& a blog

In the pouring rain, one can barely see the field anymore. But it’s there, and the crowd is fixated on it as the fourth quarter comes to a close, and Harvard University’s football team lines up on the one-yard line. If you can make out the neon-electric scoreboard, you will see the reality of the situation illuminated: BROWN 24 HARVARD 22 1:03 QUARTER 4. Seconds earlier, Harvard’s Quarterback Liam O’Hagan managed to find Matt Luft at the back of the endzone. It marked the penultimate play in a three minute march down the field at Brown Stadium, a drive that threatens overtime and perhaps a Harvard defeat averted.

I am disoriented by my presence at the Brown-Harvard football game. I am looking around at the “stadium” at the people, at the flags on the other side of the field, at scoreboard, and recognizing ‘I am not familiar with this place.’

The bathroom is are even more disorienting. No door. Four walls of open troughs where I suppose the men of Brunonia and their enemies have micturated side-by-side since the place opened. A smell of new paint tries to cover up the smell of decades of use. And a leaky sink with rust deposits running down the porcelain. And a single stall (if you ever, god forbid, had to use it) with a paper towel dispenser that has been exhausted. They all feel like the would-be quirks of a familiar destination, but for me they are empty, strange, disorienting.

It’s not like I’ve never been here. I came freshman year, sat out in the sun for a quarter with my Dad and watched Brown score at will on Cornell.

I also decided to trek out to the Stonybrook last weekend, because the weather was fair and it felt like a collegiate thing to do. Nobody scored for the half hour I sat on the aluminum bleachers, but I took the long way going back to campus and felt like I’d gotten to walk with Providence and see how her east side was doing.

Why I go to the football games, I don’t really know. My friends don’t come,; in fact, they look at me as though I were attending an NRA meeting or going to Church. But I go anyway. And I feel alienated by a place not yet familiar, and feel alienated from the friends who can’t understand why I’m going.

***

Harvard is lining up on the one yard line even though they’d scored from the three. Moments after firing the ball to Luft, Harvard’s O’Hagan took a hit from adrenadline-addled Brown blitzers, and was rewarded with a ‘Roughing the Quarterback’ penalty. Half the distance to the goal-line. The one yard line.

In football, a team is afforded two choices after scoring a touchdown. They may elect to kick a field goal, from the ten yard line, and procure an extra point. Or they may attempt a two point conversion, wherein the offense must will the ball across the plane of the goal-line to secure two extra points.
Another look at the scoreboard reveals the necessity of the conversion attempt. Harvard must go for the two. They can tie up. The game can into overtime. This doesn’t have to be the end.
But it might be.
***

When I get out of the bathroom, I wander for a few minutes under the shell of the stadium. The signs, long meaningless, point out the student section and general admission. There’s a carnival trailer underneath a section with a sign marked CONCESSIONS.
With heavy rain falling, the space under the distressed concrete feels like a grotto. I shuffle around, looking for something to engage with before a roar from the crowd above me jerks my head back to the game. Through a narrow walkway in the concrete shielding around and above me, I can see the field perfectly as the Crimson line up to take another whack at the Brown defense.

***

In 107 meetings, Harvard has defeated Brown 77 times. The Bears have won 28 times. The teams have tied twice.
When the Brown Stadium opened in 1925, Harvard defeated the home team by a field goal. 30,000 spectators were in attendance.
Since 1999, Brown has not recorded a win against the men from Cambridge. Last year, the Harvard team went 7-0 in the Ivy League to secure the Ivy Football Championship. Brown lost 31-21 at Harvard in the Crimson’s first ever night game.

But this game, at halftime, Brown is ahead 14-13. The rain has slackened if not stopped, and the Brown Band is preparing to take the field from their Harvard counterparts. As tradition states, the away team was given the first opportunity to entertain their fans during halftime. The home team’s band gets to stoke up its patrons’ moments before the game resumes.
Earlier in the game, the Brown Band handed out pins to commemorate the game:
It’s not the size of drum, it’s how you bang it.
With the Harvard band playing their fight song and marching in step back to the visitor’s sidelines, the Brown Band careens across the field, though some of its members are stopping to roll in the mud in the endzone.
When the antics finally subside, the band forms a misshapen oval and begins to play the 1973 Kool & The Gang classic “Jungle Boogie.” Earlier in the game, Harvard had played John Williams’ “Imperial Death March” from Star Wars as the Crimson threatened to score.
The contrast could not be more stark. The Harvard band, like the college, seems a disciplined corps of order-followers. They know their place: they’re Harvard. But the Brown band, rolling in the mud, playing disco, feels gimmicky. Like kids who act out in class, wanting attention, wanting someone to say we see you, we understand.
I can’t understand them.

In trying to describe the Brown Band, I was challenged to not use terms I felt ‘adequately’ identified the organization, but were really no more than a string of insults. In almost encounter I’ve had with the Brown Band, I’ve found them to be silly, annoying, stupid, inside-joke-obsessed, and generally, out of touch with reality. Like the time they decided to march through Keeney playing the Brown fight song on Parents Weekend freshmen year. That was fucking idiotic.
The button thing, the tradition they’ve made of pressing new, unique buttons (with strange, I daresay quirky, statements) for football games is hard to explain. Nowhere in the Encyclopedia Brunonia, or in conversations with Brown Band members could the origins or purpose of this tradition be related.
But it keeps going. Despite no clear reason to persist, the buttons continue to be made. And every game, like the ubiquity of the buttons they produce, there is the band. A bad penny that just keep showing up. A sign that’s lost it’s meaning, and acts out to be reassigned an identity. Maybe if they’re just crazy enough, they’ll be something.
And maybe that’s why it’s wonderful. At the very least, I appreciated seeing Harvard fans practically barf when the mud encrusted Brown Band decided to play disco.

***

Brown-Harvard football is the Ivy League brought back to its origins. The Ivy League was (and still is) the name for an athletic conference rather than a the informal collection of culturally respected northeastern American colleges. In 1945, the presidents of eight colleges, (Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Penn, Yale) inaugurated a formal football league that would regulate player eligibility, scholarships, and postseason play. The league was never called the “Ivy League” except in newspaper articles, and in sports pundits’ re-hashings of the games. According to Encyclopedia Brunonia, until 1956, the schools represented by this league were only required to play each other once every five years.
Today, however, one can make out the words “IVY LEAGUE” spray-painted into the grass at the Brown Stadium. Through the rain, one can make out the banners of seven colleges flapping in the wind over the stadium’s north stands. And it’s in Brown University viewbooks, and repeated in tours of the college for prospective students. It’s become a brand-name, an academic standard that overshadows its athletic origins.

There’s a band called “This is Ivy League” in Brooklyn, NY with a self-described “tropical/psychadelic/pop” sound. While I listen to their Vampire Weekend meets Paul Simon sound I wonder whether their lyrics are right and he Brown-Harvard football game is something archaic; a pageant whose meaning has been lost, a ritual whose worshippers no longer care. If “This is Ivy League” means anything (besides whether acoustic pop has a life after Jack Johnson) it must be that the Ivy League has gone ahead and escaped it’s own contextual meaning. It’s become an empty signifer. It’s available for recontextual and ironic use. It’s got nothing to do with football rivalries over a century old. It’s got nothing to do with anything. Right?

***

Harvard’s on the one yard line. Despite the rain, the situation is uncomfortably hot. Don’t let them cross the line. “Hold that line!” shouts the Brown Cheerleaders in the midst of the deluge,. “Hold them!”
Last week, Brown junior James Develin stopped the Stonybrook quarterback on the one yard line to deny him a touchdown. But that was last week. In the sun. Against a non-conference team. What do you do when 108 years of history are on the line?

***

It happens so fast, I don’t think I see it.
Harvard snaps the ball., surges forward. Just a mass of players. No way to see in the rain. A man in the front row throws up his hands and drops his umbrella. I think he’s signaling the touchdown. But he’s not.
The referees are waving their arms side to side.
No score.

Through the rain I see the neon-electric scoreboard unchanged:

BROWN 24 HARVARD 22 1:03 QUARTER 4.
And there’s a feeling inside so strange and so different, that I don’t realize I’m feeling it until I feel the rain soaking through my sweater a few moments later. As I stand there in the rain and begin cheering. Cheering for Brown. Cheering for victory. Cheering for meaning.