The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
50 years ago, The Game begat the greatest headline ever
The Cambridge morning of Nov. 23, 1968, dawned with a delightfully dark and prescient piece in The Harvard Crimson, the school’s student newspaper.
Under the headline “Kill Yale,” James K. Glassman wrote, “In the existential phenomenological context of thing (the only way we approach anything in the sporting world), destroying has some magnificent benefits that accomplishing cannot touch.
“Destroying is final and absolute … Second, and most important, destroying is a wonderfully exhilarating thing to do. It is mischievous and healthy. It moves the spirit and soul.”
Consider Yale, the defending Ivy League champion, had won 16 games in a row. Consider Brian Dowling, known as “God” on campus, hadn’t lost a game he started at quarterback since the seventh grade, and Garry Trudeau, of Doonesbury lore, had already introduced “B.D.” in his strip in the Yale Daily News. Consider Carm Cozza had Calvin Hill and John Yovicsin did not.
Yes, there was much for Harvard to destroy. And the Crimson did, in 42 shocking seconds, to gain its share of the Ivy League title.
Down 29-13, Frank Champi threw a 15-yard touchdown pass to Bruce Freeman. After a pass interference call, Gus Crim ran in the two-point conversion. Bill Kelly recovered the onside kick. As time ran out, Champi scrambled, threw off his back foot and found Vic Gatto in the end zone. Champi hit Pete Varney, a future major league catcher, for the twopoint conversion.
From there delirium, and the greatest sports headline in history.
“Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29,” The Crimson announced.
Fifty years later, with the schools meeting for the 135th time Saturday at Fenway Park, we can agree that all the other sports
headlines ever written are tied for, well, tied at 29-29.
In 2000, Alan Schwarz, then with Baseball America, was asked by American Heritage Magazine to identify the most overrated and underrated headlines in history. “Dewey Defeats Truman” was selected as the former. Hey, the Chicago Tribune was wrong. The Crimson’s headline for The Game was picked as the most underrated: “What a delicious way of handling it in the short space of a headline,” said Schwarz who went on a search for its author for a piece that would appear in Harvard Magazine.
What Schwarz figured would be an easy task turned into an exhausting three-month search filled with more than 100 phone calls. He went through Ring Lardner’s grandson and a Federal Court of Appeals judge.
“With no Facebook, no Twitter, you just didn’t Google people and up popped their LinkedIn profile,” Schwarz said.
I can identify with Schwarz. I had been on my own quarter-century journey in search of the composer of the most famous fight song in hockey. “Brass Bonanza” was composed under the pseudonym of Jack Say and nobody with the Hartford Whalers or anywhere else knew where Jack Say was.
I finally found him on Facebook in 2010. He was Jacques Ysaye of Alsemberg, Belgium. “Brass Bonanza,” he said, was originally entitled “Evening Beat.” His grandfather Eugene had been one of the world’s greatest violinists. I felt like I’d discovered the lost continent of Atlantis.
About to give up on his search, Schwarz found former Crimson night editor Bill Kutiz. The main story had been written by
Peter Lennon and Scott Jacobs. Kutiz was struggling with a headline. That’s when photo editor Timothy Carlson chimed in.
“I had taken pictures on the sideline and it was the best 42 seconds of a sporting event I’ve ever seen,” Carlson said. “So many people ran on the field in celebration. They were exhilarated because they were drunk or so exhilarated they felt drunk.
“One guy who looked like an undergraduate, freshman or sophomore, saw my credential and said, ‘You with The Crimson?’ I said yeah. He goes, ‘Harvard beats Yale!’ I’m thinking that’s sort of right.”
A special edition went quickly to print but didn’t have the famous headline.
“It was Sunday night before the regular paper (on Monday) and the guys were scratching their head,” Carlson said. “I said, ‘Bill, what do you think? Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29.’ I hadn’t thought of it, but I wasn’t stupid enough to let what I’d heard on the field drop. Kutiz said, ‘What?’ He thought for a second and said, ‘Yeah.’ Everybody decided to go with it.”
After Schwarz’s piece was published in Harvard Magazine, two alumni stepped forward in the letters to the editor of the March-April 2001 issue to lay claim to the stroke of genius. One was Thomas Zubaty. He was backed in his claim by John Roberts.
In our phone conversation, Zubaty said he and classmate Rich Genz had four tickets and scalped two to Yalies for $25 apiece. They didn’t sit in their seats. They sat in an aisle on the 50-yard line. Genz had to leave in the fourth quarter to work in the dining hall.
“At one point I walked under the stands,” Zubaty said. “Yale was well ahead. On their side, everybody was celebrating and underneath the stands was
littered with alcohol and beer cartons. I went back to our side and watched the greatest comeback in sports history in stunned silence.”
Zubaty said he had been recruited to play football at Yale. The reason he went to Harvard, he said, was because the school didn’t bother him about playing. He did run hard onto the Harvard Stadium field that day, though.
“Then we went up to the dorm in Hollis North,” Zubaty said. “I told John Roberts my idea for the headline. He said I ought to call into The Crimson and let me use his phone.
“The night manager didn’t seem aware the game ended on such a shocking note. He said he’d leave the message for the editor. The story I got later on from Craig Lambert, the Harvard Magazine editor, was that there was an editor mucking around, wondering what to do (for a headline) and found this note laying on the desk, probably penned by the guy I got on the phone.
“Lambert asked me if I was adamant on claiming credit or was I willing to be part of the party. I’m happy to be part of the party. I certainly feel I was part of it. Don’t cut me out.”
Saying he felt like a citizen of Mark Twain’s Hadleyburg, where everyone tried to lay claim to a virtue they did not possess, William Clark wrote another letter to the editor.
Clark, who had gotten his degree from Harvard, was a graduate student at Yale and had driven up from New Haven. He wrote that he was there with a number of people including his sister and stormed the field, “giddy not so much with alcoholic spirits as with the euphoric wine of the last 42 seconds.” He wrote that he asked a person with credentials if he worked for The Crimson. Told yes, Clark said, “Harvard beat Yale, 29-29. There’s your headline. Use it.” He wrote the contingent went back to Dunster House and watched the TV quiz show “College Bowl.”
In an editor’s note, Clark’s sister Mary said she was at the game and didn’t recall sitting with Clark nor watching TV. She could neither confirm nor deny Clark’s on-field story. After speaking with another person who remembered the “air was full of cries of ‘Harvard Beat Yale,’ ” she said her brother may have remembered a collective creation as his own.
Clark received a M.Phil. from Yale in comparative literature, moved to Greenwich in 1982, wrote a history of the town and served on the Representative Town Meeting. It would have been grand if a Harvard/Yale man could prove conclusively he was the source of the greatest sports headline ever. Alas, Clark died in the spring of 2017.
Or hey, maybe it’s somebody else altogether who was too inebriated to remember.
“A lot of things can become hazy over the years,” said Schwarz, who gained acclaim for his work at The New York Times that exposed the dangers of head injuries in football. “Tim Carlson said the headline to (Kutiz) but gave credit to somebody else. To me that’s the most believable.”
“I cannot say who was right and who was not,” Carlson said. “I only know I wasn’t approached by more than one person.”
As Schwarz wrote in 2000, rather than finding a fact, he had confirmed the mystery of the great headline. Tommy Lee Jones played offensive guard for Harvard that magical day 50 years ago. Maybe he can track down the truth. After all, he starred in “The Fugitive” and “U.S. Marshals.”