

They led the mascot in on-field circles by his hula-hoop leash before breaking for the Harvard student section, where they were received like royalty. A fan photo of the sprint to freedom later circulated, and Tim particularly loves how it “captures the Yale fans.

“Most of them are still applauding wildly, with no idea of what’s going on,” he explains. “But there are 10 or so who’ve pieced it all together and have an unmistakable look of horror on their faces.”

He’s only half-joking when he calls the episode “the highlight of my college career, and probably the greatest thing I’ll ever do.”

Yale faithful surely boast similar experiences, though it seems that a large part of The Game’s appeal is simply that memories on both sides are proudly hazy.

Emily, now a sophomore, lists among her notable 2005 Game experiences an 8 a.m. bus to New Haven last year. She arrived at 10:30, only to realize she was “incredibly behind. People were falling down drunk.”

So when you get right down to it, maybe people love The Game simply because they are too drunk on a pleasant Saturday morning to know any better. Because they are blackout when they would normally be sleeping through breakfast.

But as Aidan, a junior, notes scornfully, fans in her native Oklahoma “actually use their tickets to go to the game. They don’t just drink to oblivion and ask, ‘Who won?’”

Of course, one might argue The Game is worth one’s attendance just to see Harvard Stadium, a National Historic Landmark for which football itself has changed. The forward pass, the stuff of decades of highlight reels, was adopted because the sport was played in a dangerously confined manner 100 years ago, and the Crimson’s concrete venue could not be widened to stretch out the action.

Still, says Aidan, “Harvard Stadium looks like Gladiator, the movie, but only in a creepy way. And let’s be real: we will never fill it, even if we offer to keep it open 24 hours a day so kids can study.”

In the end, she says, “the rivalry is purely academic and nobody gives a shit. Poll the Harvard campus: nobody has any idea who plays [quarterback] for Yale.”

While Oklahoma fans don’t think twice about traveling for the Texas game, “we can’t even make it across the river.”

I suppose I’m a guilty party in all this. I’m a senior who’s never been to Harvard-Yale.

So this Saturday, bright and early, I’ll be there.

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Seesel can be reached at seesel@fas.harvard.edu.