The Game: Isabella’s Football Fandom

Almost every November since 1875, the football teams from Harvard and Yale Universities have played “The Game.” Before the establishment of the National Football League in 1920, collegiate football was the main focus of both fans and players. The Game was a highlight of the season. In the early days of the gridiron, it was like the Super Bowl—this was particularly true in 1908, and Isabella Stewart Gardner, an avid sports fan, followed it closely.

Yale was a dominant force in early collegiate football. In the run-up to the 1908 season, they had won every matchup with Harvard for the past six years. They had not lost a single game since 1904. However, starting in 1908, Harvard had a new transformative coach: Percy Haughton. His inaugural season coaching the Crimson was impressive: the 1908 team was undefeated with only one game left, the annual matchup against similarly undefeated Yale. 

Rules, scoring systems, and strategies were in flux in the early years of football. Haughton pioneered a new strategy: the trick play. Against Yale, the Harvard team executed a quick snap to an unassuming kicker, Victor Kennard, who had just been substituted onto the field. Before the defense could react, he kicked a field goal (then worth four points). Ultimately, the Crimson went on to win 4-0. It was a triumph.¹

Isabella had long been a Harvard sports fan: she followed the careers of scholar-athletes like Edward O. Gourdin, noted the school’s results in rowing races, and was generally a booster of all things Crimson. She gleefully celebrated Harvard’s winning 1908 season and their defeat of Yale. Her guestbook from the time features a series of clippings about the team’s success, and even a postcard from the game itself sent by Coach Haughton’s sister, Alison Turnbull Lawrence Haughton. 

With this Harvard triumph, Gardner went one step further in her fandom: she invited the winning team to dinner. In the winter of 1909, she extended the invitation to Coach Haughton. We have his reply in the archives, sent on February 17. After explaining that many of his players (and his wife, who was also invited) were traveling at the moment, he promised that once Gardner provided them with a date for the gathering, he would “warn the men not to allow any engagement to interfere with yours.” An inscription in Isabella’s hand tells us exactly what the event would be: “Supper in the Dutch Room in honor of football team—score 4-0 over Yale.” 
 

The team—including the kicker Kennard—signed Gardner’s guestbook on the evening of Friday, March 19. As noted in guard Samuel Hoar’s letter to Coach Haughton they had a wonderful evening dining with Rembrandt, Rubens, and the other Dutch masters. This type of victory grand celebration is definitely something Yale would never be able to match. 

Notes
¹ Dick Friedman, The Coach Who Strangled the Bulldog: How Harvard’s Percy Haughton Beat Yale and Reinvented Football. (Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press, 2020).