I’ve
written here on a couple of other occasions about the culture of sports and
athletics that has arisen, nourished (or malnourished) by the sports culture
that permeates so much of North American society: stressed or at least
occasionally oppressed kids, some bizarro moral warpiture around institutional
and personal values, endless blurtations of fatuosities and pomposities about
the relationship of sport and character, and a continuing and cleansing procession
of truly beautiful moments in which kids and sometimes coaches transcend the
mediocrity of the hype around sports to accomplish spectacular, glorious, and
honorable things on behalf of themselves, their teams, and their schools. It’s
hard to be a full-time grump in the face of the obvious: that sport can build
character, the way the TVA built dams.
It came to
pass, serendipitously, that I was able to spend yesterday wandering freely
about the Harvard football stadium with a press pass to The Game (Harvard
versus Yale, of course). I spent time sitting in the student stands of both
sides, gazed down upon the half-time shows from the very roof of the stadium,
walked upon the actual turf, and even rubbed shoulders, more or less, with a cabinet officer’s burly Secret Service agent, whose curlicue earpiece
wire I recognized from an encounter with George H. W. Bush in a restaurant last
summer. I was everywhere, saw everything.
Harvard
won, of course, as has been usual in recent years, although a Yale team for
whom the word “hapless” has been appropriate for much of the season gave them a
pretty good game until some lovely break-out runs in the fourth quarter sealed
the expected victory. Not much of a football fan, I spent most of my time
observing the crowd, an interesting combination of the rather predictably
attired older alums from a more genteel time and the academic alphas who make
up the current student bodies of both schools—a third or more of a stadium's-worth of
students culled from applicant pools in single-digit percentages.
I imagine
that part of what I was seeing was several thousand young adults trying very
hard to have some of the fun that they had denied themselves in high school:
some pregame tailgating and just plain “pre-gaming,” shouts and roars of a
semi-obscene and rather unpleasant nature (the Yalies doing a bit more of this,
I regret to say; perhaps the grim state of their football program made them a
little more defensive, a little more desperate), and lots of genuine enthusiasm—possibly
coming as a surprise even to the enthusiasts—when the play on the field was
especially worthy of it. I know at least one freshman for whom this was the first actual, live football game ever, and I would imagine that some of the
crowd was learning the mores of football fandom more or less from scratch—from
“up for the kickoff” through the rush onto the field after the game and the
respective bands’ post-game renditions of “Ten Thousand Men of Harvard” and
“Bright College Years” (complete with waving handkerchiefs).
Did I see
character being built? On the field, I think I did, as the Yale players rose
above their previous efforts to take the lead several times with play that was
decidedly both competent and spirited. Yale gave Harvard a pretty good Game,
far better than the utter rout that most expected. The Harvard team, too,
seemed to have galvanized itself into action after three quarters of nervous
play; to earn victory they really had to pull their socks up.
In the
stands, perhaps less so. The Yale students’ endless chorus of “Harvard S—s!”
was tiresome and silly, and occasional references to Harvard’s sad “cheating scandal” of the early fall were pointless and offensive to me as an educator.
The students involved had been caught, and most have withdrawn—something like
justice apparently done. Arguably Yale students do not always behave perfectly,
either, and the taunting seemed like tempting fate as well as irrelevant to a
football game.
But all in
all, the kids were, as they, “all right.” They generally behaved themselves and
made the occasional shows of organized assertiveness by the neon-jacketed
security team nugatory at best and just a little over the top. While the
occasional beer bottle and can could be found amid the litter in the stands,
the kinds of drunken displays that keep me home from most professional sports
events were entirely absent.
Off now to
watch the boys from my own school contend for the New England soccer
championship; I like the sport better than football and want dearly for our
kids to prevail, but I know that I will find myself watching as much as a
cultural observer as a fan. Close-up, I know I can see real character in the
faces and body language of the players, and I hope I can see as much from the
others who are watching and rooting. NOTE:
Alas, it was not in the stars today. But it’s a very young team—only one senior
starter—so there is indeed always next year.
