Connections: Fight Songs and Scotch Eggs

How was it possible to have attended all my high school’s football games and learned nothing about the game? As you might surmise, I was simply interested in other things — boys, for example. I was more attracted to the ones who played basketball. Besides, the only reason I went to all those football games was not because I was a fan but because I was a drum majorette.

Why am I thinking of football out of season, on a day like Tuesday, deadline day, when we were having such beautiful summer weather? Football came to mind last weekend because some of my grandchildren were playing their version of it on the front lawn. 

There were two kids on each side, ranging from 6 to 13 years old, and they quickly discovered I didn’t have a clue about flag patterns, zones, or hail Marys. I thought the game was divided into downs and that a new game started each time a fourth was called.

“It’s quarters, grandma,” one of the kids told me when she figured out what I was talking about.

Many years ago, when I was a young bride, my husband and I joined an East Hampton couple in going to Dartmouth games. Over the years, we must have attended at least 15 games with our friends Marlys and Peter, starting with one at Princeton before our children were born and attending others in New Haven as well as Hanover, where Ev and Peter had attended Dartmouth. Eventually our children came along, as wonderful photos of them in a tree in Hanover attest. But for me, the tailgate picnics were what mattered most. 

Peter and Marlys were outstanding cooks and providers. Many years have passed, but I haven’t forgotten Marlys’s pork pies or Peter’s Scotch eggs. (Maybe Laura Donnelly can describe the latter for readers who don’t know them.) That Ev and I were less accomplished was proven one fall day when the split-pea soup we had brought along in a Thermos exploded.

I seem to have only two distinct, and very personal, memories of those football weekends, and I guess it isn’t surprising they aren’t about the games themselves. One was during the Vietnam War, when all male citizens between 18 and 35 were required to register for the draft; I remember the crowds shouting “Fight, fight, fight!,” and being struck by how unacceptably oblivious of the outside world that chant was in wartime.

The other memory is funnier. I was incredibly impressed at one college game when a player I am now told was a running back caught the ball at one end of the field and spun away from attackers to make a long and sinuous run all the way to the goalposts. I was so impressed I began cheering loudly. The only problem was that we were in the stands among our fellow Dartmouth fans, and he was on the opposing team