The literary star wasn’t just a Princeton football
fanatic. He helped inspire a key innovation on the field.
The Newman School football team with F. Scott
Fitzgerald seated third from the left in the front row.
By
Kevin Helliker
You don’t need to know about the literary backdrop
of Princeton University football to take an interest in Saturday’s game against
Harvard. For two years running this storied rivalry has produced thrillers that
came down to the final seconds—last year in triple overtime. At stake once
again is the Ivy League title.
It’s safe to say that this weekend’s game would
have mattered a lot to F. Scott Fitzgerald. As a prep-school student in the
stands for the 1911 installment of the rivalry, Fitzgerald watched Princeton
pull off an improbable late victory. At that instant, his biographers say, he
vowed to enroll at Princeton. Once there, he tried out for the team—but got cut
on the first day, a well-chronicled disappointment that some scholars believe
explains the sense of rejection that permeates his novels, especially “The
Great Gatsby.”
But long overlooked evidence suggests that football
didn’t just influence Fitzgerald: Fitzgerald himself may have exerted a
decisive influence on the development of the game.
The evidence comes from a 1956 interview with Fritz
Crisler, a man who unquestionably shaped the game of football. After becoming
head coach at Michigan in 1938, Crisler established the practice of fielding
distinct offensive and defensive units; previously, 11 men had played both
sides of the ball for 60 minutes. This shift became Crisler’s legacy. His
biography at the College Football Hall of Fame calls him “the father of
two-platoon football.”
The tantalizing question raised by the 1956
interview is: Did Crisler get the idea from Fitzgerald? It is not a subject
discussed in the ever-expanding library of popular and academic writing on
Fitzgerald. (This year alone has seen the publication of at least three books
about Fitzgerald.)
Scholars who focus on Fitzgerald’s fascination with
money, women, booze, jazz and 1920s Paris have never made much of his devotion
to a Princeton football team that won 10 national championships in his
lifetime. His life as a devoted fan never fit well in the narrative of
Fitzgerald as a tortured artist, heartbroken by his wife’s mental illness and
confronted at every turn by commercial failure.
Even at Princeton, there is little awareness that
the university’s most famous dropout fanatically followed the Tigers. “I had no
idea Fitzgerald was a football fan,” says Princeton football coach Bob Surace,
a Princeton graduate whose coming reunion carries the Fitzgeraldian theme of
“This Side of Paradise” (the title of the author’s first novel).
Fitzgerald was, in fact, a pioneer of the fanaticism
that characterizes so many college football fans today, and his relationship
with Crisler is exhibit one.
Wooed from Minnesota, Crisler became the head coach
at Princeton in 1932, 15 years after Fitzgerald had dropped out as a junior.
Crisler stayed five years, winning two national championships, before moving on
to Michigan, where he stayed as coach and athletic director for more than 20
years. He died in 1982.
In 1956, a Michigan graduate student in romance
languages did something that apparently no other Fitzgerald scholar had done
before. The student, Donald A. Yates, asked Crisler if during his Princeton
years he’d had any contact with Fitzgerald. Mr. Yates got an earful, and in
1956 he published an article about it in the Michigan Daily, the university’s
student newspaper.
During his Princeton years, Crisler told Mr. Yates,
his phone would ring late at night before games. Answering, he would hear the
voice of Fitzgerald, calling from Miami, Chicago or Hollywood. The calls came
“between 12 midnight and six a.m. of the night before our games—not just
sometimes, but practically every eve of every home game,” Crisler told Mr.
Yates. Often, behind Fitzgerald’s voice, Crisler heard the laughter and cries
of a dying party.
What Fitzgerald called to talk about was Princeton
football. “It wasn’t just a matter of the habitual old-grad spirit and
enthusiasm,” said Crisler. “There was something beyond comprehension in the
intensity of his feelings. Listening to him unload his soul as many times as I
did, I finally came to the conclusion that what Scott felt was really an
unusual, a consuming devotion for the Princeton football team.”
In his article about the Crisler interview, Mr.
Yates argued that Fitzgerald’s obsession with Princeton football was rooted in his
failed effort to make the Princeton team as a freshman. Yet Fitzgerald had to
have known he had little chance of making that era’s most dominant college
football team: He weighed only 135 pounds, and in high school he had been a
mediocre player.
He was a smart football fan, though, to judge from
that 1956 interview. “Sometimes he had a play or a new strategy he wanted me to
use,” said Crisler. “Some of the ideas Scott used to suggest to me over the
phone were reasonable—and some were fantastic.”
In the fantastic department, Crisler cited an
example: Fitzgerald, he said, “came up with a scheme for a whole new offense.
Something that involved a two-platoon system.”
At the time of the interview, the coach was already
known as the father of two-platoon football. But Mr. Yates didn’t know that. “I
didn’t pay a lot of attention to sports,” says Mr. Yates, now 84 and a
professor emeritus of Latin American literature at Michigan State University.
So Mr. Yates didn’t ask Crisler the million-dollar
question: Did he get the idea for a two-platoon system from Fitzgerald? Looking
back at the statements Crisler made to him, Mr. Yates says, “That seems to be
what he is saying.”
In the early years of college football, the NCAA
limited the use of substitutes to cases of injury. In the early 1940s, when
Crisler implemented a two-platoon system at Michigan, the NCAA was starting to
relax those rules. Platoon-based football was a much-discussed topic at the
time and may well have originated elsewhere than with Fitzgerald.
Even so, “he was way ahead of his time,” says Mr.
Surace, the current Princeton coach. “The thinking back then was that if you
had a great player, you’d be crazy to take him out for half the game.”
There’s one bit of supporting evidence. In 1962,
Fitzgerald acquaintance Andrew Turnbull wrote a biography of the author. He
recounts that Asa Bushnell, a Princeton athletic manager during the Crisler
years, reported receiving a call from Fitzgerald promoting the idea of distinct
units of players. “Princeton must have two teams,” Fitzgerald told Bushnell,
according to the book. “One will be big—all men over two hundred [pounds]. This
team will be used to batter them down and wear them out. Then the little team,
the pony team, will go in and make the touchdowns.”
Fitzgerald never stopped thinking and writing about
football. In 1936 he published in Esquire a hilarious story about a Princeton
team whose best player is an ant—that’s right, an insect.
At the age of 44, he was reading a Princeton Alumni
Weekly analysis of the coming season—a document that now resides in the
Princeton library—when a fatal heart attack felled him. In the margins of that
newsletter, Fitzgerald had scribbled several comments, including “good
prose”—which makes college football the last thing he ever wrote about.
Corrections & Amplifications
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 short story about an ant
on the Princeton football team was published in Esquire. An earlier version of
this article incorrectly said that the story, called “The Ants at Princeton,”
was published in the Saturday Evening Post. (Oct 29, 2014)
Write to Kevin Helliker at kevin.helliker@wsj.com