Did anyone go into Yale's stadium back in the day? I have no idea what it looks like on the inside, and I went to 4 Yale Bowls.
The original Yale Bowl seated 70,000. It was built in 1914. It was constructed by digging a huge, oval-shaped hole in the earth and piling the excavated dirt symmetrically around the rim of the hole in a perfect oval shape. Then they built the 30 entrances, called portals, all the way around. Those were long tunnels underneath the upper part of the bowl, reinforced with concrete obviously so they don't cave in. It is really quite a marvel of engineering. When you walk in you are exactly the same number of feet from the field level as you are from the top rim...I believe it used to be 54 rows all around, so 27 rows up from field to ground level.
The seats were all bleachers except they did have a rather high back plank to lean against when you sat back.
My dad and I used to attend every Yale game throughout the 1960's and early 70's. My sister got married in 1967. They eloped but we still could have gone to the wedding. It was in NH somewhere. Instead we went to the bowl that day to watch the Giants play the Minnesota Vikings. There was one exhibition game there each season with the Giants. Later the Giants played two seasons there when Yankee Stadium was being refurbished.
There were many great games there. Yale was mostly mediocre during the decade. They won the Ivy League in 1960. The center on that team, Mike Pyle, went on to play with the Chicago Bears. We saw Pete Gogolak kick five FGs to beat the Yale freshmen team. He was the first soccer style kicker in the NFL for the Giants. We saw his brother kick for Princeton a couple years later. Charley kicked for the Redskins.
We saw the first game UCONN ever won against Yale after 16 tries. They wouldn't play us in Storrs for obvious reasons, so all the games were always at the bowl. Rick Forzano was the UCONN HC that day, along with Lou Holtz and Sam Rutigliano as assistants, all of whom went on to careers in the NFL and Holtz in the NFL and college. Skip Holtz was born in Willimantic.
When Gene Campbell intercepted a Yale pass late in the fourth quarter the crowd (40,000+) of mostly UCONN fans went wild. So did we. I was there with a UCONN co-ed, her father and my father. We were jumping up and down. It had pretty much been expected that might be the year...1965.
The two other years Yale was good were 1967 and 68, when they had Brian Dowling at QB and Calvin Hill at tailback. They won the Ivy League in a game at Palmer Stadium against Princeton and finished 7-2. We attended that game. The next season was the famous one when The Game at Harvard Stadium saw both teams perfect at 8-0. Yale was ranked 18th in the country and heavily favored to beat Harvard, a great defensive team but mediocre offensively. I think Yale was favored by close to two TDs.
That was the now infamous 29-29 tie, when the headline in the Boston Globe the next day read, "Harvard beats Yale 29-29". That was accurate We saw that game. Harvard had to score 16 points in 42 seconds to tie it. Harvard would have won if they hadn't missed an XP on their first TD. There were thousands of fans on the field behind the goal posts for the last minute of the game at the closed end of the horseshoe. They went completely crazy when Harvard's Pete Varney caught the 2 pt. conversion pass in the EZ on the last play which tied the game. He was mobbed, everyone was mobbed. Tommy Lee Jones was a senior All-Ivy OG on that Harvard team.
Yes, many memories from the old Yale Bowl, where the smell of cigar smoke permeated the air. I think all the games started at 12:30 pm because there were no lights so the games had to end before the sun got too low in the sky. With no TV, no OTs and no instant replay, the games moved along very quickly. They'd get modest crowds in the 20 - 30,000 range for lesser opponents like Columbia and Cornell and some OOC games, but they'd get huge crowds some years for Dartmouth, Princeton, and always for Harvard. Dartmouth had some great teams in the 60's, Princeton in the early 6O's and Harvard in the mid to late 60's.
I saw a lot of future NFL stars and players. The Gogolaks, Gary Wood, a great QB for Cornell who later went on to be a backup QB for the Giants, Archie Roberts, QB for Columbia who had a brief pro career, Calvin Hill, longtime tailback for the Cowboys and later the Redskins, Marv Hubbard, who played for Colgate and later was a star tailback for John Madden with the Oakland Raiders, Mark Van Eeghen, ditto, Ed Marinaro, amazing tailback from Cornell and runner up for the 1971 Heisman Trophy, later played a prominent role with the Minnesota Vikings, Pat McInally of Harvard, went on to garner fame with the Bengals as a TE and punter for several seasons, John Dockery, a great Harvard CB who later became a starter for the NY Jets, and last but not least, our own Husky tailback Vinny Clements, the pride of Southington HS and later the NY Giants. I think his pro career was cut short by injury. God knows the Giants could have used a tailback during those seasons.
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