Great Sports Movies: Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29

My new favorite sports movie, just out on DVD--and if you've been reading for awhile you'll know that I get one of these every few months--is Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29.  I'm your ideal audience for this movie, because I had no idea what happened in the famous 1968 football game between the two rival, undefeated teams (though the enigmatic title is something of a giveaway).  Essentially, the movie recounts, through archival footage and interviews with surviving players--of whom there are many--exactly what happened in what is now simply known as "The Game," virtually in real time. 

It's a simple, direct approach, and with a game like this one (Harvard was down 22-6 at the half and scored twice in the final minute and 42 seconds), you hardly need a lot of extra fanfare to make it exciting.  There are a few brushes with celebrity (actor Tommy Lee Jones played tackle for Harvard, who himself roomed with Al Gore; one of Jones' teammates was dating Meryl Streep; a Yale player was good pals with George W. Bush), and they add some incidental flash to the proceedings, but what's most striking about the movie is the players, the everyday guys who, one afternoon 41 years ago, all experienced something remarkable together.

Played against the backdrop of the grainy footage of the the actual game, the interviews become a study in how memory protracts and expands time, sometimes altering events altogether:  one Yale player is certain that he made a key tackle in the game; the footage indicates that he was nowhere near the action when it happened.

You get the sense that these men went on to lead full, productive lives--they are graduates of Harvard and Yale, after all.  Only two went on to play sports professionally (Calvin Hill, who isn't interviewed here, and Yale quarterback Brian Dowling) but that the game touched and shaped them all.  Not one of them recounts his involvement in the game with anything less than full, gleeful engagement and wonder--it's like they're there again, experiencing it all, play by play.