The astonishing thing about this documentary isn't the excitement and the drama. The football game is presented brilliantly, the key plays are shown in riveting detail and you really feel like you're down on the field with the players right until the final gun. But the astonishing thing is how much you really learn about Harvard and Yale and why they have the reputation of being the very best of the best colleges in America.
All the interviews in this movie are interesting, but the one that shocked me was when this big, tough, Harvard linebacker broke down and started crying, forty years after the game! And not because he muffed a block or a tackle, either. "I can't believe Harvard would take a chance on a kid like me," he said.
That line really stuck with me long after I left the theater.
You see, I went to Columbia, which is also part of the Ivy League. But the whole time I was there in the mid-eighties, I had a sense that there was something missing. It wasn't till I saw this movie that I understood what it was. The thing about Harvard and Yale isn't that they only admit the richest kids, or the smartest kids. The thing is that once you're admitted you're really someone. You're a part of something. And I suspect it's not just the stars on the football teams who feel that way.
When I was at Columbia it was just the opposite. It was a campus full of strangers located in the most impersonal urban landscape imaginable. I don't remember anyone crying over how lucky they were to be there. When my roommate dropped out halfway through the freshman year, no one on the faculty or in the administration begged him to stay. No one asked me why I didn't do more to help him, either. It wasn't until years later I began to ask myself that question. And I've begun to suspect that the answer lies largely in the way Columbia treated all its undergraduates like cattle. They didn't expect champions, and they didn't get them either. To be sure, there were some star athletes on campus, and they got plenty of fawning remarks and plenty of special attention from the faculty. But it was because they were part of a special elite, not because they really mattered as individuals. None of us really mattered as individuals. That's why Columbia is strictly third rate compared to Harvard and Yale. I always thought it was because Yale and Harvard had richer kids, smarter kids, tougher kids. Really it's just because Harvard and Yale treat their students like human beings, and not like cattle.
And that's what I learned from watching Harvard "beat" Yale.
