Marazzi returns with more fascinating Yale football stories
This was 1963 at a college football induction ceremony in New York. Frank Birmingham, sports editor of the old New Haven Journal-Courier, extended his hand in introduction to a Harvard man. President John F. Kennedy had one question.
“Was Yale’s undefeated 1960 team really as good as its record?”
That is a Yale football story. And thanks to Rich
Marazzi, it’s just part of the story.
Ben Balme, the AllAmerican lineman from that unbeaten team, went on to become an orthopedic surgeon who volunteered for a mobile Army hospital unit in Vietnam. Watts Humphrey, who had been quarterback of the 1965 Bulldogs, was serving as a Marine infantry company commander when he was hit by rocket shrapnel in 1968 just south of Da Nang. The mangled and badly injured were brought into the MASH unit. Humphrey, whose brother captained the ’63 team and father played for Yale in the 1930s, was among them.
The story goes that Balme recognized Humphrey. Suddenly, one Yalie was working on another in surgery. Humphrey would lose one third of the muscle of his right forearm, but Balme saved the arm and maybe his life.
“He thanks Ben for this,” Marazzi said. “I said, ‘Watts, have you ever met
Ben?’ He goes, ‘No, I never have.’ ”
Marazzi and a few others are working to get the two to meet next year at the Yale-Harvard game.
Now, THAT is a Yale football story.
Marazzi, who authored “A Bowl Full of Memories: 100 Years of Football at Yale Bowl,” is back at it with “Yale Football Through the Years.” His 406-page coffee-table-size book in 2014 was rich with 377 photos and interviews with 115 former players and coaches.
This 209-page effort is the source authority for anyone who loves, cares or wants to know about Yale football. It’s all there. Every Yale-Harvard game. Almost all the Yale-Princeton games. The big games. The big names. Every year from 1872. Sure, there’s Albie Booth, Clint Frank, Larry Kelley, Carm Cozza, Calvin Hill, Brian Dowling, but there’s Herbert Hoover, Babe Ruth, Teddy Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, too.
There’s everything you need to know about “Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29,” in 1968 and even more about Yale’s double-overtime victory in near darkness over Harvard in 2019, marked by the climate change protest at halftime. Where else are you going to get Sam Waterston, from “Law & Order,” being led off the field in handcuffs for not being lawful and orderly?
“The first book was to humanize the football experience, to bring people into the huddle, into the locker room, onto the campus over 100 years at Yale Bowl,” Marazzi said. “A good part of that book was really in first person because of the interviews. I asked everyone for a story, basically, that they would tell at a cocktail party.
“What I did this time is I streamlined the outstanding games, accomplishments and performances, every year from 1872. Wherever I could find human interest things to embellish, that’s what I did. I’d call it a cousin, a companion, to the first book, I tried to take a different X-ray of Yale football.”
From start (some Columbia players arrived by boat, some by train and admission was 25 cents in 1872) through Walter Camp’s innovations that essentially invented the game we know and onto the finish (Waterston in handcuffs), there are pieces of athletic history that are too precious to be lost to the passing decades, actually the passing centuries.
No one loves all things Yale football any more than Rich Marazzi. This is a guy who had a fantasy to march on the field with the Yale band. Dave DeAngelis was the drum major and his father, Ray, was a colleague of Marazzi’s at O’Brien Tech. And, well, there Rich was Oct. 6, 2007, marching at halftime, fake-playing a clarinet that his late uncle Joe gave him. He never played the clarinet in his life. He just followed the kid to his right.
Marazzi dedicated the book to the late Bob Barton, a long-time New Haven Register editor whom he called the resident historian of Yale football. They worked closely on the first book, and some material in this one is from Barton. Joel Alderman — Yalie, former attorney, long-time announcer on WELI — also contributed.
Although there are some classic Grantland Rice passages — like the poetic tribute to Heisman Trophy winner Larry Kelley — the book is less colorful prose than the result of painfully extensive research. When you compact a century and a half of football history into 209 pages, the result is a compelling chronological narrative of “Wow, I didn’t know this. I didn’t know that.”
There were violent games between Yale and Harvard in the early years, violent to the point that they canceled the series for a couple of seasons near the end of the 19th century. In 1905, another game turned nasty. Yale’s Jim Quinn broke Francis Burr’s nose in retaliation for biting him. All sorts of stuff. It got so bad that Henry Lee Higginson, a Harvard benefactor who had donated to Soldiers Field, sent a note down to Crimson coach Bill Reid asking him to withdraw his team from the field. Reid refused. It wasn’t like Higginson was soft. The guy was wounded at the First Battle of Bull Run in the Civil War.
The schools used to make up songs for The Game, and they weren’t exactly high society. Take the 1912 effort called The Undertaker Song: “Oh! More work for the undertaker. Another little job for the casket maker, in the local cemetery they are very, very busy on a brandnew grave. No hope for Harvard.”
Maybe we should be a little less critical of rap music.
No sitting president, best any one can tell, has attended a Yale game at the Yale Bowl. Jack and Bobby Kennedy were there in 1955 when Teddy scored the only touchdown for Harvard in Yale’s 21-7 win. William Howard Taft’s son Charlie played at Yale after his presidency. Ronald Regan’s son Ron attended Yale and the future president was at The Game in 1976. In 1938, future president Gerald Ford, a star at Michigan, began his duties as assistant football and boxing coach while working on his Yale law degree.
And then there was Babe Ruth, who once said he was paid so much because he had a better year than the president. He attended the Yale-Harvard game in 1932, sitting with his wife, Claire, and a strip of linoleum over their heads to shield themselves from the torrential New Haven rain.
Marazzi’s first time at the Yale Bowl was sitting among the state high school-record 40,000 fans at the 1948 Hillhouse-West Haven game on Thanksgiving Day. His first Yale game was 1955 when Yale stunned No. 19 Army, 14-12. He and his dad rooted for Army because Bob Kyasky, a great running back from their hometown, Ansonia, played for the Cadets. Marazzi remembers Yale captain Phil Tarasovic, from Bridgeport, running up into the stands afterward with the game ball and giving it to his father.
“It was like a movie,” Marazzi said.
While the tie at Harvard the following year is more famous, Marazzi loves the thrilling ’67 Yale-Harvard game. Yale blew a 17-0 lead and Harvard went ahead in the closing minutes. Dowling hit Del Marting for a 66-yard touchdown pass with 2:16 left and Yale recovered a fumble at its 10-yard line with 56 seconds left to preserve the win, 24-20. Here’s the kicker. Marting’s dad, Walter, scored a touchdown in that 1932 game the Babe saw to make the Martings the only Yale father-son duo to score against Harvard.
Yale football was big stuff in the day, national stuff, by far the biggest stuff in Connecticut. In 1953, a car overturned in West Rock tunnel (Wilbur Cross Parkway), causing a traffic jam. No one was hurt. Fans, worried they’d miss the kickoff, flipped the car over and the guy drove off. By the time the state police arrived, no one was to be seen.
They were at The Game. Where else?
For a signed copy of “Yale Football Through the Years,” the price is $25. Make the check to “Rich Marazzi” or “Rich Marazzi Productions” and send to 105 Pulaski Highway, Ansonia, CT, 06401. The book can also be purchased on Amazon for $29.99, at Campus Customs on Broadway in New Haven and through the Yale bookstore.