A Son of Eli

Bulldog

(Words and music by Cole Porter, ‘13)

Bulldog! Bulldog! Bow wow wow,

Eli Yale!

Bulldog! Bulldog! Bow wow wow,

Our team can never fail

When the sons of Eli break through the line,

That is the sign we hail

Bulldog! Bulldog! Bow wow wow,

Eli Yale!

　

　

OPENING KICKOFF

 

There is only one way to start this: With me standing in a blustering late winter wind, outlined against a granite-gray sky, positioned on the goal line of the empty turf of Yale University’s DeWitt Cuyler Field. There is no one around me --no one in front of me, no one behind me, no one beside me. I am alone. To my right, the arched openings of the baseball stadium’s concrete façade look out as blankly and blackly as the eyes of unlit jack o’ lanterns. I see them, but they can’t see me. To my left, beyond a perfunctory set of creaky aluminum bleachers (and behind a wooden, eight -feet -high forest green fence beyond that), St Lawrence Cemetery and its headstones and its dead and its empty gravel lanes sprawl out in immutable silence (a few of the monuments are so lofty as to poke their heads above that peeling-paint, clapboard fence, but their witness does not diminish my aloneness; it accentuates it). In front of me, beyond the gravel track that rings the field, I can hear the faint, variable whoosh of Derby Avenue traffic as cars and trucks and buses filled with people leading far greater lives than I (or so I imagined) go to and fro about the business that made their lives far greater than mine.

 

I stand there alone except, of course, in my mind’s eye, I am not alone. Precisely and symmetrically aligned on the gridiron before me, kind of like that inverted pyramid journalism instructors are always going on about, are the rest of the members of the Yale University kickoff return team. Directly before them, strung out across the perpendicular length of the 40-yard line (which is where kickoffs were made from in those days) is the Harvard University kickoff team. Though they are fully sixty yards from where I stand, and though between them and I stand ten of my own stout and sturdy teammates, they like look -- clad in away-game white jerseys, crowned with blood-clot colored crimson helmets and donning old-gold white-and-crimson striped football knickers -- huge and (I admit it!) terrifying. There is a lump in my throat, my belly feels heavy, my legs a little rubbery and my palms sweat just a little as I scan the column. I take a deep breath, exhale, try to stay calm and focused.

 

I am alone but I am not. Yes, I am a solitary figure there on the goal line of the beaten turf of the practice field. This practice field’s sod is winter dead and yellowed, as sparse and lank as the stringy remnants on the liver-spotted pate of a octogenarian; the dirt is hard and frozen, still pocked and punctured by the cleat marks of countless trampling feet; its sidelines are empty and forlorn, the chalk lines demarcating the end zone, the sidelines, the hash marks, the ever-so critical five and ten-yard intervals, are only vaguely visible in the sallow winter light. There is a sense of neither excitement or event, only silence and emptiness.

 

But that‘s okay because, in that mind’s eye of mine, we --my return team and the Harvard kickoff team-- are actually all gathered about a quarter mile across the street on the sacred turf of the fabled Yale Bowl. And in there, we are surrounded by a mass of humanity, a sea of faces and eyes. We are assailed by an ocean of sound rushing down from the stands. Just a surely a rocky shoreline somewhere else in New England was getting pounded, at that very minute, by a stormy surf, we are likewise pummeled. There are cheerleaders, there are newspapermen; there are photographers. There are old people, young people, men, women, boys, girls. There are students, faculty, alumni from both schools. There are kids from the surrounding neighborhoods. Bands play. Some prop plane flies overhead dragging behind it some kind of advertising banner I can’t read. It’s Game Time. The Public Address system booms above the din like the voice of God, announcing that, indeed, it is I down there standing on the goal line, awaiting the opening kickoff for this year’s edition of The Game. I try not to think about all that, try to focus on what I have to do, but I know my parent’s are out there in the miasma of humanity, and though I have only the vaguest of ideas of where they are sitting, and though their eyes are but two amongst about 75,000 sets, I feel them on me and inside me I feel a queasy mix of pride, love and unattainable expectation.

 

And then there is a whistle, an official in a far off corner drops his hand; the Harvard place-kicker, heretofore standing about ten yards behind the ball with his raised also, drops his and begins his slow, straight-on approach (as was still more or less the fashion of the day) to the ball. The crowd had risen and when I hear the muffled thud as the kicker’s toe connects with the pigskin, I hear it let out an enormous, excited roar. The Game is underway. I watch the ball rise, see it pinwheel to what looks like skyscraper height in the cemetery-stone gray of the afternoon sky, shrinking as it arches. For a moment I wonder if it will ever come down. Finally, gravity does its job and bats it back down to earth and it starts dropping to me, growing exponentially larger as it does, buzz sawing so near to me that I swear I can read the fine print burnished into it. It lands in my hands, thuds against my belly and I cradle like a new mother her suckling child.

 

And then I am off.

 

Instinct takes over, because there is no thought to what I do and where I proceed next. I am vaguely aware of the roar of the crowd and the crackling of helmets and pads as muscle, bone, plastic and flesh collide and explode around me like artillery fire on the shores of Normandy. I zig. I zag. I snake my way through a rushing churning blur of Navy Blue and crimson, gold and white, prescient only of the need to make forward progress, which I somehow miraculously manage to do despite the forest of arms and hands reaching and grabbing at me for what feels like every single step of the way. Footsteps, collisions, the crowd report balefully around me but they do so distantly, like summer thunder banging away at some far-off hills while the valley stays sunny and dry. I concentrate on moving forward.

 

And then, before I know it, it happens: I break into the clear. Once again I am alone, with nothing but about 70 yards of emerald green Yale Bowl turf between me and the end zone. While everything seems to be happening with maddening speed, there is precious little sense of movement. Once I break into the open, I glide like a plane or a jet, and like that plane or jet, hurtling through a cloudless sky at multiple hundreds of miles per hours, my flight is bumpless, seamless, swift and sure. It feels more like the ground moves beneath me, rather than I over it. I feel a dream-like, feathery weightlessness. And in my heart (which, beneath my consciousness and beneath the breastplate of my pads, beats in my chest like a jackhammer) I know there is no one --repeat, no one!-- who can catch me. I am taking the opening kickoff of The Game back the full length of the field and there is no one who can stop me, no one can catch me. I make a diagonal B-line for the goal flag to my left, feeling huge, powerful, humble. Blessed.

 

And when I reach the end zone and look back…

 

I see that I’m really alone. Finally, firmly and fully alone. I have traversed, juking in suitably serpentine fashion, the full length of the field, but I am not triumphantly swept up in the burly, ecstatic arms of my teammates; nubile, adoring cheerleaders do not swarm around me like hummingbirds around a honeysuckle bush; the frenzied crowd is not roaring around me like an Apollo rocket at liftoff. When I, huffing and puffing, gasping for breath with my hands on my knees, look back down the way I’ve just come, I do not see the frustrated, exasperated bodies of the Harvard kickoff team lying prone on the ground or cursing, head-bowed, as they make their red-faced way off the field.

 

I see what I saw when I started. I see nothing. I see those lank blades of grass riffling sullenly in the cold breeze. I see that this end of the field has just as many ghostly cleat scars as the other one. I see a granite obelisk or two --otherwise pinpointing the spot of someone’s eternal rest --poking their noses up over the fence in St Lawrence Cemetery. They are not impressed. I hear the oblivious rush of Derby Avenue traffic as it passes to and fro about sixty feet beyond the end zone, and I think of those people leading bigger, better, more important and meaningful lives than I. And I am a little thankful for the ten-feet high brick wall between them and me. I don’t exactly feel stupid out there in the cold alone, sucking wind and celebrating a phantom touchdown only I knew I scored, but the brick wall provides cover and comfort. And for that I am grateful.

 

And as soon as I catch my breath, I line up on the goal line, ready to dash off in the opposite on another phantom touchdown run.

　

　

　

EVICTION NOTICE

 

I’m not sure how I wound up on this scene that day. My memory not does serve me especially well in this particular instance. I don’t remember what day of the week it was; I don’t remember what month it was, not sure of the exact time of day, (although I ‘m reasonably certain it was morning) but I can assert, based on my father’s attire. that it was late winter (or early spring, which in Connecticut could be equally as brutal). He was wearing a huge, brown corduroy overcoat and a hat. He was sitting in our aquamarine armchair, and he was sitting there kind of like Abraham Lincoln does in his memorial: both feet on the floor, legs slightly spread, arms resting on the arms of the chair, each hand gripping the end of the chair. Staring straight ahead.

 

But there were some differences, too, between Abe’s posture and my father‘s. Whereas Abe sat upright, with dignity and purpose, my father slouched, slumped, seemed to want to slip, turtle-like, into the shell of that great brown overcoat, so much so that the coat’s faux-fur collar rimmed his lower jaw line, casting the illusion of a Lincolnesque bearded growth (not likely: by then my father had gone largely gray, and while beard-growing was completely within his purview, growing a brown one surely was not). The hat on his head was tipped forward , resting almost on his brow, emphasizing the “I would like some incognito time here, if you don’t mind” look he, perhaps unconsciously, seemed to be trying to create.

 

One other difference between Abe and my father. Never been to the memorial, but from the pictures I’ve seen the president peers out upon the populace, his visitors and admirers, with great resolve and character, with the enormous moral certitude that freed a people and saved a nation. Even though stone, seemed those eyes could pin you, see into you, seize you. Stir you. My father, too, stared unblinkingly forward, but he did so distantly, distractedly, with all the vacuous glassiness of a (not particularly pleasant) doll.

 

The mid-morning light poured in through the window (almost unabated, given that, while cheaply and flimsily curtained, the window was also unshaded) and bathed him like cold, soap-scummy bath water. It was a harsh, sallow light, grimy and diffused by the dirty window pane it sluiced through. I recollect it as morning because my mother stood before him, barefoot, in a knee-length, faded blue nightgown. The light bathed her too, and it was no more merciful to her than it was to my father. Her calves, exposed, were a ruined relief of knotted and knobby, bluish-green varicose veins; backlit, outlined, by that harsh, ugly late winter’s morning light, were the lumpy, uneven contours of her thighs and upper body. Her belly swelled majestically, her breasts less so. She stood makeup-less, uncombed. Disheveled and dour, she loomed over my father like either a trial lawyer, an interrogating police detective, or a berating drill sergeant.

 

She was yelling at him because the family faced eviction from the singularly ugly and depressing second floor apartment on George Street that we were living in at the time. Cold in the winter, stifling in the summer, cockroach infested, full of fleas and woe, despair and desperation seemed to cling to its walls like grubby handprints. But it was, as an old Broadway song said, the only home we knew.

 

My mother reminded my father that the “authorities” weren’t F-ing around anymore. They were coming. This was as imminent as flea infestation come summer time. Both the family and all its stuff were going to be on the street any day now. My mother wanted to know what my father planned on doing about it. Besides just sit there.

 

My father just sat there, staring ahead, looking both dazed and slightly unaware.

 

I felt sorry for him. With his hairless upper lip, he looked younger than I was accustomed to seeing him look; his toothless overbite made him look, well, toothless and pouty, hapless against the assault of my mother. He looked for all the world like a beaten man. I was 14 years old and I could see it. This guy, slumped down there as he was on that ugly aquamarine vinyl armchair of ours (which, according to my mother, was going to wind up down on the sidewalk any time now), had no more of a plan than I did. He looked, for all the world, like he wished to shrink, flea size, and disappear into the pockets of his cheap corduroy overcoat, leaving his ridiculous Vince Lombardi hat to perch precariously on the cheap faux-fur of the collar.

 

I felt sorry him. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe I should have been on my mother’s side. Hell, maybe I, like my sister, should have joined in on the pummeling they were giving him. After all, it was his drinking and irresponsibility and neglect that got us to this point, as my mother pointed out to him a time or two (blithely neglecting to mention that some might charge her guilty of the same three crimes). Maybe I should have hurled an epithet or two myself. But I couldn’t. I didn’t want to. Sad and sorry for a 14-year-old to observe, let alone say about his father, but the man was pathetic. My mother might call him helpless, powerless, and wonder aloud why she didn’t just divorce his useless a*s, but to me he looked hapless. Maybe it was gender identification. Maybe it was that, even at 14 years old, I was beginning to identify some of those feelings beginning to fester in my own heart and soul and couldn‘t bring myself to pick on a kindred spirit. Whatever it was, while it didn’t make me hate my mother or anything, it did make me wish she and my sister would just stop and leave the guy alone. It was obvious to me, and I wasn’t the most perceptive crayon in the box, the man was down for the count. Why kick him?

 

Memory did not record how long this event played out. It did record, however, the fact that, through it all, my father never uttered a word, never so much as sighed, never looked at either my mother or my sister. Hell, memory barely registers him blinking. He just sat there, silent and unmoving as stone, like old Abe (or, better yet, one of those granite obelisks down at St. Lawrence’s Cemetery that had witnessed my amazing opening kickoff touchdown runs). For my part, by the way, I just sat there too, as I said not joining in on the festivities but not doing anything to stop them either. I perched on the torn, stuffing-disgorging arm of the couch, hands on my knees, silently wishing it would all just stop. I didn’t feel like stone, although I was pretty much as still as it, as still as my father for sure. Maybe to an outside observer I would have looked more like one of those weird, mute and unmoving stuffed birds in creepy Norman Bates’ gloomy back room. I don’t know.

 

I got my wish, but not because my mother and sister ran out of bullets or steam. It ended because my father, still soundless but no longer so stony, at last got up, stood, and without so much as a glance backward or askance (and certainly without the tip of his ugly hat) walked out of the room. He strode silently down the hall, quietly out the front door and wordlessly down the stairs, out of harm’s way --and out of our lives (as I recall)-- for a while. It was left to my sister to deliver the morning‘s last salvo:

 

“That man is the biggest f*****g coward I ever saw,” she said.

 

Honestly, eviction was a new twist, the latest in a long series of slings and arrows visited upon us by the Hand of Fate. We’d gone hungry. Sometimes, it seemed, all my brother and I had to eat was the candy (usually Life Savers, appropriately enough) that we managed to shoplift from downtown department stores. We’d gone without electricity and water. There was a swath of time known in our family as “Candlelight Days” because candlelight was the illumination de jour. The electricity had been turned off due to non-payment. I remember too going out and washing my hair in the residual drippings from the front yard faucet. Why? Because the water had been turned off. Why? Because of nonpayment. One time my brother went to school shoeless. We’d gone long stretches without parental supervision, without guidance, without discipline (some might argue without love as well, but I couldn’t -- I believed our parents loved us. They just liked drinking more/ Maybe?). But we’d always managed to hold onto whatever fetid little domicile we happened to be occupying at any given epoch. Apparently now even that streak was about to come to an end.

 

Very important to understand here that I am not indicting my parents, nor am I strictly singing the blues. All I am trying to do here is introduce evidence to the fact that, as kids, my brothers and I had next to nothing at home, and what we did have was generally miserable and unhappy; this particular episode, the eviction and the psychodrama played out because of it, were both an archetype and a culmination of all the seedy little privations and dysfunctions which we (being kids) were dragged through. It is too late in life to be hating and blaming (although, trust me, in my time I have done both). But facts are facts, truth is truth. And although the truth and the facts that comprise it are easily twistable and contortable, bendable and malleable, subject to the vagaries of perception, delusion and all that other subjective filtering we run it through, in their own essence, they remain immutable and irrefutable. So, I’d like to think here that I am not bemoaning the truth, but simply acknowledging it

 

Anyway, here’s the bottom line: It didn’t matter then. Really, it didn’t. It mattered more later on when I started looking for reasons (excuses?) for why I was so screwed up, but as a kid it was simply a state of being. It was the way things were. We didn’t know any other reality --most of our friends shared equally broken home lives-- so, given no other frame of reference, we found it tough, but slogged through it. It was life. Get over it and get on with.

 

There was another reason it was not only survivable but tolerable: For much of that five-year window from 1968 to 1972 -- years that dovetailed nicely with the last year of elementary school through to my first year in high school-- we had an escape, a place where we could go, a place where we could dream dreams, feel bigger and better than we actually were; a place where we could run back kickoffs for touchdowns to the delight of no one but ourselves. We had a refuge. We had a sanctum sanctorum, an island, a hideaway. A getaway .

We had Yale football.

 

FATHER’S DAY

 

One bright, able-bodied Saturday afternoon in late September 1968, my father took me to my first Yale football game, the season opener versus the University of Connecticut. The invitation came quite from out of the blue. Not sure now what I was doing otherwise, but at some point during the day my father game up and asked me if I would like to go the Yale game. I said, Sure (although, really, I had no idea what I was in for). But it was football. How could it not be good? And besides, invitations from my father to do anything were few and far between. So I jumped at the chance.

 

I had never been to an EVENT before. Not even close. I had been to some movies, a few Babe Ruth League baseball games, and I think once when we lived in a Florida my father and I stopped to watch a few plays of a junior college football game. That was about it, as I recall. Nothing prepared me for the spectacle I would encounter once my father and I made our way through one of the Bowl’s gloomy portals and entered what to me looked like, perhaps in its own way, what Poe’s gallant El Dorado knight might have beheld had he actually ever found his City of Gold.

 

I had seen the Bowl many a time from the outside, but from the outside, there was no way to gauge its true length and breadth on the inside. To me it looked gigantic. From goal post to goal post it looked a mile; from where we stood in the South End Zone to the scoreboard perched atop the seats at the northern end, it looked like two. From the press box on one sideline (the Yale sideline) across to the top of the visiting team’s rooting section, again, seemed distance could be measured in increments of miles, not mere feet. I was standing on “feet.” The distances on display within the Bowl called for more prestigious and majestic units of measurement than what I had stuffed into my two battered sneakers.

 

I would never know the exact attendance figures until many, many years later, but I knew this then --the place was not sold out. But I knew this: it was easily half-filled, and in the configuration of the Bowl in those days, that meant a crowd in the neighborhood of 35,000. Not exactly Rose Bowl numbers, but I knew this too--it was far and away the most people I had ever seen in one place. And I knew this, this crowd dwarfed whatever might have been the runner up. For sure, it dwarfed me. It even intimidated me at first, seeming like, even during just the pre-game activities, a living, breathing thing filled with its own kind of energy and pulse. A trifle frightening to an 11 year old, but more than a little exhilarating. As would be expected, the areas of the fifty yard lines were the most filled and the sheer enormity of colors spread on that pallet -- a pointillist mélange comprised of the hues of everything from faces to fashion to head wear to hair color was, in its way, the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes on.

 

I had seen green grass before. Heck, given that we’d roamed the expanse of the University’s athletic fields beyond the Bowl time and time again, I had actually seen larger swaths of it. But I had never seen deeper or more immaculately coiffed and compressed green in my life. I had never (in person, anyway) seen a field marked and lined for combat. Never seen orange end zone flags rippling in the breeze (it was a brilliantly sunny early autumn day, as warm as June with a sky so crisp and sharply blue it almost looked scrubbed, waxed and polished). I’d never heard a PA System before, and when the announcer spoke, his titanic, stentorian tones seemed to authenticate and validate it all: I was at an EVENT. I’d never seen vendors and hawkers plying their trade; selling pop corn, peanuts, hot dogs, Cracker Jacks, pennants, little stuffed animals, plastic horns. It all seemed marvelous and overwhelming and extraordinary. I felt dizzy and dazzled, not only by excitement, but by joy too.

 

Finally, I had never seen real football players before. Not in person. True, I’d fleetingly glimpsed a few JC players a few years earlier, but it was instantly obvious that these were not JC players. They seemed huge, massive, more like beasts of both burden and rare and fine grace and beauty. The white of the helmets and pants seemed as white and fine as powdered sugar, their navy blue jerseys, much darker than the sky overheard at the moment, seemed to catch the brooding and regal beauty of a dusking sky. I watched them run through their pre-game drills, already awed and enamored, stunned that human beings could at once be so huge, so massive, but also lithe, so athletic, so graceful.

 

When my father asked me where I wanted to sit, I pointed to the first row. Down there, I said. He reminded me that the view, the perspective down there was skewed and we could see more of the action, and see it better, if we sat higher. I wasn’t having any of it. I wanted to sit as close to field, as close to the players, as close to the action, as close to game as our two general admission tickets legally entitled us to. So, we, my father and I, sat in the front row in the south end zone, just a little to the left of the goalposts.

 

This easily became The Day with my father, the one day which I could point to without hesitation, without equivocation, without consideration or caveat as easily the very best day he and I ever shared together. I can‘t think of a second best, this one seems so singularly shining and, yes, perfect. He brought me here. He made this possible. He invited me into this spectacle. He chose to show me this and share it with me. Whatever else the man did or didn’t do before that day, and whatever else he did or didn’t do after it, he did this much. And that made him for that day, and for all the memories of it ad infinitum, my hero. This was sensory overload. This was love, deep abiding, unquestioning, unconditional love at first sight. From the moment we walked in, from the moment of that opening kickoff, through the pomp and pageantry of halftime and all through the game (which the home team, much to my delight, totally dominated) I fell more deeply and dumbly in love. And don’t we always save a special place in our hearts for those who introduce us to our first love? By the time I left I knew there would be no other place I would rather spend my Saturday afternoons in the fall than in the very spot doing that very thing.

 

I suppose the whole thing became an addiction, a dependency, a compulsion, although I am not sure exactly when it did and I do not actively care. Damn right I was addicted. Damn right I was dependent. Damn right I was compelled. And as the situation at home deteriorated, that addiction, that dependency, that compulsion deepened, worsened (if that is how you choose to view it) to the extent that I --my brothers and friends too-- began haunting not only the Bowl, but Lapham Field House, the practice field (DeWitt Cuyler Field), Coxe Cage, in fact the whole of the entire Walter Camp Memorial athletic complex.

 

For me, it was simple. I wanted to be near it. I wanted to be around it. There was a magic, a timelessness, a beauty and majesty to those fall Saturdays that no amount of alcoholism, no amount of cockroaches, no amount of neglect, no amount of hunger, no amount of flea bites, heat and cold, abandonment and eviction could destroy or even diminish. That magic, that majesty, for me, lingered even during the weekends when Yale was away; it lingered during the off season; it remained through winter blizzards, spring rains and thaw, through the merciless heat, humidity and haze of summer, the magic remained, and I walked to it, I ran to it, I embraced it.

And like a good lover, it embraced me back. I felt somehow safe at the Bowl, bigger, better and stronger than I did anywhere else in the small and ugly little world I was stuck in. I was a part of something fine, something successful, something which seemed great and immense. I was a part of the Yale University football family. That conferred upon me, at least for the Saturdays that I stood and cheered for them, and at least for the moments, minutes and hours I spent haunting the terrain of the athletic fields (sometimes we’d skip school and just wander around there somewhat absently, but always reverently), some stature, some bona fides, some legitimacy that my life seemed otherwise sorely lacking in. I think it did for a lot of us. I guess the easiest to say it is to just say it thusly: It seemed that we were, or we would be, losers in life. For a few brief, shining moments, Yale football made us feel like winners.

 

Who could resist that? Isn’t that why kids formed or joined gangs? For identity? For companionship, for camaraderie? For closeness? For unity? To bond? For a feeling of bigness and betterness and oneness with something bigger and better they could ever be on their own? We had all that, and we didn’t have get our asses kicked to enjoy it.

 

I will stop just short of calling the players gods, in either lower case or capital letters. They weren’t that. Even I knew it. But I know this: Whatever it was folks in ancient Rome must have felt for their most honored gladiators, whatever it was that folks in the Middle Ages felt for their knights-errant; whatever it was Native American might have felt for their bravest of braves, that’s exactly what we felt for the players for the Yale University football players.

 

They seemed to occupy a realm all their own: not quite men, but certainly not boys; college students, but an entirely different breed from the ones I saw from the window of the bus walking the downtown New Haven campus, different, indeed, from even the students who strode so briskly down George Street, Derby Avenue and Chapel Street heading for the Bowl to cheer on their classmates come Game Day.

 

They were special. Big, strong, fast, brave, daring, tough; they were accomplished, successful, great athletes, great students (going as they did to what we knew was one of the greatest schools on the planet). They seemed to have everything. I didn’t doubt that they could do everything (or at least anything they set their minds to). And yet they were accessible. They were everything we weren’t and everything we might never be, and simply walking amongst them down on the field of the Bowl after the game --still sweating and bleeding from the game, still smeared with the mud and turf stains of the Bowl floor-- was a dizzying experience, literally a stroll among giants.

 

For all this, there was no resentment, no jealousy, no envy, surely no bitterness or begrudging. Those were all traits we would learn a little later on in life. Right then there was awe, adoration and admiration. It was not a stretch to say we loved these guys. And did so unconditionally.

 

YESTERDAY’S HERO

 

I am not sure exactly when, or even exactly how, my friend Mike McKinney and I became caddies for place-kicker Harry Klebanoff, although I have to admit that, given my shyness and general social inertia at the time, it must have been Mike who “broke the ice.“ Don’t know what he did, don’t know what he said, but one evening at practice, there along the sidelines of DeWitt Cuyler Field, I found myself chatting with the place kicker for the varsity football team. History does not record what was said. And I have absolutely no recollection either of how we (he, Mike and I) moved from chatting along the sideline to actually joining him on the field, snapping and holding for him while he kicked, but we did. And history cannot accurately recall how often we did it. I would like to think that it was every day, and maybe it was, but I‘m not sure (Here‘s the rub regarding that: my mind, my heart, have recorded it as daily. And, therefore, daily it is.).

 

Here’s what I remember specifically about my time with Harry Klebanoff. I remember him teaching us (me and Mike) how to short snap for field goals and extra points, and how to long snap for punts. He taught us the intricacies of the hold (most important revelation: a proper holder never took his finger off the ball, never moved it --even after if was kicked!). He taught us that you held the ball differently for soccer-style kickers (which he was) than for old-fashioned straight-on kickers (who were still around but vanishing like the light at sunset). For the record, you slanted ball slightly toward a soccer-style kicker; for the straight-on guy, you held it perpendicular to the kicking tee. He taught us the precise balletic timing involved in the execution of the kick, be it field goal or extra point (big revelation here: the kicker actually started moving to the ball even as the ball was snapped; me, I’d always thought he remained stationary, moving only after the ball was snapped and held in place. Nope. No way. Every kick would be blocked if you did it that way).

 

Here’s what I don’t specifically remember about my time with Harry Klebanoff --I don’t remember life lessons; I don’t remember mentoring; I don’t remember fatherly advice; I don’t remember philosophy, politics, religion. I don’t remember deep thoughts, I don’t remember baring my heart and soul, discussing the problems of home, school, or the world with him. (Don’t remember him asking me to). This was not Tuesdays with Harry. To me it was a business, a job, an honor, a privilege I did not take lightly, nor was it one I was going to muck about by turning the guy into my shoulder-padded shrink (although, ironically, I was aware of the fact that he was majoring in psychology.) No, this was business, this was football business, this was Yale football business, and I am pretty sure that, despite my foggy memory, that took precedence over everything. Harry Klebanoff didn’t have to say, do, or be anything other than what he was: the place kicker for the Yale University varsity football team. That made spending time with him, and the fact he spent time with us, amazing enough. ‘Nuff said.

 

This to me was massive, this was mammoth, this was monumental. This over-shadowed everything. I was a part, however tangentially, of the Yale University football program. Me. From George Street. From that flea-ridden, cockroach-infested, hot-in-the-summer, cold-in-the-winter shithole (you should pardon my language), the one we would someday get thrown out of; the one in which I bore witness to her and my sister verbally assaulting my father; the one from which my parents seemed forever absent (in another interesting little sardonic twist, the name of their favorite watering hole, located just down the stairs, to the left and just chip-shot field goal distant away, the place where most of that absence was centered, was called the Yale Bowl Grille). We didn’t eat enough; we wore the same ratty clothes day in and day out; my brother and I were chronic truants, hated school as much as it seemed to hate us, but none of that seemed to matter to Harry Klebanoff. He didn’t ask to see my resume and I was bright enough to know, having not been asked, to not give him a verbal one. Didn’t occur to me that it might make him fire me, but there was no sense in taking unnecessary chances.

 

But here is the best part about toiling away under the lights in the chilly, dewy early-evening darkness of autumn with Harry Klebanoff: For the time I labored there, either kneeling to take a snap or peering backwards upside-down between my two spread legs to make a snap (Mike and I alternated); for the time that I was on the cleat-marked turf, I didn’t even think of my “resume.” All the ugliness, the sadness, the meandering desperation of living in that dump with those neglectful parents stopped right at the brick wall separating the field from Derby Avenue. Oh, sure, it waited for me till practice was over; it walked the half-mile or so home with me down darkened, deserted Derby Avenue afterward; it followed me home --hell, it practically opened and held the door for me when I got to that aforementioned dump.

 

But for that (to me) sacred (no hyperbole there) and transcendent time I was on the field, it was held at bay. I was safe, I was protected. And better than that, I was Somebody. I had Something. I was a Big Shot. In the Bowl on Saturdays there were literally thousands of boys my age. Mike and I, among them, were the only ones “working with” Harry Klebanoff Monday through Friday. When Harry Klebanoff trotted onto the field of the Bowl on those Saturdays before those boys to attempt a point after touchdown or field goal, Mike and I were the only two who could say, “We are a part of this.” And when Harry Klebanoff banged one home good we were the only ones who could say, “We helped make that happen.” Didn’t matter if a single other soul in the Bowl knew. I knew it. And that was all that mattered. For a few hours, Monday though Friday, I had a place. I knew joy, I knew awe, I knew peace. Come Saturday, I knew success.

 

To this day, that remains about the best remuneration I have ever received for any job.

 

THE OLD MAN COMETH

 

If the brick embedded in the courtyard in front of the new locker room at the freshly-renovated Yale Bowl is accurate, Harry Klebanoff graduated in 1971. One of the very few concrete things I remember him saying to me (although I don’t remember when he actually said it) was that he hoped, he expected, Mike and I would help out the “new guy” (I believe his name was Brian Clarke) the way we‘d helped him out.

 

Sorry, Harry, that didn’t happen. I guess there is only one such moment like that in a boy’s life, and ours was with Harry Klebanoff. Who knows, maybe two kids showed up one day at practice and begin chatting up new placekickerBrian Clarke along the sideline of DeWitt Cuyler Field and --presto!!-- before he knew it, he had his very own caddies. As for me and Mike, we went on our way. By the following, autumn he and I were playing midget football (among other things, I long-snapped and he punted). By the autumn after that, I was playing high school freshman ball (again, among other things, I long-snapped). Still made it to the Bowl every chance I got, but those chances just were not as plentiful as they had been before. We were, for the record, evicted from George Street in the early spring of 1971. We eventually wound up in a (not much) better place, but it was on the other side of town. The geographical proximity that made Yale Football Mania so accessible was gone now. Another factor in the gradual decline of fanaticism, if not fandom.

 

That was never really lost. By the 80’s I was in the Navy and lived a continent away. But I still followed, as best I could., the fates and fortunes of the Yale Bulldogs. By the 90’s I lived about a third of a continent away in Michigan and yet I still followed, as best I could, the fates and fortunes of the Bulldogs. While in Michigan, when I mentioned my love for Bulldog football, I got puzzled and condescending glances from the fans of Big Blue and State. That was okay. I was willing to bet I had a deeper, more meaningful bond with my team than they had with theirs. What’s more, I wasn’t going to sully it by exposing it to the factory air in which most of the discussions took place. It was a personal, private treasure. No one else needed to see it. In fact, given the tone and timbre of some of those “discussions,” I decided they didn’t deserve to see it.

 

Unfortunately, sometimes, maintaining connection with the Yale University football program wasn’t always a pleasant experience. I remember watching the Princeton game one year --think it might have been the mid 90s--on ESPN. The Bowl was virtually empty; there appeared to be more people on the field than in the stands. The place was literally crumbling under the weight of years of neglect--the lower retaining wall virtually looked like it could give out at any moment; the steps were visibly crumbling--you could see it even on TV (good thing no one was walking on them); the seats, wooden benches (with, surprisingly enough for a collegiate venue, back supports) were cracked, splintering, fading (I’m not sure when the place was last painted, but I know it hadn’t been since I started going there). Good thing no one was sitting in them. I guess.

 

I couldn’t help but remember my first Princeton game, in 1968, Brian Dowling and Calvin Hill’s final home (the penultimate game before the infamous 29-29 “loss” to Harvard a week later). Nearly 60,000 jammed the Bowl. There was feeling of Bigness, of Big Time, of Big Deal. Lowering mountains of cadaverous gray clouds loomed overhead; pennants, flags and banners riffled slightly in a light but persistent breeze; the air snapped with a slightly damp chill. Down on the field, the Bulldogs were destroying the Princeton Tigers. Brian Dowling and Calvin Hill were cementing their legends. This wasn’t just football. This was College Football. And this wasn’t just College Football. That dark November day, as I rose with the other 60,000 to give Brian Dowling a Standing O as he triumphantly walked off the field one last time late in the fourth quarter I realized, at that moment, there beneath that sky, in that breeze, in that chill, among those almost 60,000 strangers, that to me this was religion, the most uplifting and satisfying spiritual experience I had ever known. And the Bowl was its church.

 

Simple as that.

 

What I saw that day on ESPN seemed a sacrilege, resembling a rather non-descript game between two not-particularly talented or inspired high school squads. It looked for all the world like the place and the program were on their very spindly, wobbly last legs, dying a slow, gloomy death on that rainy, muddy afternoon. A word for it might be discouraging. Another might be depressing.

 

Well, it’s easy, and perfectly of the nature, of an older generation to turn its nose up at the proceeding generations’ “product.” Nothing is ever as it good as it was when we were young. I have since returned home from my journeys across the land and have, as best as possible, attempted to resume my Yale fandom. I go out to the Bowl as often as possible, but, as often as not, it is a difficult, sometimes saddening experience.

 

Nothing, of course, is as it was. The Bowl is physically smaller (and, no, it is not just the myopia of older-age setting in). At one point, among many renovations, they ripped out the last ten or so rows of bleachers rimming the top. I guess it makes some kind of sense; they don’t really need most of the 65,000 seats that remain, why let an additional 10,000 rot and decay in the sun? By removing those seats, you can now take a circular stroll around the rim of the bowl on a spiffy new concrete walkway, your view of the field unimpeded as you traverse. Also new is the wrought iron fence bounding this walkway. Aesthetically, it is not an unattractive move, I guess. However, the reduction has left the bowl looking significantly smaller, substantially less massive than it did “Back in the day.” And those last few rows of bleachers were our seats as kids (when we weren‘t sitting down in the front row, harassing the opposing teams’ marching bands at halftime). My friend Brian Bogan, now deceased, and I would sit up there and sing Tom Jones songs, waiting for the games to begin. I can’t help but remember that I every time I look up there and see those seats gone.

 

Attendance, of course, has fallen off hugely. In 1969, the Bulldogs averaged nearly 40,000 per home game. As late as 1981 they averaged almost 39,000 at the Bowl. These are not enormous numbers compared to some schools, but this has always been the Ivy League, not the Big Ten or the SEC. I attended the Colgate game this past year. There were less than 5,000 bodies scattered amongst the still splintering, cracked, unpainted seats. The place was deathly quiet. You could hear the quarterbacks barking signals, you could hear the coaches yelling orders. From the north end zone you could hear the cheerleaders near the south end zone leading cheers for virtually no one (couldn’t help but harken back to the day when the cheerleaders --with megaphones, no less-- would come over to our end zone, that same south end zone. We used to scream ourselves hoarse. They’d call for a Y. We gave them one. They’d ask for an A. We bellowed one out to them. They wanted an L. We gave ‘em an L. They wanted an E. An E they got. When they asked us what that spelled, we shouted to the heavens: YALE!! They’d ask again. We told again: YALE!!! It was always a point of honor that we be louder than the folk in the north end zone. Of course, we swore we always were; and, no doubt, they swore the same thing. Point is, we were there, we were present ; we came to make noise and we stayed and, like the team, we fought till the end. That was just the way of it in those days).

 

Who knows, maybe kids today are too sophisticated, too busy, too jaded, to come out to an almost one-hundred-year bowl with little or no modern amenities to sit on splintering unpainted benches and watch of bunch of future doctors and lawyers and bank presidents and politicians knock heads with a bunch of other geeks and nerds. Isn’t it easier to just sit at home and watch ESPN1 and 2 and 3 and god knows what else? I can’t see --I don’t see-- kids as we were at the bowl that much these days. You see some kids, but mainly they are there with their parents (and I am morally certain most of them are alumni).You don’t see much of what we were --gangs, hoards of unsupervised, unaffiliated free agent neighborhood kids there because we wanted to be, because we had to be, because we needed to be. Because there was nowhere else for us to be.

 

Maybe kids today are just too cool for all that nonsense.

 

And, giving the kids a break, the level of play on the field isn’t quite what is was in the days of yore. Back in 1981 the NCAA decided to demote Yale and the rest of the Ivy League school to I-AA (apparently in a tiff over television money), and enticing quality recruits became increasingly more difficult. While Yale hadn’t been a national powerhouse since the 20s, it had remained through the years a competitive, thriving program (perhaps its last great moment of glory being a 21-19 upset win over Liberty Bowl-bound Navy in 1981). After that, it became as glamorous and relevant as the program of nearby Southern Connecticut State College. What I fear is that it may one day go the way of the University of Chicago, or the University of Detroit , or Centre College, incredibly at one point national powerhouses whose programs have long been extinct.

 

Even I find myself going as much as for what transpired there forty years ago as for what transpires there today. Sure, it’s a nice afternoon; it’s cheap; it’s fun, and stepping into any of the ancient men’s restrooms is like stepping into a time machine back to dawn of the 20^th century. But the experience for me is enhanced by the fact that virtually every step and every seat in the place is painted with some special memory, even if renovations and new constructions have rendered some of the place and some of the surrounding grounds unrecognizable: Dewitt Cuyler Field has been spruced up; the long stately promenade up through the Walter Camp Memorial on Derby Avenue to the main entrance has been inexplicably neutered by the jarring, detouring presence of newly-planted pine trees and tennis courts(!!!); they shoe-horned a soccer stadium beside that majestic brick-and-glass monstrosity, Coxe Cage. I wonder if, without that allure of personal memory, even I would be trekking to the Bowl even half as often as I do, given all the changes.

 

Other things have changed: My father is gone, my mother long gone. They never divorced: Death did them part. Brian Bogan is gone. So is Kirk Bacon; David Rosenbloom is gone too. These are the dead. Among the missing is just about everyone else I hung out with back in those days. We’ve all sort of scattered to the wind, as the old saying goes. Nobody comes here anymore. But when I come here, I think of them, I remember them. I don’t exactly get to sit with them or even see them, but they’re here, a little out of reach and just beyond my sight. They haunt this place now as surely as we did back when we were kids.

 

But here’s what hasn’t changed: Love. Don’t want to get all mawkish and maudlin as I wrap this up, but it is true. I loved Yale football as I kid. I love it now. It has lost its religiosity for sure, but what it has lost in reckless, innocent fervor it has gained in the patina of maturity and remembrance. One of the trade-offs of life is that, as memories lose their specificity, as details and particulars becoming increasingly more difficult to recall (for instance, I always remembered the 1970 squad as an offensive juggernaut led by mad-bombing quarterback Joe Massey; the 1970 squad, as it turns out, was an admirable 7-2, but Massey himself was barely a 50 percent passer), they gain in value and meaning. The specific numbers of Joe Massey and crew and the final scores of the games they won are largely irrelevant. What is relevant is the emotional toll still resonating throughout my soul (yeah, that’s no lie) those numbers created.

 

I suspect I will be one of those doddering old men I used to see when I was a kid (I see them now), hunched over a little, sporting a cane, slowly, arthritically making their way to probably the same seat that have sat in since they were kids. When I was a kid they sat there, redolent in cigar smoke and roiling in memories, and maybe talked about the Clint Franks and Larry Kellys. Heck, who knows, in those days it was possible, I suppose, for a memory to stretch back to the Albie Booths and Pudge Hefflefingers. What kids there are now probably look at me and think, Wow, I bet he can remember back to the days of Brian Dowling, Calvin Hill and Dick Jauron. Well, yes I can. Very easily. The place, the game, the team, those days, have never left me. They never will. They are a part of my historical lineage, the memories a part of my emotional DNA, a part of the fabric of who I was, who I am and who I suspect I will be for as long as I am able to get myself out to the Bowl and take a seat on one of its splintering benches: a follower, a fan, a family member.

 

A son of Eli.

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

　

Reviews

[Trigorin]

This is really not bad. You obviously know how to write, and while your topic isn't very appealing to me, you've really done a good job with the exposition and characterization here. This is very polished and professional - well done.

[John Edwards]

Thank you for reading and reviewing. Most appreciated.