It Matters

A CENTURY OF DARTMOUTH FOOTBALL text by David M. Shribman '76 design and picture commentary by John R. Scotford Jr. '38 Dartmouth Athletic Council, 1980. 76 pp. $6

For practically half of its existence, Dartmouth has fielded a football team. As one has endured, against sometimes heavy odds, so has the other. The reasons why don't always bear too much scrutiny, but Shribman, in describing the Dartmouth-Harvard rivalry, puts the case as well as anybody: Because it matters.

On a fall day in 1881, Captain Clarence Howland led his forces against Amherst and came away a winner, 1-0. On the 20th of this month, Co-captains Dave Shula and Jerry Pierce will stride across Memorial Field to meet their Pennsylvania opposites and commence the 100th season of Dartmouth football. So, we have this family album celebrating the fair, thick-necked boys of fall, the coaches, the championship teams, great rivalries and great games. The game: Because it matters.

Some images from the book and the century: Shribman, who is a writer, not a cheerleader, describes the decision of Frank Cavanaugh '99 to quit coaching at Dartmouth and go to war. The year was 1917, and Cavanaugh, past 40, enlisted as a private. "I've got to go," he said. "In that thing over there are the boys I have coached." Cavanaugh quickly rose to the rank of major. Three weeks before the war ended he was mutilated by an exploding shell. Here are Blaik and Blackman, tough men flushed with success; something of Crouthamel's personal torment; Oberlander's six touchdown passes against Cornell; 8,000 alumni traveling to the 1925 Chicago game ("yesterday," wrote Damon Runyan, "they were inaugurating a period of old-gradding as has never been known before in the United States of America"); the Hurricane Game, the Fifth Down, the 12th Man; the men for all seasons: Healy, Lane, Morton, MacLeod, King, Klupchak, and Williams.

The pictures: images of youthful innocence paired now and then with an eminence grise (before 1900, local seasoned "amateurs" were eligible to play for Dartmouth and were known, with artful invention, as members of the "Dartmouth Marine Corps"); the teams of 1901, 1902, 1903, featuring Matthew W. Bullock '04, end, the first black to wear the football Green; pain and fear, joy and triumph.

There are nuggets for the statistic mavens: from 1895, when Dartmouth crushed Exeter, 50-0, through 1943, when Dartmouth slipped by Holy Cross, 3-0, the team won every season opener. In fact, if the "breather" wasn't invented here, it was certainly developed into a high art. In that string of 49 years, Dartmouth opened the season 23 times against Norwich. Points for Dartmouth: 918. Points for Norwich: 18. And so Dartmouth and football endure, against sometimes heavy odds.