Movie Quote of the Day (‘Horse Feathers,’ With Groucho in a Unique College Football Moment)

Referee [sees Wagstaff lying in the middle of the field with a cigar]: “What are you doing with that cigar in your mouth?”

Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff [played by Groucho Marx)]: “Why? Do you know another way to smoke it?”—Horse Feathers (1932), written by Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, S.J. Perelman, Will B. Johnstone, and Arthur Skeekman (uncredited)

Wouldn’t you find the football game in Horse Feathers a lot more unexpected and entertaining than any of the bowl games you’ll watch on TV today?

Quote of the Day (Richard Price, on Fans, The Crimson Tide, and Contact Sports)

“In our dissociated culture—despite whatever grace, glory and beauty they evoke in the best teams and players—contact sports serve two functions: They allay boredom, divert people from thinking about the dreariness of their lives; and they help people channel their rage. You can go to a revival in Selma on Friday or you can scream your lungs out in Bryant-Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa on Saturday. The bottom line at both is transference of a lot of anger into a socially acceptable outlet….As coach Karl Marx once said, football is the opiate of the people.” —Novelist-screenwriter Richard Price, “Bear Bryant’s Miracles,” originally published in Playboy, October 1979, reprinted in Football: Great Writing About the National Sport, edited by John Schulian (2014)

This post is dedicated to two especially enthusiastic Crimson Tide fans: my friend Bridget and her husband Jim—both of whom, I am sure, disagree vehemently with Mr. Price’s contention in this quote.

The image accompanying this post, of University of Alabama football fans wearing crimson and white with the name of the football team on their garments (at the annual spring practice scrimmage game called “A-Day”), was taken on Apr. 17, 2010, by Carol M. Highsmith.

This Day in Football History (Columbia Begins Stupefying, Epic Non-Winning Streak)

Oct. 22, 1983—Facing Bucknell in front of a mere 3,800 fans at Hofstra Stadium, Columbia University’s football team managed a 31-31 tie. 

The outcome, though not all they could have wished, left the Lions looking forward to their opponent the next weekend, Holy Cross, with a losing but still not disastrous 1-3-1 record. But that would change quickly.

The not-disastrous part, I mean.

Seven days on, Columbia was annihilated in Massachusetts by Holy Cross, 77-28, and the following weekend tied again, this time with Dartmouth, 17-17. Those two ties in the space of three weeks was the closest the squad would come to winning over 47 games. 

In fact, the penultimate game of the season, a crushing 31-6 loss to Cornell in Ithaca, began a then-record 44-game losing streak that left fans shaking their heads and the rest of the nation simply astonished that this could be happening.

That Lion you see in the logo accompanying this post? During those years, it was a toothless creature that scared few if any opponents in their right minds.

Let me put this another way that might help you better understand the frustration of the Columbia  players: Those who began playing in the 1984 season would graduate without winning a single game.

Like most of the student body in the late Seventies and early Eighties, in the time preceding what alumni still call "The Streak," I had followed the team’s (mis)fortunes at something of an emotional remove. During my four years, I didn’t attend games—a part-time job occupied my time on weekends instead—and had gotten used to hearing about its misfortunes. 

Most of my friends saw the team’s 6-31-1 record during that time as regrettable, but they had their minds on other matters: handling a demanding academic workload, participating in their own extracurricular activities, and/or simply surviving New York City when it was only slowly emerging from its mid-Seventies trough.

That nonchalant attitude couldn’t have been more different from my high school in Northern New Jersey. We had experienced our own season without a win my season year, but it was regarded as an aberration from a tradition of winning and even championships that began when Vince Lombardi started his coaching career there in 1939. Athletes were the gods of the school, with academics hardly so stringent as to hinder football participation.

Columbia had its own tradition of gridiron glory—the third school to play intercollegiate football, back in 1870; a legendary 1934 Rose Bowl victory over Stanford; a 1961 Ivy League championship. But in recent years, the stench of failure had grown stronger and harder to eradicate, with only two winning seasons since the latter title.

The team appeared to have turned a corner when I arrived on campus in 1978, jumping off to a 3-1-1 start under its young, charismatic head coach, Bill Campbell. Then, after it was blown out by Rutgers 69-0 at Giants Stadium, things were never the same. 

It did not win another game that year, and midway through 1979, after the losing continued and Campbell was briefly hospitalized for exhaustion, the coach announced he would be stepping down at the end of the season.

The following years would prove that the failures of the program were hardly Campbell’s fault. “Coaching a Columbia football team may be the most frustrating job in the Ivy League or possibly in all of college football,” noted New York Times reporter Gordon S. White Jr. in his discussion of Campbell’s resignation, citing a home field considerably distant from its Morningside Heights campus and difficulties recruiting athletes.

White might also have mentioned another turnoff to prospective athletes: Baker Field, a 32,000 wooden-seat stadium that had been around for a half century. 

At that structure’s final game in the 1982 season, fans tore out the seats (with some even having smuggled saws into the stands for that purpose) and carried off their booty onto the nearby subway station after—need I say it?—another loss for the home team.

It was a sign of the team’s continuing struggle to escape from oblivion, though, that even the opening of new, gleaming Lawrence A. Wien Stadium didn’t mark a turnaround in the program’s fortunes. In other words, "The Streak" continued unabated.

By this time, as an alum with weekends now blissfully free, I was attending home games when I could. It was just my luck that this took place as losing became more entrenched.

Fans attempted to cheer themselves with halftime entertainment provided by the team’s irreverent marching band and gallows humor of their own. In one contest, as the opposing team marched up the field on an offensive drive, several alumni around me shouted blitz suggestions to the coaches:

“Send the linebacker!” yelled one.

“Send the end!” screamed another.

“Send in the clowns!” my friend Alan offered.

“Don’t bother, they’re here!” countered another Sondheim aficionado.

The nadir of the losing struggle may have been reached after the opening game of the 1985 season, courtesy of head coach Jim Garrett. The Columbia administration may have hired this former WFL and Boston College coach to adjust the team’s attitude. It never reckoned that what needed to be reset was the coach’s volatility rather than any defeatism on the part of his players.

The team was leading 17-0 toward the end of the third quarter against Harvard when the Crimson scored 49 unanswered points in a mere 20 minutes. In an angry post-mortem delivered to a New York Times reporter, Garrett used the words “drug-addicted losers” and singled the team’s longtime punter out for special criticism, in remarks that spiraled into hysteria:

''Don't tell me it's a college atmosphere. This is an atmosphere that creates people for the future. I want to see him when he graduates and goes to work downtown on Wall Street and does three things that he did today. See how long he is gonna work for that company, how long Merrill Lynch or Smith Barney is gonna have him around.”

To be fair, even after his quick, ignominious exit at the end of that inglorious season, Garrett had his defenders. A 2018 post on “Roar Lions,” “the unofficial fan blog of Columbia University football,” featured comments from former players noting that he had been misquoted (the coach claimed he had said the team was like drug-addicted losers rather than they were), that they didn’t want him to go, that the real problem lay with a university administration that did little to support the program, that he was at heart honest and a better person than his successor, and that the team would have thrived if Garrett’s sons (including future Dallas Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett) hadn't left with their father.

All these claims may have been true. But whatever hypothetical success in strategy or motivation that Garrett might have achieved, with or without his talented progeny, doesn’t get around the fact that after a certain point, it doesn’t matter if athletes accept mistreatment as part of the program: abuse, whether physical or otherwise, is still abuse.

And, by telling the squad that the punter would never play for him again, then publicly trashing him in such a ridiculous and unwarranted fashion, Garrett had humiliated one individual and made the university’s sports program a subject of nationwide ridicule.

Too bad that the replacement of Garrett as head coach did not mark a swift upturn in the team’s fortunes. Yet I continued to attend home games loyally.

Until, that is, October 8, 1988. I listened to the weather reports carefully that day: windy, cold, maybe even rain, with gray skies not helping matters. And the Lions would be facing Princeton, which had a 2-1 record and Jim Garrett’s quarterback son Jason itching to avenge his father's termination.

What were the odds that this afternoon contest would turn out well? I decided to spare myself a strong chance of a cold on the slim possibility of a Lions win.

Wouldn’t you know that Columbia beat the Princeton Tigers that day, 16-13, in front of 5,400 flabbergasted but delighted spectators?

During the team’s streak, I had tried to make every home contest I could—but I chose to sit out The Big One. The story of my life, I guess.

As George Harrison had philosophically advised me and other Baby Boomers nearly two decades before, all things must pass. And so it turned out for Columbia University’s dubious NCAA losing-streak record, surpassed by Prairie View A&M, which lost 80 consecutive games from 1989 to 1998. 

Quote of the Day (Bear Bryant, on Getting Past Mistakes)

“When you make a mistake, there are only three things you should ever do about it: admit it, learn from it, and don't repeat it.” — Alabama football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant (1913-1983), quoted in Creed and Heidi Tyline King, I Ain't Never Been Nothing but a Winner: Coach Paul Bear Bryant's 323 Greatest Quotes About Success, On and Off the Football Field (2000)

This past week, guess who did repeat his mistake?

One hint: the man that Spy Magazine once aptly called a “short-fingered vulgarian.”

Photo of the Day: All Dressed Up, But Nothing To Cheer For

When I took this photo of the cheerleaders for Columbia University early in the Lions’ first home football game a month ago, there was still a good deal for them to cheer for. That’s normally the way it is when you begin a season, anyway, and even more so after you’re coming off a prior one in which the team did not win a single game.

But, I strongly suspect, it’s been increasingly hard to rouse the hometown crowd when what is happening on the field seems at such wild variance with what you’re trying to do. And so it has been this year. The scores, including that first loss at Kraft Field, have been familiarly dismal, even redundant: 49-7, 42-7, 38-6, 61-28, 31-7.

This Saturday, Columbia hosts Dartmouth for the Homecoming Game. Relief doesn’t appear to be in sight then, since Big Green has won three straight, including two in the Ivy League. The losing streak, holding over from last year, stands at 16 and counting—and, as can be seen in this post from the “Roar Lions” blog after the Penn debacle, the calls for the firing of Coach Pete Mangurian continue to mount.

This Day in Sports History (Rice Immortalizes Notre Dame ‘4 Horsemen’)

Oct. 18, 1924—In the fading afternoon twilight in the press box at New York’s Polo Grounds, New York Herald Tribune columnist Grantland Rice pondered how to convey the excitement of the University of Notre Dame’s 14-7 win over Army that day, in a way that would distinguish his piece from that of talented friends on rival papers. 

Suddenly, a chance conversation from the year before and an anecdote he’d heard that week about the moviegoing habits of the Fighting Irish inspired the courtly Southerner to compare the winner’s swift backfield to a whirlwind force and to the “Four Horsemen” of the Apocalypse, in perhaps the most famous lead in the history of American sports journalism.

Rice’s dramatic opening and the importance of the game itself (a major clash of collegiate football powers) led the sportswriter’s editors to splash the piece on the front page, above the fold, of the Sunday paper. The column proved a public-relations bonanza for Notre Dame, providing one of the legendary moments in an athletic history filled with them.

In his heavily distributed column “Sportlight,” Rice was not above alluding to the Greek and Roman literature he had studied at Vanderbilt University. This afternoon, however, he referred to a piece of literature better known to religious-minded Americans, including the winning team—the Book of Revelation:

"Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.”

There was some poetic license involved with this—not a surprise, really, since, liberally sprinkled among the 67 million words produced throughout his five-decade career, Rice tossed in his own verses for the sake of variety. Purists noted, for instance, that there was no way that the Army team could be “swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds,” because the field sprawled out below the precipice under Coogan’s Bluff. Moreover, for subsequent generations of English majors raised on the prose of Ernest Hemingway, much of this is sounded like purple prose.

But Rice had his share of friends and admirers, even among those who wrote in ways that differed dramatically from his. Stanley Woodward, who acted as mentor to a generation of famous sportswriters as sports editor at the Herald Tribune, observed that among Rice’s legacies to subsequent practitioners of the craft was “rhythm and euphony.” Roger Kahn, author of the masterful elegy for the Brooklyn Dodgers, The Boys of Summer, noted simply that the “Four Horsemen” passage was “the most remarkable lead ever written on a football game”—one that, like the cyclone that functioned as the article’s central metaphor, “swept away all before it.”

As Rice recalled the creative process that led to this in his autobiography nearly 30 years later, The Tumult and the Shouting (excerpted in a fine football anthology just published by the Library of America, Football: Great Writing About the National Sport), after being nearly run over by three of the players in the Notre Dame backfield as he was standing on the sideline, he told a friend, “They’re like a wild horse stampede.”

But when he remembered this, Rice was in his early 70s, ailing, and, likely, forgetful about a more immediate influence on his thinking. Back in October 1924, George Strickler, then coach Knute Rockne's student publicity aide and later sports editor of the Chicago Tribune, told Rice and other reporters during halftime who were marveling over the exploits of quarterback Harry Stuhldreher, left halfback Jim Crowley, right halfback Don Miller, and fullback Elmer Layden that they were “just like the Four Horsemen,” a reference to the movie the team had seen the Wednesday before they traveled east for the game: The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, starring an exotic new newcomer to Hollywood named Rudolph Valentino.

Reporting that day was as talented a group of sportswriters as may ever have watched a single game: Damon Runyon, Paul Gallico, Gene Fowler, Westbrook Pegler, Jack Kofoed, Davis Walsh, and Frank Wallace. Significantly, though, it is only Rice’s account that is still remembered.

The hyperbolic nature of his prose and the prominence given his story by The Herald Tribune accounted for much, but not all, of the reasons for this. Once Notre Dame made it home to South Bend, Strickler quickly got Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden, all dressed in their uniforms, to mount horses from a local livery stable, and made sure that the wire services received the resulting image. The photo became indelibly associated with a team that went on to win the Rose Bowl and compile an undefeated record. The power of Rice’s words, then, was multiplied by a single image.

If the 1920s represented the Golden Age of Sport, then Rice was its bard. What he did with this passage illustrated what contemporaries regarded as his greatest gift, and what many today see as his greatest failing: transforming a transitory athletic moment, place, and people into mythological status.

A couple of years ago, Tommy Craggs posted a devastating critique of Rice’s literary failings (“Why Grantland Rice Sucked”) on the sports Website Deadspin. The notion of a sportswriter comparing a minor-league baseball game to Gettysburg, Bull Run or Waterloo is, indeed, laughable.  

But at least some of this is unfair to Rice. As a onetime college athlete himself, he knew intimately the competitive instincts and stresses of those who played sports, and he was part of a writing fraternity that was not interested in exposing the peccadilloes of players. It would take a full two generations after the appearance of the “Four Horsemen” column before that laissez-faire attitude changed.

What had altered, too, was the nature of the media covering these events. For No Cheering in the Press Box, a 1974 oral history of sportswriting edited by Jerome Holtzman, Strickler mused that by then, it would have been impossible for Rice and his brethren to practice the craft the way they had before:

“Your stories today are shorter because of the economics of getting out a newspaper. Your columns are narrower. Your type is larger. And when you start to trim a Grantland Rice or a Davis Walsh, you get down to the straight Associated Press story. You trim out the little touches, the man's nuances. You trim out the man himself. So how are they going to build up another Red Grange?”

(The reference to Grange is apropos here. While Notre Dame was crushing Army, Grange was leading the University of Illinois to victory over Michigan with an electrifying, five-touchdown performance, leading Rice, in a typical bit of versification, to term him the "gray ghost.") 

The other basic change was what boosted this particular column by Rice to begin with: the image. With the rise of television—and especially the multiple cameras and instant replay that were increasingly used—viewers could now see for themselves, in real time—and repeatedly thereafter—any plays. They didn’t need the likes of Rice to talk about the action. The emphasis, then, switched to the individuals associated with the game.  

More has disappeared, however, than the romantic style of sportswriting epitomized by Rice (who, incidentally, in perhaps his best-known bit of verse, wrote: "For when the One Great Scorer comes/To write against your name,/He marks--not that you won or lost/But how you played the game"). The Polo Grounds, scene of countless legendary baseball and football contests, was demolished in 1964. 

Even the types of backs hailed by Rice could no longer exist today. The biggest of the Four Horsemen, Layden, weighed only 164 pounds. In contrast, on this year's much-ballyhood Fighting Irish roster, quarterback Everett Golson and running backs Cam McDaniel, Tarean Folston, and Greg Bryant average 200 pounds.

Photo of the Day: Columbia Lions’ Roar Muffled—Again

Saturday afternoon, I ventured up to the northern tip of Manhattan to watch my alma mater, Columbia University, begin their football season. After graduating in ’82, no longer having to work on weekends, I used to make the journey up to 218^th Street quite a bit. In fact, I had been a spectator through much of “The Streak”—the 44-game losing streak that, for a time, represented an NCAA record for futility.

I hadn’t been up there in 26 years. The passage of time had filled me with curiosity about what had transpired in the meantime.

Much about the atmosphere and experience of watching a game had changed since I had last seen a football tossed in the air by members of my old school (starting with the place, now called Robert Kraft Field in Lawrence Wien Stadium at Baker Athletic Complex. But one thing hadn’t changed: the team still lost.

The 49-7 final tally versus Fordham doesn’t give an adequate idea of the futility involved. With a little over three minutes left, I left the stadium with the score at 49-0. Shortly after walking out the gates, I heard a roar coming from the crowd. It turned out that the Lions had broken up Fordham’s shutout with a touchdown pass with less than a minute to play.

Was I surprised by the loss? Not really. I hadn’t heard a whole lot of good coming out about the team in recent years. This is a group, remember, that not only had lost all its games in 2013 (including a 52-7 battering by Fordham’s Rams that must have given onlookers yesterday a bad case of déjà vu), but that had had only three winning seasons in the last half century.

Not that a number of alumni take the losing lying down. Late last year, a rather nasty battle broke out in the pages of The Columbia Daily Spectator (reported on breathlessly by The New York Post) about how steamed many of them are by the weight-loss/nutrition program instituted for the team’s offensive linemen by Lions head coach Pete Mangurian. (Evidently, the bruising blockers average about 20 pounds per man less than their counterparts at Princeton and Dartmouth.) Some have called for Mangurian’s head, and others for that of Athletic Director M. Dianne Murphy for allowing the situation to continue.

A fan in the stands—a father with a son on the squad—had remarked, with something of gallows humor, as I took my seat a couple of minutes after kickoff time: “I saw the other team do something already that I didn’t see all through last year—punt.”  I’m sure that other fans have reacted far more cynically over time, such as this exchange I heard at the height of The Streak, when several yelled helpful coaching hints as a pass began to transpire:

FAN 1: “Send a linebacker!”

FAN 2: “Send an end!”

FAN 3: “Send in the clowns!”

FAN 4: “Don’t bother—they’re here!”

While I understand some of the cynicism (it beats having your heart broken over and over again), I find it hard to maintain it for too long myself. Waking up during the season at 5 am for a bus ride 15 minutes from campus, enduring hours of practice, summoning your brain to somehow stay awake and complete class papers and study for tests—then have your head handed to you by a different opponent every Saturday—can’t be much fun.

I don’t think this is all that can be said about the Columbia football experience, however—and later this week, I’ll get into my own seriocomic experience as a Rip Van Winkle in a forum where much has changed, even as the Lions continue to be eaten.