Purple majesty reigns in Berkshires
WILLIAMSTOWN -- The band gets a police escort to the stadium. The Mucho Macho Moocow Military Marching Band is 11 members strong (attendance varies) and if they dawdle, they might cause a massive traffic jam on Spring Street, which is what passes for Fifth Avenue in a place that calls itself ``The Village Beautiful." It's the main thoroughfare to Weston Field, where Williams met Middlebury for the 79th time yesterday afternoon.
Ephs football is an old-school (as in 1793) throwback, the Saturday game as it was played more than a century ago. The varsity operates on the same quadrangle of turf that it did in 1884. A third of the squad plays two sports. Admission is free; freshmen, old boys, townsfolk, and stray dogs are invited to wander in for a glimpse. The schedule is what it has been for decades: eight games, with no playoffs.
``Amherst is our Super Bowl," says Williams tricaptain Jon Dolan , whose purple-clad teammates are undefeated (4-0) after yesterday's 40-9 victory.
In the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC, in brief), football is the only sport that is not allowed a postseason. That's just as well, muses former coach Dick Farley, who led six unbeaten teams in his 17 years at the helm and was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame this year. ``I'd tell the players, `You're better off finishing 8-0 or 7-1 and thinking you're good than finding out you're not,' " he says.
A game after the annual Armageddon with the Lord Jeffs would be anticlimactic. (It's the only rivalry whose teams are nicknamed after 18th-century military men.) It also would destroy the rhythm of the season, which always ends on the second Saturday of November, once the foliage has fallen.
Williams football always has been about embracing the season. There is no lovelier place on the planet in October than this undulant corner of the commonwealth, tucked in where Vermont and New York bump elbows with Massachusetts.
Yesterday afternoon, the sky was high and blue, the surrounding hills were turning crimson and orange and yellow, and everybody in town, it seemed, had dropped in to check on the Ephs. At the open end of the field, the Purple People Feeders were dispensing lunch and drinks to anybody connected with the team.
Fifty of them, friends and family wearing shirts with Dolan's name and number on the back, had come in a bus from Lowell. ``Everybody was asking, `When can we see Jon play?' " says his dad, Jack. ``We thought we'd bring everyone at once." By game's end, they knew everybody on the premises.
There is an unavoidable intimacy in a place where the town and the campus are one. ``You walk down the street on Tuesday," says center Chris Kenney , who comes from Walpole via Roxbury Latin, ``and someone says, `Hey, how's Middlebury looking this year?' "
The Sideline Quarterback Club, some of whose members may have hobnobbed with Ephraim Williams himself, wouldn't miss their Wednesday luncheon at The Log . And the alums circle the Amherst game on their calendars as a holy day of obligation. ``Our alumni are irrationally attached," says athletic director Harry Sheehy , who coached basketball here for 17 years. ``And I totally understand it."
Nobody ever really leaves the Purple Valley, and once you get here, you tend to stick around. Head coach Mike Whalen told Farley he'd probably be here for two years when he arrived as an assistant. That was 11 years ago. ``I found that this was what I was looking for," Whalen says. ``I just didn't know it."
Nor do most players until they arrive here. What they find are rigorous academics and athletics (Williams has been ranked No. 1 in both in Division 3 for three straight years), a campus they can get their arms around, and a rich football legacy.
``We encourage kids to at least look at the way we do it," says Whalen.
Dolan, who could have wrestled for an Ivy League school (and is captain here), spent a prep year at Exeter after high school to increase his chances of getting in here. ``There's definitely something extremely appealing about this place," he says.
The history and the rituals are a huge part of the attraction. If the Ephs beat Wesleyan in next month's homecoming game, the squad will make The Walk up Spring Street to St. Pierre's barber shop for celebratory sodas and creative haircuts for the freshmen. ``It's pretty much the same thing again and again every year," says Kenney.
When the clock ran out yesterday with handshakes all around, the visitors from Vermont climbed onto their bus for the ride back up Route 7. The Ephs gathered around Whalen and sang ``Yard By Yard." And the Purple People Feeders and their fellow communicants lingered until the sun dropped into New York.
``This is," Whalen says, ``a hard place to leave."
John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com 