哈佛击败耶鲁29-29

HARVARD BEATS YALE 29-29

Hypathway's Notes: Have you had a chance to watch this year's boring World Cup final? If you do have tasted the Spanish style in winning a single goal at the last moment in their trademark of numerous 1-0 wins, then you would more appreciate the excitement of America's football. "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29" is a documentary movie recording what was called the most famous football in the history of Ivy League between the two traditional rivalries. The game took place in Boston at Harvard Stadium in 1968, at the peak when this country was involved in a heating debate on Vietnam War and experiencing the social turmoil.Unlike the current situation in which Yale lost the past three-consecutive games against Harvard although Yale is still leading Harvard 65 to 53 in total games, Yale was a better team then and was favored to win easily. As a result, Yale led Harvard 22-0 in the beginning and 29-13 in the final minute. But Harvard overcame the unbelievable deficiency by scoring 16 points in the final 42 seconds to tie the game at 29-29, it was a mission impossible if you were aware of the basic rule of America's football. That is why Harvard’s newspaper Crimson run a headline in the special issue as "Harvard beats Yale 29-29" the next day after the game, claiming that even a tie result is a win for their team. The film tells the story by interviewing about 40 players from both sides, including Oscar winning-actor Tommy Lee Jones who was Harvard's offensive guard and former Vice President Al Gore's famous roommate. The below included one article from NY Times' film review; another one was written by an alumni of Yale class 1968.

 

FrankO’Brien/Kino International, Harvard’s Pete Varney (80) scoring the two-point conversion to tie Yale 29-29 on Nov. 23, 1968.

Back in 1968, When a Tie Was No Tie

 

By MANOHLA DARGIS, New York Times, November 19, 2008

 

For most of the world, I suspect, the year 1968 signifies upheaval, revolution, power to the people, Vietnam and My Lai, Paris in flames, Martin and Bobby, Nixon versus Humphrey. Another great rivalry played out that year in the form of a college football game.And while it seems absurd to include such a picayune event in the annals, the filmmaker Kevin Rafferty makes the case for remembrance and for the art of the story in his preposterously entertaining documentary “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29,” preposterous at least for those of us who routinely shun that pagan sacrament.

 

True gridiron believers doubtless know every unlikely, heart-skipping minute of this showdown. (The schools, like some others, honor their football rivalry with vainglorious capitalization, calling each matchup The Game.) On Nov. 23, 1968, the undefeated Yale team and its two glittering stars — the quarterback Brian Dowling and the running back Calvin Hill — went helmet to helmet against its longtime rival, Harvard, also undefeated. Mr. Dowling, a legendary figure whom grown men still call god (and the inspiration for Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury character B. D.), had not lost a game he started since the sixth grade, a record that well into the fourth quarter, with Yale leading by 16 points, seemed safe.

 

Everything changed in the final 42 seconds as all the forces of the universe, or so it seemed, shifted and one player after another either rose to the occasion or stumbled with agonizing frailty. Gods became men as the ball was lost and found and one improbable pass after another was completed. In front of the increasingly raucous packed stadium, each play became an epic battle in miniature with every second stretching into an eternity. As in film, time in football doesn’t tick, it races and oozes, a fact that Mr. Rafferty, working as his own editor and using the simplest visual material — talking-head interviews and game footage — exploits for a narrative that pulses with the artful,exciting beats of a thriller.

 

What’s most surprising about this consistently surprising movie is how forcefully those beats resonate, even though you know how the story ends from the start. (Take another look at the coyly, cleverly enigmatic title, borrowed from the famous headline in The Harvard Crimson.) One reason for the excitement is the game, of course, which remains a nail-biter despite the visual quality of the footage, which is so unadorned and so humble — and almost entirely in long shot — it looks like a dispatch from a foreign land. And in some ways it was:Football fans still wore raccoon coats to games and the women in the stands cheering for Yale could not attend the college. The same month,Yale announced it was (finally) opening that door.

 

This history helps explain why there are no women here, at least in close-up. “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29” is very much about men,triumphant, regretful, defiant, sentimental, touchingly vulnerable men who are made all the more poignant with each image of them as young players. For some, the game was and remains the greatest moment of their lives — even better than sex, one volunteers, prompting Mr.Rafferty to ask off-camera if the man had then been a virgin (no). Mr.Rafferty, himself a Harvard man, films his subjects (Tommy Lee Jones, a Harvard lineman, included) with a lack of fuss in plain kitchens and cluttered offices. He lets them roam around their memories and, for a time, gives them back sweet youth.

 

HARVARD BEATS YALE 29-29

 

Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.

 

Produced,directed and edited by Kevin Rafferty; director of photography, Mr.Rafferty; released by Kino International. At the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, West Village. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. This film is not rated.

 

Harvard beats Yale 29-29

 

The most heartbreaking football game in Yale history lives again, in an indie film.

 

by Charles McGrath '68, Yale Alumni Magazine, November/December 2008

 

Charles McGrath '68, former editor of the New York Times Book Review and the New Yorker, contributes frequently to the New York Times Magazine, Golf Digest, and other publications.

 

The1968 Yale-Harvard game—the famous 29-29 tie—is one of those sporting events, like Bobby Thomson's home run or Don Larsen's perfect game,whose attendance has grown exponentially over the years. Many more people claim to have seen it than were actually there at the time. I used to fervently profess to have been in the stands that day until my wife pointed out that, as a member of the Class of '68, I had graduated the previous June and she knew for a fact that shortly afterwards I moved to England. The closest I got to Harvard Stadium was a little baggie full of turf that someone had dug up after the game and mailed to me. An English friend eagerly picked it up from my desk one day,assuming it was something we could smoke.

 

Brian Dowling was later immortalized by Garry Trudeau as B.D.

 

And yet, after all these years, I recall that game much more clearly than any that I really did attend—those agonizing last few minutes, Dowling scrambling, the onside kick, the botched coverage in the end zone. My memories are a composite, I guess, of all the afternoons I did spend watching Yale football and of all I've heard and read about the 1968 game. Yale, then nationally ranked and riding a 16-game winning streak,was hugely favored in the annual tilt that year. The team was led by quarterback Brian Dowling '69, who hadn't lost a game since the sixth grade (and was later immortalized by Garry Trudeau '70, '73MFA, as the character B.D. in his Doonesbury strip), and by Calvin Hill '69, who went on not just to sire Grant but to play for 12 years in the NFL. In the second half, Yale got a little sloppy, but with less than a minute left they still led 29-13. Then it was as if time slowed down, and in just 42 seconds Harvard somehow managed to score an improbable 16points. The next day the headline in the Crimson said: "Harvard Beats Yale 29-29."

 

That's also the title of a documentary film by Kevin Rafferty that was an unlikely hitat the recent Toronto Film Festival, not the kind of event where people tend to get carried away by old-time Ivy League football. Rafferty(Harvard, Class of '70) is an unreconstructed hipster and rebel, most famous for The Atomic Cafe, an anti-nuclear documentary that has become a cult classic, and works out of what must be the dingiest basement in all of Greenwich Village. If only the lighting were a little better, it could be the setting for the next installment of Saw. But he has, it turns out, a distinguished football heritage—both his father and grandfather played for Yale—and though he's hardly a rah-rah type, he saw the '68 game and it made an impression on him. "My father watched from the other side," he told me recently, "and afterwards I said to him, 'Dad, how did you like the game?' This was a guy who had been at Guam and Iwo Jima. He looked me in the eye and said, 'Worst day of my life.'"

 

Oscar-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones was an all-Ivy tackle.

 

A year ago, Rafferty bought a used car for $4,000 and put 16,000 miles on it, driving around the country and interviewing people who had played in that game. He did all the filming, editing, and sound work himself.The result is a no-frills but thoughtful documentary that combines talking heads with extensive footage from the telecast of the game on the Boston station WHDH. The film is part straightforward football reminiscence and part essay about the passage of time. The game footage has faded a little—it has the sepia glow of a bygone golden age—and the broadcast, by the veteran sportscaster Don Gillis, is so professional it makes the Ivy League broadcasts of today look and sound like something on your local cable channel. Watching it,you can't help thinking that this may be the last moment when people actually took Ivy League football seriously.

 

The players, too, have inevitably aged, though as a group they don't look so bad. Vic Gatto, the Harvard running back, must be taking the secret sheep-gland extract. He could pass for 40. Tommy Lee Jones, on the other hand, looks tired and grizzled and speaks so slowly and with so little affect that you wonder whether he didn't practice without a helmet sometimes. (He says that he and his roommate Al Gore had "too much fun," and gives as an example listening to Al play "Dixie"over and over on the keypad of a touch-tone phone.) If you didn't know already, you would never guess that this guy was an Oscar-winning actor as well as an all-Ivy tackle. You also might not guess that the roster of players interviewed includes distinguished educators, a well-known pediatric neurosurgeon, and a couple of guys who have made vast fortunes. Identifications, beyond their names and what position they played, wouldn't have hurt.

 

Does anyone seriously care anymore who wins the Yale-Harvard game?

 

They all remember (or, in one case, misremember) the game even more vividly than I do. A few of the Yalies, so heavily favored to win, still haven't got over it. Several of the players also talk about what it was like to be a young person back in 1968, when there was so much going on besides football: the first stirrings of the feminist movement and sexual revolution, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the war in Vietnam, which hung threateningly over all of us, dividing faculty and students, friends and classmates and even teammates. Pat Conway, who played defense for Harvard, was a newly returned Vietnam vet on a squad where many of the players were outspoken opponents of the war. Football brought them together, he says, and Del Marting '69, the great Yale end,recalls that it did the same thing for the Yale community as a whole."The team's success had a role in keeping the campus focused on something else," he says. "Everyone went out to the Bowl on Saturday."At a time when the Bowl is more than half empty on most Saturdays, that too seems a glimmer from an era that, for all its shadows, was also simpler.

 

Mike Bouscaren '69, theYale linebacker who drew a costly, last-minute penalty trying to knockthe Harvard quarterback out of the game, still seems tortured by thatafternoon. "I'm glad we lost," he says in the film, not entirelyconvincingly, "because if we had won I would have had more difficultybecoming a regular person." But in fact by tying the way they did, theYale players became more famous than they ever would have as victors.Does anyone seriously care anymore who wins the Yale-Harvard game? Butthat one afternoon 40 years ago, so singular, dramatic, andunrepeatable, lingers in our memories, even the made-up ones.

Posted 星期六, 07/24/2010 - 22:12 by Fishville at www.tongjiyiren.com.