Kennedy touch evident at Harvard

Ted Kennedy raised the ball in triumph after hauling in a touchdown pass in The Game of 1955, a 21-7 Harvard loss. (FILE/JOHN B. LOENGARD)

John Culver was a running back at Harvard for three years in the early '50s. He played against Army, Dartmouth, Princeton, and Yale before full houses. But the most difficult and demanding afternoons were those spent playing touch football with the Kennedy brothers at Hyannis Port. "They really took those games seriously," recalled the former US Senator from Iowa. "They were as tough as playing Yale."

Jack, who had a bad back, would quarterback both teams. "He would call the plays - you go this way, you go that way," remembered Dick Clasby, the former Crimson captain who was one of Ted's classmates and close friends. "Jack loved to do that."

Ted was the big guy with the good hands, the man you wanted on your side. And Bobby was an absolute terrier, flinging himself around the lawn - and into the rose bushes - with abandon. "The games were tough if Bobby was playing," said Clasby. "For Bobby, it was the Super Bowl. His tenacity - he played very hard."

All four Kennedy brothers played football at Harvard, all of them at end and three on the varsity. Bobby and Ted both earned letters and appeared against archrival Yale, with Ted scoring in the 1955 loss. Today, when Harvard and Yale meet at the Stadium for the 125th time, is the 45th anniversary of Jack's assassination, when the game was postponed for the only time.

The Kennedys played in an era when the Harvard-Yale game was the athletic and social highlight of the autumn in Boston, when the Stadium routinely was sold out, when Locke-Ober's nude painting of Yvonne was draped in black crepe when the Crimson lost, and when winning a football letter was very nearly as important as earning a diploma.

Commitment to excel
Joe Sr., who'd won his letter in baseball, badly wanted his sons to get theirs. Though both Joe Jr. and Jack earned letters with the sailing team, which won the 1938 Eastern collegiate championship on Nantucket Sound, they were "minor" H's. Football had been the marquee sport for more than a half-century at Harvard, which had claimed seven national titles and still was playing powers like Texas, Michigan, Army, and Virginia. And in the '30s, playing against Yale, even for one snap of the ball, was the only way to a letter.

Joe Jr., who died during World War II when the plane he was piloting exploded over England, was a benchwarmer on Harvard's first winning team in four years in 1937. Frequent injuries - a broken arm, a damaged knee, and a concussion - hadn't helped. Had the Yale game been more lopsided than 13-6, Joe likely would have seen action for at least a few plays. But Yale, behind Heisman Trophy winner Clint Frank, was undefeated and the Crimson didn't score the decisive touchdown in the snow and freezing muck until six minutes remained.

So coach Dick Harlow used just eight substitutes, only one of them an end. "The first debt is to Harvard football," he said later. "We needed our strongest defensive combination up to the closing whistle." That didn't mollify Joe Sr., who came down from the stands and confronted and berated Harlow after the game.

While Jack was a talented athlete - he won freshman numerals in swimming and golf - his spindly 150-pound frame wasn't suited for football. "You could certainly count his ribs," classmate Jimmy Rousmaniere testified. His older brother, after watching him get flattened in practice, advised Jack to give up the sport. "You just don't weigh enough," Joe told him, "and you're going to get hurt."

That was enough to keep Jack going. "Guts is the word," said his roommate, Torby Macdonald, who captained the 1939 varsity. "He had plenty of guts." Though Jack did play on the junior varsity and earned a minor H for getting into the Yale game, his lack of size and his bad back ended his gridiron adventure.

Though Bobby was no bigger, his relentless ferocity earned him the freshman captaincy ("You'd have had to kill him to make him quit," said coach Henry Lamar) and eventually got him a starting spot in 1947 at a time when the squad was loaded with fellow veterans who were at Harvard on the GI Bill. "Stop him before he gets killed," fullback Vinnie Moravec told the coach after Kennedy, who was 75 pounds lighter, kept slamming into him during practice.

But Harlow loved Bobby's tenacity. "He was the toughest kid, pound for pound," the coach said, "and what he didn't do with his body he did with his heart. That's why he played regularly." Bobby's senior year was ruined, though, when he broke a leg in practice shortly after the opener and unwittingly kept playing on it for several days. Harlow, though, got him into the Yale game on the final play before 73,000 at the Bowl for his second letter. "It was one of the high points of my life," said Bobby, who still had a cast on his leg.

Six years later, though, he came back for one last crack at Yale, playing alongside Ted (who got him a uniform) for Winthrop House in the intramural game against Davenport College. "Aren't you graduating one of these years?" the house master wondered.

Ted the talent
The most talented of the brothers clearly was Ted, who had the size and durability the others lacked. "He was a big guy for the time," said Clasby. "Ted wasn't terrifically fast, but he was quick and tough and gave no quarter." He also had superb hands. "We were playing a freshman game at Brown and I threw a pass to Ted and he made the greatest catch you could have imagined," recalled Clasby. "He was horizontal to the ground."

Academic issues and two years in the Army interrupted Ted's career, but he played as a backup in 1954 and was just two seconds short of the 60 minutes then required for a letter. The next season, on a snowy day at the Bowl, Ted caught a pass for Harvard's only touchdown, the sole bright spot on a losing day that ended a losing season.

His father and brothers, who'd been watching jubilantly in the stands, came to the locker room to congratulate him. "My brothers and I were euphoric, and Harvard was depressed," Ted recalled. It was undeniably a family triumph, though, the grand finale of a two-decade saga. But for the Kennedys, football didn't end with the Yale game. They kept playing in Hyannis Port, in Washington, in Virginia.

"Those were real games," remembered Culver, who scored a touchdown against Yale in Harvard's shutout victory 55 years ago and will be at midfield today for the coin toss. "One or the other of us was always rolling into the rose bushes trying to make an interception."

The Yale game had no thorns and lasted just 60 minutes. Not so the Kennedy game, which Clasby said often would continue until sundown. "If we were ahead, we had to play another hour," Culver said. "It was very tough to end a game."

Like the Winthrop House team, the Kennedy rosters were fluid. If you were on the premises, you were in the game. "They always let everyone play," said Clasby, who once carried Jackie Kennedy to the car after she'd hurt a leg.

Even the pros could, if needed.

"One time down in Virginia, Bobby and Teddy had a competition and they were each getting players for their teams," said Clasby. "So Bobby shows up with some people from the Colts. And Teddy showed up with guys from the Giants."