III


God Plays Quarterback for Yale

One hundred and twenty miles southwest of Harvard Yard, in New Haven, Connecticut, hopes could hardly have been higher for the 1968 Yale football team. The previous year, following a string of disappointing seasons, the Bulldogs had put together one of the most glorious campaigns in recent memory. After losing their opener, they won eight straight games, outscoring their opponents by an average of twenty-three points and capturing the Ivy League title for the first time since 1960. Their closest game had been the last: a come-from-behind 24–20 win over Harvard so thrilling that, as 68,135 fans poured out of the Yale Bowl, everyone agreed that there would never be another Harvard-Yale game as exciting as the one they’d just seen.

This year, with twenty-eight returning lettermen, the most in the league, the team was expected to pick up where it had left off. The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Street & Smith’s, Playboy, and almost every preseason poll picked Yale to repeat as Ivy League champion; many people assumed they would go undefeated. Indeed, the outlook was so bright that one of head coach Carmen Cozza’s main concerns was to make sure the team didn’t get complacent. At an organizational meeting in January, he had quoted his old college coach, Woody Hayes, who said that in football there was no such thing as standing still—if you weren’t getting better, you were getting worse. “Boys,” said Cozza, “We’re going to get better.

It’s not that there weren’t concerns. Ten starters had been lost to graduation, including the entire defensive line. But on offense, eight of eleven starters were back from an attack that had been one of the most explosive in Yale history. They had two All-Ivy interior linemen. They had the finest pair of ends in the league. And they had what the New York Times, in its preseason college football roundup, called “two of the best offensive backs in the nation.” One was Calvin Hill, a halfback who could run, catch, and throw with equally devastating effect. The other was quarterback Brian Dowling.

Dowling was the most sensational Yale football player since Albie Booth, the pint-sized halfback known as “Little Boy Blue,” who had given Bulldog fans something to cheer about during the Depression. Sports Illustrated called Dowling the most exciting Ivy League back since Dick Kazmaier, the Princeton halfback who won the 1951 Heisman Trophy as the country’s top player—an award for which Dowling himself was being touted this year. He had been written up in Time and Newsweek. His picture had appeared in the New York Times on three occasions. He had been the subject of a five-minute special report on the CBS Evening News with Heywood Hale Broun. Howard Cosell, at Yale to speak at a Master’s Tea, had stopped by Dowling’s room to meet the young phenom. At a time when most colleges were too cool to have a Big Man on Campus (or, if they had one, he was likely to be the head of SDS), Dowling was the Biggest of BMOCs. Yale students hung bedsheet banners painted with his uniform number from their windows. Grown men asked for his autograph. Women from colleges across the Northeast wrote to ask him for a date. The Yale Daily News called him God.

If Dowling was a deity, he was a modest and unassuming one. In an era that prized self-expression, in which outsized personalities like Muhammad Ali and New York Jets quarterback “Broadway Joe” Namath were redefining what it meant to be a sports star, the Yale captain was a throwback: a soft-spoken straight arrow who never sought the limelight, though it often sought him. With a football in his hand, however, he was as daring and unpredictable as any athlete in the country. “With Dowling on your side,” said a teammate, “you never know what’s going to happen—but you know you’re not going to lose.” Indeed, except for two games in which he had been injured, he hadn’t lost a football game since the seventh grade.

*  *  *

Dowling grew up in Cleveland Heights, the second of six children, five of them boys. When they weren’t in school, in church, or at the piano (their mother made all her children take lessons), he and his brothers were outside playing sports: baseball in the front yard, using trees as foul poles and the brick steps as a backstop; basketball in the driveway, shooting at the hoop their father had bracketed to the garage; football in the vacant lot across the street. Inside, there were Browns and Indians games to watch on TV; box scores to study in the Plain Dealer; baseball cards to sort, trade, and flip; and endless living-room-floor games of dice baseball (double ones was a strikeout, double sixes a grand slam). When he was old enough, Dowling signed up for every football, basketball, and baseball league he could. The skinny, well-mannered boy excelled in all of them.

On his first play from scrimmage at Saint Ignatius High School, Dowling intercepted a pass and returned it for a score. In his first start as quarterback, he threw five touchdown passes. In his three years on the varsity, two as starting quarterback, his team won twenty-nine of thirty games. Its only loss was the final game of his junior year. Competing for the city championship in Municipal Stadium in front of 37,673 people on Thanksgiving Day, Dowling played through a sprained ankle, a bruised kidney, and chipped bones in his back, before a broken collarbone on the final play of the first half sent him to the hospital. (Because Dowling was the team’s quarterback, safety, punter, and kick returner, it took four players to fill in for him in the second half.) In his high school career, he threw for 2,350 yards and thirty-four touchdowns, averaged over 35 yards a punt, intercepted a state-record thirty-three passes, and was named to several All-America teams. He also led the basketball team to a city championship, batted over .400 for the baseball team, and reached the regional tennis singles final. By the time the twelve-letter man graduated, he had become one of the most celebrated high school athletes in Cleveland history.

Dowling was recruited by more than eighty colleges, including such powerhouse football programs as USC, Michigan, and Notre Dame. Ohio State was especially keen in its pursuit of the home-state hero: its coach, Woody Hayes, spent four hours in the Dowling living room one evening; OSU alumnus Jack Nicklaus called long-distance from Florida to ask whether Brian would play a round of golf with him next time the Masters champ was back in Ohio; Governor James Rhodes stopped by the house and put in a pitch for matriculating in-state. Dowling listened politely, but he didn’t want to go to OSU. Its quarterbacks spent most of their time handing off. He was leaning toward USC, another perennial contender for the national championship.

Dowling wouldn’t have considered Yale had it not been for his father, a successful businessman who came to all his son’s games and was supportive without being pushy. Emmett Dowling knew Brian had his heart set on a big-time football school, but he asked him to consider the Ivy League. Touring east coast colleges with his father in the spring of his junior year, Brian liked Princeton’s campus best, but the Tigers still used the single wing, an old-fashioned offensive formation in which the quarterback rarely passed. At Harvard, he met with John Yovicsin, but the meeting seemed perfunctory and the coach didn’t even offer to show Dowling and his father the stadium. At Yale, Dowling immediately hit it off with Carmen Cozza, who was also from the Cleveland area. Cozza drove them out to the Bowl, where they stood on the field and gazed up at the 70,000 empty seats. “Wouldn’t it be great to play here in front of a full house?” Cozza asked.

Yale deployed every resource at its disposal to woo Dowling. Clint Frank, Yale’s 1937 Heisman winner, called him to talk Yale football. Mike Pyle, captain of Yale’s undefeated 1960 team and starting center for the Chicago Bears, wrote him a three-page letter, assuring him that playing at Yale wouldn’t keep him from playing in the NFL. Cozza sent him Why Yale?, a pamphlet enumerating the presidents, senators, Supreme Court justices, and CEOs who had attended the school, as well as The Yale Football Story, a book recounting the exploits of Walter Camp, Pudge Heffelfinger, and other legends from the turn-of-the-century glory days when the Bulldogs were always at or near the top of the national rankings and tickets for their games were among the most sought-after in sports. Cozza told Dowling that he wouldn’t be the only blue-chip recruit in his class; two other high school All-Americans were likely to attend. Dowling narrowed it down to USC, Michigan, Northwestern, and Yale. His father encouraged him to choose Yale—“Why go cabin when you can go first-class?”—and said that if Brian didn’t like it, he’d pay his way to another school. When Dowling called Cozza to tell him he was coming, the coach was stunned. An editorial in the Plain Dealer praised the decision as the rare triumph of education over big-time sports.

*  *  *

In his first weeks on the freshman team, Dowling couldn’t help having second thoughts: Yale didn’t seem so first-class after all. The players had to take a fifteen-minute ride on a cramped yellow school bus just to get to practice. The locker room consisted of a hook or two for each player in a World War I–era armory that also housed the polo stables. The practice field smelled of manure. The equipment, varsity hand-me-downs, looked as if it might have been worn by Albie Booth. (One player wrote to his high school coach and begged him to mail him his old shoulder pads.) On Thursdays, there were no tackles at practice—all four of them took Biology 11, which held labs that day—and the team had to make do with tackling dummies. The coach of the Bullpups, as the freshman team was known, was an avuncular ex–Green Bay Packer named Harry Jacunski, who introduced a vocabulary “word for the day” at the beginning of each practice, served milk and cookies at optional Tuesday-night film sessions, played scratchy records of the Whiffenpoofs singing fight songs to fire up the team during drills (the players blocked and tackled to the strains of “Daddy Is a Yale Man” and “Goodnight, Poor Harvard”), and used note cards to help him through his pregame pep talks. Reaching for an inspirational finish before his team took the field one day, Jacunski, peering through thick horn-rimmed glasses, concluded, “And so, boys, I want you to go out there and . . .”—there was a pause as he switched to the next card—“win!”

If the freshman football program seemed amateurish, Dowling had to admit that the team itself was loaded with talent. The other high school All-Americans—Calvin Hill and end Bruce Weinstein—could have played for any college in the country, and Cozza had persuaded an unprecedented number of All-State players to join them at Yale. Theirs would one day be regarded as the greatest recruiting class in the school’s history. As the season progressed, the coaches occasionally sent over members of the freshman team to drill with the varsity. One afternoon, Weinstein and tackle Kyle Gee practiced double-team blocking against the varsity’s best player, a six-foot-four, 240-pound defensive tackle who would captain the team the following year. To the shock of the coaches, the two freshmen pushed the junior down the field again and again. It would be the last time they were invited to practice with the varsity.

Even in this august group, Dowling stood out. His style was, admittedly, unorthodox. He threw from a three-quarters delivery, like a shortstop slinging a baseball. His passes wobbled, yet when the receiver looked up, the ball always seemed to be right there. He ran with a long, loose-limbed stride that looked almost leisurely—until you tried to catch him. But he had unerring instincts and a genius for ad-libbing. Back to punt on fourth and one in a close game against Cornell, he saw an opening and decided to run. He made the first down with a yard to spare. A 15-yard penalty, however, erased the gain, making it fourth and sixteen from deep in Yale territory. Jacunski told him, in no uncertain terms, to punt this time. Dowling, however, seeing the Cornell defenders come up the middle, took off around end for 20 yards and another first down. Cozza, getting a look at the freshmen from atop the viewing tower, was so furious he almost fell as he scrambled down the scaffolding, yelling, “Make that kid kick the ball!” But that kid had a way of making things come out right that seemed almost charmed. His teammate Pat Madden would long remember a play in the Columbia game when Dowling took off downfield, holding the ball, as he often did, to his coach’s consternation, away from his body, in one capacious hand. Any other player carrying the ball like that, Madden knew, would surely have fumbled—or gotten his arm ripped off. Indeed, after a long gain, Dowling ended up buried under four Columbia defenders. But from deep within the pile of pale-blue jerseys, there extended a lone, dark-blue-shirted arm, at the end of which a hand held out the football.

Dowling led the freshman team in rushing; completed 57 percent of his passes for eleven touchdowns and almost 1,000 yards; did most of the punting and some of the placekicking; and, when the defense couldn’t stop a potent Princeton offense, convinced Coach Jacunski to put him in at safety, where he helped preserve a narrow victory. The freshmen won all six of their games, finishing with a 45–20 thrashing of Harvard in front of 5,000 spectators, an unheard-of crowd for a Bullpups game. Every Old Blue, as Yale’s ultra-loyal graduates were known, in attendance was salivating at the thought of Dowling and company playing varsity for the next three years.

*  *  *

Dowling came along at an opportune time for Yale football—and for Carmen Cozza. The youngest of five children born to Italian immigrants in Depression-era Ohio, Cozza had never set foot in New England before 1963, when he was hired as an assistant coach at Yale at the age of thirty-two. As he would write years later, “It was a culture shock for the son of an Italian laborer from the Midwest to be transported suddenly into the elite, old-money atmosphere that marked Yale and the Ivy League at that time.” It didn’t seem likely that he would be there long. In 1965, in Cozza’s opening game as head coach, Yale lost to the University of Connecticut, an upstate school intended to serve as an early-season warm-up—a “patsy” or “cream puff,” as such opponents were known—before Yale began Ivy League play. Letters from irate alumni poured into the athletic department, urging that Cozza be fired. “There’s a train for New London at 5:40 p.m.,” read a telegram addressed to the coach. “Be under it.” As Dowling’s Bullpups racked up victories, the varsity won only three games that season, finishing with a dreary shutout loss to Harvard.

Win or lose, Cozza had the players on his side. Many of them had come to Yale because there was something about Carm Cozza that felt right. With a closely cropped fringe of prematurely silver hair surrounding his bald pate, Cozza had a wrestler’s build, a strong jaw, and a straightforward manner that contained not an iota of pretension. He worked his players hard but never berated or made fun of them. He never used profanity. If someone made a mistake, he didn’t criticize him in front of others; if someone did something good, he pointed it out in front of the team. He tried to find a role for everyone on the squad. He wasn’t one for stem-winding pregame speeches; he spoke briefly and frankly. His players knew he meant what he said and they didn’t want to disappoint him. During games, he patrolled the sideline in slacks, sneakers, windbreaker, and a Yale baseball cap, which he windmilled above his head in delight after a particularly fine play.

Each day the players walked past a sign in the locker room that read, “Football is not only a game. It is a way of life.” It was Cozza’s favorite quote. If some of the players thought it a little hokey, they took to heart its implication that football’s lessons of hard work, loyalty, and sacrifice were equally applicable off the field. A football team, said Cozza, was a family. A devout Catholic, he led the team in the Lord’s Prayer before each game. He often invited players home for dinner, and on Sunday mornings he visited injured players in the infirmary, bringing brownies baked by his wife. He kept a close eye on his players’ grades, not just to make sure they stayed eligible but to make sure they stayed on track to graduate. If they had to miss practice for a lab, so be it. He was proud that the team had a higher GPA than the student body as a whole; in fact, because of the structure imposed by the football season, the players’ grades were usually better in the fall than in the spring.

But Cozza was no softy. A fiercely competitive man who had pitched in the minor leagues before turning to coaching, he hated losing as much as anybody. In his mid-thirties, he was in better shape than many of his players; running wind sprints with the team, he easily kept pace with all but the fastest. He encouraged them to play handball in the off-season to improve their agility; sometimes he took on two at a time and destroyed them both. After his dismal first season as head coach, he was all the more determined to win. And with Dowling and company moving up to varsity, he had the tools to do it.

*  *  *

Charley Loftus had high hopes, too. As Yale’s sports information director since 1943, Loftus had been responsible for numerous innovations in the fledgling profession of sports publicity: joint telephone press conferences with opposing coaches, typed play-by-play accounts of games supplied to press box writers at the end of each quarter. It had been Loftus who insisted that the Harvard-Yale game be called “The Game.” It had been Loftus who came up with the idea to photograph the Harvard and Yale captains together for the program cover. In twenty-three years at Yale, Loftus, who could make a press release about a JV hockey game sound like a Fitzgerald novel, had covered almost three thousand athletic events. He knew a great story when he saw it.

Although Loftus, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking serial raconteur, spent his career proclaiming the glories of Yale, he was, like Cozza, something of an outsider, having grown up a townie in New Haven and gotten his B.S. in journalism from Ohio University. He brought to his work an outsider’s blend of reverence and skepticism. If, occasionally, he seemed eager to prove that he was as clever as any Yalie (when an alumnus demanded he write “something big” about the football team, he responded with a 182-letter word from Aristophanes), he was not above tweaking Old Blues. He once proposed that Yale drop its bulldog, Handsome Dan, as mascot and replace him with his own prizewinning Old English sheepdog, Fezziwig Clyde—a notion that had gullible alums harrumphing into their dry martinis. Ironically, the outsider-turned-insider—the “y” in Charley, he insisted, stood for Yale—was incapable of straying far from campus. Loftus intimated that an inner-ear infection made travel difficult, but those closest to him knew that a phobia kept him from venturing beyond the New Haven city limits. Even trips to the Yale Bowl made him so anxious he required a police escort.

Loftus saw Dowling as next in the roll call of Yale gridiron giants. It didn’t hurt that Dowling was a three-sport star who had gone on to lead the freshman basketball team in scoring and rebounding, play center field for the baseball team, and win a few doubles matches for the tennis team. Or that with his tousled hair and blue-green eyes, he was as handsome as a Hollywood leading man, yet had the quiet, unaffected manner of the altar boy he had once been. Before Dowling played a varsity down, Loftus was extolling him as the contemporary incarnation of Frank Merriwell, whose last-second heroics and manly but modest personality had won the day for Yale on and off the field in a series of popular turn-of-the-century dime novels. Loftus’s efforts soon bore fruit: “Another Merriwell in Making at Yale” was the headline in the Providence Evening Bulletin; “Yale QB Tabbed 2d Merriwell” was the title of a syndicated column by Red Smith. When reporters asked Dowling about his fictional alter ego, Loftus couldn’t have scripted a more Merriwellian response. “I’ve never read any of the books,” Dowling said. “But from what I understand, Frank Merriwell was quite a guy.”

*  *  *

On September 24, 1966, in his first varsity game, Dowling threw for two touchdowns in a win over Connecticut.

The following week, playing Rutgers in a torrential rain, Dowling was running the option early in the second quarter when, as Charley Loftus wrote, his right knee was “ripped asunder by a jarring tackle,” and he was carried off the field.

That night, Dowling’s father died.

He had known his father was seriously ill but had no idea that the illness would be fatal. In May, they had played a round at the Yale Golf Course. Emmett Dowling had gotten a blister on his foot—which was nothing unusual, except the blister never healed. Six weeks later, when the family gathered in the backyard for their annual Fourth of July cookout, he fainted. He spent most of the summer in the hospital, his red and white blood cell count alarmingly skewed. When Dowling returned to school in September, his father knew he was dying of leukemia but was hoping for a remission long enough to see Brian play at least once for the Yale varsity. Too ill to travel, however, he had listened to the Connecticut game on a special radio hookup from his hospital bed. “Maybe I can get to the Rutgers game,” he whispered to his wife. But by then, he couldn’t even listen to the radio. He slipped into a coma and died that night at the age of forty-nine. On Sunday morning, Dowling was at breakfast when the assistant to the president of the university walked across the dining hall toward him, and Dowling knew.

In the weeks following the funeral, Dowling felt as if he were in a twilight zone. He had lost his father; he had also lost football. His knee required surgery that would force him to miss the entire season. He considered leaving school. But after talking it over with Cozza, he decided it wouldn’t make things any better. Dowling spent weeks on crutches, then endless afternoons doing leg lifts with sandbags draped over his shin. Without him, the team struggled to a 4-5 record. Dowling sat in the stands at Harvard Stadium on a bitterly cold November afternoon and watched Yale conclude its season with a 17–0 loss.

*  *  *

In the 1967 preseason, though everyone pretended otherwise, all eyes were on Dowling and his surgically repaired knee. Dowling himself wasn’t worried, but he couldn’t wait to get the initial hit over with. He got his chance on the first play of the first intrasquad scrimmage, when he fumbled the snap. As he picked up the ball and began to run, one could almost hear the collective intake of breath among onlookers—and the exhalation when, after being tackled, Dowling hopped to his feet, intact. The news traveled all the way to Boston: “Yale QB Dowling Passes Big Test” was the Globe headline. Then, eleven days before the opening game, while doing the Monkey Roll, a routine warm-up in which players leapfrogged over one another, Dowling landed awkwardly and fractured his right wrist.

By the following day it seemed the entire Yale campus had gone into mourning. “Another season down the drain,” one student told the Yale Daily News. In “An Open Letter to Yale Football Fans,” the News sports editors acknowledged that Dowling’s fluke injury was “a crushing blow” but implored students not to succumb to despair. “Giving up is no way out,” they wrote. “It’s our football team, and they need our support. Win or lose, they’ll try harder if we will.” The players themselves were shaken. Dowling, the doctors said, would be in a cast for six weeks. The 1967 season seemed to be over before it began. Indeed, the team fumbled five times and lost its first game, to Holy Cross: only the fifth time in ninety-seven seasons that Yale had lost its opener. Cozza, going into the final year of his contract with a 7-11 record—and, even worse, without a win over Princeton or Harvard—knew he had little margin for error. In the locker room after the game, the coach who almost never raised his voice raised it. “This may be my last year of coaching here, but I’m not going down without a fight,” he roared. “If any of you guys aren’t with me, don’t bother showing up at practice on Monday.” The following week, Yale barely squeezed by Connecticut.

For the second straight year, Dowling faced missing most of the season. How could it happen again? Would he ever get to play varsity football at Yale? But after an evening spent pacing his dorm room floor, he reminded himself he’d be back in time to play at least a few games that season. The next day he was out at practice, fielding punts and passing left-handed, listening in on huddles, handing out towels, trying to make himself useful.

In fact, Dowling’s wrist healed far more quickly than anticipated, though Cozza, not wanting to get everyone’s hopes up, including his own, kept the news a secret. In the third game of the season, against Brown, a murmur rippled through the stands when Dowling trotted onto the field in the fourth quarter. He was in for only one play—at flanker, where he was safely removed from the fray—but, like the vision of Zapata on his white horse that was said to inspire his Mexican revolutionaries in mid-battle, Dowling’s brief appearance gave hope to fans and teammates alike. Help was on the way.

The following week, Dowling started against Columbia. Playing with his knee heavily taped and his wrist cushioned in foam rubber, he spent most of the 21–7 win handing off. “I’m just glad to see him come through the game alive,” said Cozza. Facing heavily favored Cornell, Dowling ran for 51 yards on the second play of the game. Yale fans shuddered when he got up from the tackle with a bloody face, but after a trip to the locker room to have his broken nose wrenched back into place, he returned to lead Yale to a 41–7 victory. A year after a provocative Time cover had asked, “Is God Dead?” a chant arose from the Yale student section: “GOD IS ALIVE! GOD IS ALIVE!”

All the promise of that undefeated freshman year blossomed against Dartmouth. Dartmouth had won five Ivy titles in ten years. They came into the game without a loss. They had the league’s top-rated defense. They were favored by two points. They lost by forty-one. Yale scored four touchdowns in the first seventeen minutes. It was 35–2 at the half. Cozza put in the second team, and they kept scoring. He put in the third team, and they kept scoring. “It’s like Carm has created a Frankenstein and he doesn’t know what to do with it,” Bruce Weinstein told Kyle Gee. At the height of the slaughter, reserve defensive back John Waldman looked across the field at the Dartmouth players lined up on the sideline; they were all watching the Yale offense with slack-jawed expressions. He looked up and down the Yale sideline: his teammates wore the same awed look. The final score was 56–15, the worst beating Yale had administered to Dartmouth since 1896. In the locker room after the game, Cozza was at a loss for words.

As Yale continued to run roughshod over its opponents, the school embraced its team with the kind of fervor normally associated with state universities in the Midwest. Much of the adulation centered on Dowling, whom sportswriters called “Superman,” “Wunderkind,” “the Magic Man,” “Lochinvar,” and, to Charley Loftus’s gratification, “Merriwell.” But all the players basked in the attention. There were pep rallies and bonfires. Restaurants and barbershops filled their windows with photos of the team. Students packed three-hundred-seat Harkness Hall for Football 10a, an informal weekly session in which Cozza narrated the most recent game film; they gave the coach a standing ovation when he stepped to the podium. Alumni who a year earlier had demanded Cozza’s ouster now agreed they’d always thought him a fine coach. On game day, the New Haven Railroad added extra trains to accommodate the tide of alums coming up from New York City. “It should be recorded for all time and not on the sports page, what Yale’s charismatic football team has done to this normally sedate university community,” declared a Yale Daily News editorial. “Quite simply, it has turned Yale into a frenzied, screaming, rock-’em-sock-’em football school, where the marching band trudges home through a cheering New Haven from the Yale Bowl, where myriads of posters festoon the college walls with naughty slogans, where even the cynics sport ‘Blue Power’ buttons, and where renditions of ‘Bulldog Bulldog’ or ‘Boola Boola’ or ‘Bingo Bingo’ are sung by sober-minded fans as they cross the campus for classes.”

The euphoria reached fever pitch for the Princeton game. A saying at Yale had it that the coaches wanted to beat Dartmouth and the alumni wanted to beat Harvard, but the players wanted to beat Princeton. They wanted to beat Harvard, too, of course, but with Harvard there was an underlying, if grudging, mutual respect. Their dislike of Princeton was visceral. Asked why he found Princetonians objectionable, one Yale undergraduate said simply, “They’re pompous, snotty rah-rahs.” In 1967, Yale’s animus was whetted by the fact that they hadn’t beaten Princeton in seven years. Players and fans were still smarting from the 1964 game, a rout in which Princeton tailback Cosmo Iacavazzi scored on two long runs and, after each, had hurled the ball into the Yale Bowl stands—the kind of insult-to-injury flourish that, years later, would become routine but at the time was a breach of gridiron etiquette akin to letting out a Bronx cheer in church. In 1966, when Dowling was out with his knee injury, Yale had the game all but won when, on fourth down from the Princeton 30-yard line, Cozza elected to punt. The snap was low, the punt was blocked, and a second-string Princeton end ran it back for the winning touchdown. Afterward, in the locker room, several players wept.

In the week leading up to the 1967 game, film of the blocked punt was played on a continuous loop outside the locker room, intercut with footage of Iacavazzi hurling the football into the Yale Bowl stands. But with Dowling healthy, there was a sense that this time, things would be different. The campus was seized with a collective frenzy. HATE PRINCETON banners appeared in dorm room windows. TWEAK THE TIGER’S TAIL buttons appeared on students’ shirts. The Yale Daily News described the Yale-Princeton rivalry as a Holy War and the upcoming game as Armageddon. Each night, bands of students held roving rallies, involving so much symbolic crushing of Princeton-colored oranges that by mid-week, Yale dining halls stopped serving the fruit. On Wednesday night, hundreds of undergraduates made a pilgrimage to the courtyard of Dowling’s dorm, where they settled beneath his second-floor room and chanted “WE WANT GOD! WE WANT GOD!” until, like the Pope appearing on his balcony at St. Peter’s to bless the faithful, the quarterback came to the window and spoke to the crowd below. Someone tossed up an orange and Dowling crushed it against the wall, triggering a roar. On Friday morning, eight hundred students gathered in front of Ray Tompkins House, the neo-Gothic home of Yale’s athletic department, to send the team off to New Jersey, working themselves into such a pitch of excitement that they began to rock the team buses before an alarmed Cozza told the drivers to take off.

Early in the game, Dowling pitched to Hill, who ran a sweep to the right before pulling up and throwing back to Dowling, who had drifted, unnoticed, down the field. Catching the pass on the Princeton twenty, Dowling strode into the end zone and fired the ball into the upper reaches of Palmer Stadium. Playing in biting cold, with intermittent rain and a smattering of hail, against a team that had beaten Harvard by five touchdowns the previous week, Dowling passed for two touchdowns and scored twice himself in the team’s 29–7 win, clinching Yale’s first Ivy title since 1960. Players carried Cozza off the field on their shoulders. Fans tore down one of the goalposts and carried a fifteen-foot chunk into the Yale locker room, where they presented it to the coach. An inebriated senior named George Bush was one of several Yale students detained by Princeton campus police for refusing to come down from their perches on a goalpost.

It was a day in which Dowling could do no wrong. Late in the second quarter, when the rain started up again, a chant arose from the Yale student section: “MAKE IT STOP, BRIAN, MAKE IT STOP!” Dowling raised his arms for quiet, and though a causal relationship could never be definitively established, it was indisputable that the sun emerged at some point during the fourth quarter. The headline in the Yale Daily News: “God Plays Quarterback For Yale.”

A week later, in front of the largest crowd at the Yale Bowl since the 1954 Army game, Yale trailed Harvard by three points with two minutes left when Dowling, his back foot slipping on the soggy turf, threw a 66-yard touchdown bomb to end Del Marting to win the game, 24–20. “His timing was poor,” Charley Loftus crowed to reporters in the press box. “Merriwell would have waited until there were only seven seconds left.”

*  *  *

It wasn’t just what Dowling did but the way he did it that dazzled fans and demoralized defenses. Although the six-foot-two, 195-pounder was an extraordinary athlete, he would never have been chosen to appear in an instructional film for young quarterbacks. Over the years, writers would describe his passes, variously, as loopers, bloopers, floaters, lobs, knuckleballs, beanbags, balloons, loaves of bread, marshmallows, custard pies, rainbows, cotton candy, blimps with engine trouble, and “great lumbering auks.” Dowling himself good-naturedly called them his “flutterballs.” (Weinstein thought the fluttering made them easier to catch; it was if the football had handles.) Defensive backs, convinced Dowling’s throws would fall short and they’d have an easy interception, dropped off their coverage—only to watch the football sail over their head and into the receiver’s waiting arms. “He doesn’t look very good passing,” said the Penn coach after Dowling flutterballed Yale to a lopsided victory over his team. “All he does is kill you.”

Dowling’s running was no less exasperating. He could look as if he were out for a Sunday stroll—describing one touchdown run, Red Smith wrote that the quarterback “loitered” across the goal line—but his long-legged gait ate up ground. (In wind sprints at the end of practice, just as teammates were convinced they’d catch him, he’d take a few strides and be out of reach.) He was maddeningly elusive, capable of scrambling for a seeming eternity before throwing for a big gain or loping for a first down. “He was like a ghost,” said an opposing lineman. “You were so sure you had him. And then you didn’t.” In one intrasquad scrimmage, two beefy Yale defenders broke into the backfield, each determined to get a big hit on Dowling. At the last second, like a matador working with two bulls, Dowling stepped away, and they knocked each other to the ground.

Many quarterbacks who threw perfect spirals or ran like gazelles couldn’t read the field. Dowling was blessed with what freshman coach Jacunski called “panoramic peripheral vision” and an uncanny awareness of where every player was, even, it seemed, when his back was turned. As defenders closed in on him, he continued to hold out for the big play long after most quarterbacks would have thrown the ball away to avoid being tackled behind the line. (In 1967, he averaged 15.5 yards per completion; of every eleven Dowling passes, one was a touchdown.) Four decades later, on a charity golf outing, a current Yale coach asked the legendary quarterback how, back to pass, he chose his receiver. How did he read his progressions? Did he watch the safety? Did he key on the linebackers? Dowling shrugged and said, “I just threw it to the guy who was open.”

*  *  *

As the 1968 season got under way, the pressure on Dowling was enormous. Yale fans were counting on him to lead the team to an undefeated season and a second straight Ivy League crown. Dowling himself expected nothing less. He possessed a preternatural confidence—not the in-your-face cockiness of some star players but the laid-back calm that in great athletes can be mistaken for carelessness. Junior year, on the morning of the Dartmouth game, Cozza thought his quarterback might be nervous about taking on the undefeated Indians in his fifth varsity start and sought him out in the lounge at Ray Tompkins House for a game of pool. Waiting for the right moment as they moved around the table, he began to talk soothingly to Dowling, telling him not to worry, that everything would be all right. Dowling politely cut him off. “Coach, don’t worry, we’re going to kill ’em,” he said, lining up a shot. That afternoon, Yale scored the first four times they had the ball.

Dowling played without doubt or fear; the possibility of losing never crossed his mind. No matter how dire the circumstance, he was unflappable; third and ten didn’t faze him any more than second and one. Sportswriters described his affect on the field as “nonchalant”; Thomas Bergin, a Yale professor of romance languages and devoted Bulldog fan, wrote of his “serenity.” In four years of Yale football, his teammates saw him flustered only once: when, as Dowling crossed the goal line at the end of a long run, the Yale cheerleaders fired off a miniature cannon, primed with wads of paper, as they did after every Yale touchdown. In this case, the blast happened to hit Dowling on his calf, startling him so that he dropped the ball and turned his head in surprise.

Dowling’s confidence was reflected in his play-calling. On first down, when most teams ran the ball, he often chose to pass—sometimes even on the game’s first play. On third and short, when most coaches called for the fullback up the middle, he was just as likely to throw the bomb. If Dowling’s calls seemed whimsical, they were based on logic—albeit the logic of a high-stakes gambler, not an accountant. And woe to those who expected Dowling to play it safe just because Yale had a big lead. “Heck no,” he told a reporter. “That’s when you have the other team retreating.” Dowling’s decisions often made Cozza, a disciple of conservative, run-it-up-the-gut Woody Hayes, squirm. But ever since he’d seen Dowling run from punt formation on fourth and sixteen freshman year, Cozza had learned not to intervene too much; it would be like telling Jackson Pollock to paint by numbers.

The self-assured Dowling, in fact, had a soothing effect on his tightly wound coach, who entered the 1968 season more relaxed—relatively speaking—than his players had ever seen him. In practice, Cozza took an occasional turn throwing against the defensive backs. He allowed a bespectacled, 125-pound reporter from the New Haven Register to don pads and spend an afternoon drilling with the team. (Paper Lion, George Plimpton’s account of playing training-camp quarterback for the Detroit Lions, had just been published.) And one afternoon near the end of two-a-days, when the team was dragging in the heat and Cozza stalked off the field in apparent disgust, the players were flabbergasted when, five minutes later, the neighborhood ice-cream truck drove up with Cozza at the wheel. “You guys stink,” he said, as he hopped out and began tossing them Eskimo Pies.

There was an obvious bond between the quarterback who had lost his father and the coach who had three daughters and no sons. (When Emmett Dowling died, Cozza had missed two days of practice to fly to Cleveland for the funeral.) They could often be seen talking quietly on the sideline, Cozza, one hand on his cheek, listening thoughtfully. They looked more like two friends, one team member thought, than like coach and player. Dowling called the coach Carm. During two-a-days, Cozza promised his oft-injured quarterback that if he stayed healthy all year and the team went into its final game undefeated, he’d let him return a kickoff against Harvard.

Quarterbacks are rarely elected captain—Dowling was the first to hold the office at Yale since 1926—but it would have seemed wrong to choose anyone else. In some ways the role didn’t suit him. He wasn’t a backslapper. He never gave a single speech before a game. Other than to call the plays, he didn’t talk all that much. But there was no doubt who the leader of the team was. His teammates kidded him about being God, but when asked about Dowling by reporters, they sounded almost as if they meant it, using words like faith, belief, aura, and mystique. Said one: “All the reassurance I need before a game is to know that Brian Dowling is alive and healthy.”

*  *  *

Had Dowling been a different person, his teammates might have resented the attention he got. But he never boasted, was quick to redirect praise toward his offensive line and receivers, and treated everybody with the same quiet respect. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to complain to the officials after a bad call or show up an opponent. Except for his moment of payback in Palmer Stadium, he’d hand the ball to the referee after scoring as matter-of-factly as if he were returning a book to the library. When all of Yale went into depression after he fractured his wrist, no one heard the injured man himself complain or even express disappointment. Indeed, Dowling seemed slightly embarrassed by the fuss people made over him. He would just as soon be one of the guys. Each year, the Yale trainers jokingly maintained an All-Ugly Squad, composed primarily of linemen who had lost teeth or gotten stitches. The handsome Dowling, of course, had little chance of being chosen. But as he came to the sideline after breaking his nose in the Cornell game, Dowling, pointing to his bloody face, crowed “U.S.! U.S.!”—thrilled that he might earn a place on the Ugly Squad.

Off the field, Dowling was amiable, if somewhat reserved. Like most Yale football captains, he was tapped for Skull and Bones, the most exclusive of Yale’s nine “secret societies,” whose alumni included William Howard Taft, McGeorge Bundy, and George H. W. Bush. But no one pegged Dowling as socially or politically ambitious, much less a devoted clubman. And though he switched majors from sociology to economics in his junior year and had to give up varsity basketball to bring up his grades, he would never have been mistaken for a grind. (Yale legend had it that if Dowling walked into a lecture hall at the beginning of the semester, when students were choosing classes, the other students applauded, certain they had found a gut.) He hung out with his roommates in front of Batman and Hogan’s Heroes, and joined an occasional road trip to Briarcliff or Vassar. On Saturday nights at DKE, while his frat brothers celebrated another Yale victory by knocking down whiskey sours, Dowling sipped a 7-Up and responded politely to the people who sought to warm themselves in his glow. Sunday morning he was always up in time for ten o’clock Mass at St. Mary’s. Like many great athletes, he wasn’t given to introspection or reflection. He seemed incapable of the world-weary irony and facetiousness that constituted the lingua franca of many Yale students. “Nothing ever bothered Brian, at least not outwardly,” Cozza would write many years later. “I don’t know what made him tick inside.”

He felt most himself on the playing field. He wanted to go pro, hoped to be drafted by his hometown Browns, the team he’d grown up watching with his father. And as he checked the college football scores in the New York Times on Sunday mornings that fall, if he occasionally wondered what it would have been like had he gone to USC, where a tailback named O. J. Simpson was setting records, he was glad that he had chosen Yale. When he heard “Boola Boola” or “Down the Field” played in the varsity locker room, the songs that had seemed so corny three years earlier now triggered a palpable feeling of pride.

*  *  *

On September 28, 1968, Yale opened its ninety-sixth football season against Connecticut in front of 33,373 fans at the Yale Bowl. The largest stadium in the world when it opened in 1914 (“We suppose the Yale Bowl . . . can be seen through a telescope from Mars,” observed the New York Times), the Bowl was beginning to show signs of wear, but its 70,869 seats—eighteen miles’ worth—had been given a fresh coat of Yale blue for what was expected to be a banner year. Yale was favored by three touchdowns.

In the first half, the defense recovered three fumbles and intercepted a pass, and the offense converted all four turnovers into touchdowns. The final score was 31–14. Afterward, in the locker room, tackle Kyle Gee said to his teammates, “One down, eight to go.”

The win came at a cost. In the fourth quarter, Calvin Hill, hit by a defensive back as he leaped high for a Dowling pass, flipped upside down and landed on his head. He was carried from the field on a stretcher and taken by ambulance to the Yale infirmary.

At most colleges, players who “got dinged” or had their “bell rung”—they didn’t like to use the word concussion, which made it sound serious—were asked by their trainers how many fingers they were holding up and who was the president of the United States. If they answered correctly, they were sent right back into the game. At Yale, things were different. The head trainer, Bill Dayton, had come to Yale from Texas A&M after being fired for objecting to Coach Bear Bryant’s practice of rushing players back on the field before their injuries had healed. At Yale, concussed players were kept out of action for a minimum of ten days.

Fortunately, the concussion Hill sustained was a mild one, and he seemed fine when Cozza visited him in the infirmary on Sunday morning with a plate of brownies.

*  *  *

On Monday morning, two days after Yale’s victory over Connecticut, students came down to breakfast to find a comic strip on the op-ed page of the Yale Daily News. It depicted a quarterback addressing a huddle. O.K. team, this play is the same as the last one . . . “The Cleveland Clutch.” The front line just blocks like hell. The ends run straight down the field, and you backs tear off around the ends. I’ll either pass downfield, or roll out to one of the backs, or I’ll run the ball myself, or maybe I’ll just punt it. In the last panel, the quarterback, whose huge helmeted head rested on a pencil-thin neck, turned to the reader with a sheepish grin. Actually, “The Cleveland Clutch” is a very flexible play.

Bull tales, as the comic strip was titled, was the work of a junior named Garretson “Garry” Trudeau. A third-generation Yalie, Trudeau had played football in junior high but given it up when he went off to boarding school and got interested in art. At Yale, he wrote for the campus humor magazine and became one of the thousands of undergraduates who flocked to the Bowl during the 1967 season, besotted with the team and its charismatic quarterback. In Trudeau’s case, his hero-worship was tempered with wry bemusement. He expressed his thoughts in a few cartoon strips, and showed them to an editor at the Yale Daily News. “They’re all right,” said the editor. “We publish pretty much anything.”

Over the course of the fall, Trudeau would introduce other characters to bull tales, including a self-conscious freshman named Mike Doonesbury, but he always returned to the football team. Though other players made cameo appearances, the strip revolved around “B.D.,” the endearingly single-minded quarterback who never took off his helmet, even on road trips to Briarcliff. Although a few players grumbled that the strip reduced them to stereotypical dumb jocks, like everyone else on campus they checked the News each morning to see if there was a fresh installment and, if so, whether they might be in it. Players passed it around on the bus to practice, ribbing Dowling for whatever his alter ego had done that day. With Loftus as the quarterback’s Boswell and Trudeau as his Daumier, Dowling’s legend grew.

*  *  *

In its second game of the season, Yale rolled to a 49–14 victory over Colgate. Even without Calvin Hill, the offense amassed 520 yards on a Yale-record 103 plays. The defense held Colgate to 9 yards rushing and 99 passing. Yale, which hadn’t lost since the first game the previous year, won its tenth consecutive victory.

Yale’s offense was even more impressive in its Ivy League opener against Brown. Before many people in the crowd of 29,511 found their seats, Yale led 14–0. It was 28–0 at the half, 35–13 at game’s end. Yale established a school-record 614 yards of offense: 307 on the ground, 307 through the air—the beau ideal of a balanced attack. Dowling produced 303 of those yards, rushing for 111 and completing seven of nine passes for 192 more, in what the New York Times’s Dave Anderson called “the most spectacular individual offensive performance in Yale’s distinguished football history.” Dowling, said the Brown coach, was “the most exciting football player in the country.”

Late in the third period, Dowling was on the bench when Charley Loftus, watching from the press box, realized his Merriwell was only three yards shy of the Yale single-game record for total offense. He got word to Cozza, who sent Dowling back in. After gaining a yard on a keeper around end, Dowling was hit out of bounds by a Brown player, triggering an outraged roar from Yale fans. Dowling hopped to his feet, seemingly unhurt—then suddenly buckled to his knees. It turned out to be nothing serious, but the incident put a scare into Yale coaches and fans, and reminded them just how much the 1968 season depended on their quarterback.