I’ll be speaking about my latest book, The Game: Harvard, Yale, and America in 1968, which tells the story of the 1968 Harvard-Yale football game, the legendary 29-29 tie that is on nearly every list of the top ten most exciting games in college gridiron history. Although the book includes a detailed description of the game itself, this is a book about more than football. It’s a book about a watershed year in American history (the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, rioting at the Democratic National Convention, the Tet Offensive, increasing racial tension, not to mention sex, drugs, and rock and roll) as navigated by a group of young men and by the contrasting institutions they attended.  (In the course of my research I interviewed 54 of the players who took the field on November 23, 1968.) As Publishers Weekly observed, “By humanizing the players, the accounts of each team’s amazing season and the four-chapter recap of their final, unbelievable game are elevated above entertaining sports reporting to thoughtful, emotional storytelling. This excellent history illustrates sport’s powerful role in American society.” The Wall Street Journal called it “the rare sports book that lives up to the claim of so many entrants in this genre: It is, in its way, the portrait of an era.”

I’ll talk about how I came to write the book, about the process of writing and editing it, and about the unexpected relevance readers have found in it.

Host: Alex Garnett

On November 23, 1968, there was a turbulent and memorable football game: the season-ending clash between Harvard and Yale. The final score was 29-29. To some of the players, it was a triumph; to others a tragedy. And to many, the reasons had as much to do with one side’s miraculous comeback in the game’s final forty-two seconds as it did with the months that preceded it, months that witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, police brutality at the Democratic National Convention, inner-city riots, campus takeovers, and, looming over everything, the war in Vietnam.

George Howe Colt’s The Game is the story of that iconic American year, as seen through the young men who lived it and were changed by it. One player had recently returned from Vietnam. Two were members of the radical antiwar group SDS. There was one NFL prospect who quit to devote his time to black altruism; another who went on to be Pro-Bowler Calvin Hill. There was a guard named Tommy Lee Jones, and fullback who dated a young Meryl Streep. They played side by side and together forged a moment of startling grace in the midst of the storm.

“Vibrant, energetic, and beautifully structured” (NPR), this magnificent and intimate work of history is the story of ordinary people in an extraordinary time, and of a country facing issues that we continue to wrestle with to this day. “The Game is the rare sports book that lives up to the claim of so many entrants in this genre: It is the portrait of an era” (The Wall Street Journal).

Video of his presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93l0d5gaNMA