Unique tie

It's more than just a rivalry

Percy Haughton never strangled that bulldog in the locker room to get his men fired up to beat the Yalies in 1908. What the Harvard coach did was drag a blue-blanketed papier-mache canine behind his car as he drove up to the Connecticut inn where the team was staying the day before the game. After 124 meetings of these two red- and blue-blooded rivals, there's enough lore that there's no need for fabrication.

The entire Yale team pushing Bum McClung across the goal in 1889. Harvard unveiling the Flying Wedge in 1892. The 1894 slaughter in Springfield that produced a casualty list in the Boston Post. George Owen's daredevil run in the Bowl in 1922, mimicked by George Jessel on Broadway that same night. Yale manager Charlie Yeager catching a conversion pass in 1952. Frank Champi directing Harvard's 29-29 miracle "win" in 1968. MIT's prank balloon exploding on the Stadium field in 1982. Joe Walland coming woozily out of an infirmary to pass the Crimson dizzy at the Bowl in 1999. Harvard's Clifton Dawson scoring at sundown in triple overtime in 2005. All part of the lore - and the lure - of The Game, which will be contested at the Stadium tomorrow for the 125th time.

It hasn't always been called that. Charley Loftus, Yale's legendary sports publicist, came up with the term and Harvard counterpart Baaron Pittenger printed it on the cover of the 1960 program. And The Game isn't universally regarded as the definite article elsewhere, certainly not where Ohio State-Michigan, Army-Navy, Cal-Stanford, Alabama-Auburn, or Texas-Oklahoma is concerned. "THE Game?" Tank McNamara co-creator Jeff Millar snorted in a comic strip penned for the 1976 program. "It ain't even A game."

At Princeton, whose rivalry with Yale predates Harvard's by two years, The Game takes place a week earlier. "When I was visiting Princeton, they made a point of telling me that Princeton-Yale is the real rivalry," said Yale fullback Shebby Swett. "That Harvard-Yale was sort of a sideshow."

One-game season

What makes the Harvard-Yale rivalry unique is its pedigree. The colleges are the country's oldest and third oldest (William & Mary comes between). The Stadium, which was built in 1903, and the Bowl, which dates from 1914, both are national landmarks.

Bart Giamatti, the former Yale president, called the game the last great 19th-century pageant in the country. Norman Rockwell painted it for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. A half-dozen presidents (both Roosevelts, both Bushes, John Kennedy, and William Howard Taft) watched it as undergrads or old boys. George Frazier, the former columnist for the Herald and Globe, wrote about "the willful and pleasurably persistent nostalgia it evokes."

Since the Ivy League doesn't allow postseason play for football teams, there is a finality to The Game that makes victory even more blissful and defeat more woeful. "It makes for a warm winter if you do win," said Joe Restic, who coached Harvard for 23 years, the longest tenure in the school's history. "And a cold one if you don't."

Dismal seasons are salvaged with a triumph; perfect ones are tarnished by a loss. Last year, after his squad had drubbed the unbeaten Bulldogs by a 37-6 count at the Bowl, Crimson coach Tim Murphy was in New York with his family during the holiday season when a Yale fan saw him in the hotel lobby and groaned, "Aww, no. Not you."

Said Murphy, "He was an alum and the father of one of the players. I said, 'You sound like you've just had a 1-9 season.' It happened to be our day and our game, but Yale had a great year. But they couldn't be convinced."

Even tying The Game leaves a sour taste. Yale considered its 29-29 deadlock in 1968 a loss. Harvard's 1897 varsity refused its letters after being stopped at the 6-yard line in a scoreless match. But losing can leave eternal scars. "If there was a hole I could have crawled into, I would have welcomed it," coach John Yovicsin said after the Bulldogs had gnawed his first Harvard team to bits, 54-0, in 1957. Nearly a decade after Yale had lost consecutive games to Harvard in the final minute in the '70s, the players still were haunted by the memories.

"We were at Rudy's Bar last night until 2:30 talking about the 1974 game," former captain John Smoot related in 1983 when his teammates got together for a touch football tournament with Harvard in New Haven on the eve of their 100th meeting. "We went through every play of that last drive - 95 yards. Then we relived the 1975 game and every play of that drive."

Both years Yale mastered Princeton, part of an amazing streak that ran from 1967 through 1980. But it was the Harvard game that endured. "Gentlemen, you are now going out to play football against Harvard," coach T.A.D. Jones told his squad before the 1923 game. "Never again in your whole life will you do anything so important."

Mutual admiration

The Game does not carry nearly as much gravitas these days, yet what remains unaltered is the gentlemanly regard between the schools, the coaches, the players, and the fans that has vanished from most collegiate rivalries. "There's a tremendous mutual respect between Yale and Harvard," said Jack Siedlecki, who has coached the Bulldogs since 1997.

Harvard's Vic Gatto and Yale's Brian Dowling, the captains who played in the famous 1968 deadlock, still have dinner together several times a year, and Gatto has stayed friends with Calvin Hill, the Bulldogs' star running back. "Dartmouth was the team we loved to hate back then," recalled Gatto. "The Yale guys seemed so much like us."

After Yale had rallied to beat Harvard in the Bowl in one of the most memorable games of the series the previous year, Gatto was invited to New Haven to give a speech at the team's formal victory dinner. "Where else would you have the rival captain come down and speak at your banquet and know that it isn't going to be obnoxious?" Gatto said.

The Bulldogs certainly wouldn't have invited the Princeton captain up for cocktails and chitchat. Their shared scorn went back beyond F. Scott Fitzgerald's day. "Boy, you don't know what it'll mean for some of us old fellows to see Yale go down," a graduate assistant coach tells the young fullback in "Stover at Yale" on the eve of an expected mauling by the Tigers.

When Carm Cozza took the Yale coaching job in 1965, the Old Blues were more upset that the Bulldogs had been losing to Princeton than to Harvard. "I guess you could say that Harvard, we have this mutual respect for each other," said Yale captain Bobby Abare. "Princeton, we just flat out don't like each other."

Not that the Harvard-Yale rivalry has been all hearts and flowers. Their first meeting in 1875 was quite collegial. "Saturday morning, the Yale men kindly drove the team about New Haven, showing them the objects of interest," the Crimson reported. And after Harvard prevailed, 4-0, in its last victory for 15 years, the two squads supped and sang together before the visitors took the midnight train back to Boston.

Subsequent meetings were downright savage. "The disgraceful application of the teeth in the game is to be severely denounced," the Harvard Advocate declared after the 1881 game. After Yale's bone-crushing 1894 victory, which sent multiple players to the hospital, the schools didn't play each other for two years. For the past century, though, the competition has been vigorous but sportsmanlike. "Our kids really respect their players as tough, hard-nosed, classy kids," said Murphy.

After the game, the participants seek out each other for handshakes and congratulations and frequently turn up at each other's tailgates as alums. "When I took an all-star team to Japan for the Epson Bowl, the Harvard and Yale kids hung out together," said Cozza, who recommended Gatto for his first college coaching job at Bates.

Abare came up to Cambridge during the summer to pose with Harvard's Matt Curtis for the traditional program cover photo of the captains, hang out together, and toss out the first pitches at Fenway. "I threw one over the catcher's head," said Abare. "He told me Kevin Garnett couldn't have caught it. Curtis short-hopped his, I think. We both did not do very well."

Easier on the road

The Game forges a bond not only between the players but also the coaches. Murphy and Siedlecki, who roomed together as Lafayette assistants, are good friends. So are Cozza and Restic. "The other coach feels the same way you do about the things that are important to the game and the integrity of the game," said Restic. "If you don't have those feelings, everything changes."

The coaches will tell you how crazy everything gets during the week before The Game - the visitors, the media requests, the phone calls, the letters, the advice from old grads mailing in trick plays that worked in 1931. "People want to get involved and you understand that," said Restic. "The one thing I always tried to do is get them to feel that they're a part of it."

The festival atmosphere is so pervasive, so inescapable, that the coaches prefer to play on the road. "Carm said this to me when I first came and it's proven to be true - the game is honestly tougher to play at home," said Siedlecki, whose varsity has lost five of the last six to Harvard in the Bowl but won three of five in the Stadium. "There are way more distractions on campus, particularly the couple of nights before."

Not since 1983, when the schools celebrated their 100th meeting in New Haven, has there been such a concelebration as there'll be tomorrow. The Stadium has been sold out for weeks and there'll be lunches and team reunion dinners. At noon Curtis and Abare will walk to midfield and shake hands, just as William Whiting and William Arnold did in 1875, and the last 19th-century pageant will be renewed. And if the gentlemen from New Haven want to stick around for dinner, Harvard will be happy to oblige at Locke-Ober - and send the bill to Princeton.

John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com.