‘Harvard Beats Navy 29-29’ scores, even for non-football fans

Published 6:01 pm Thursday, March 19, 2009

If you don’t like football, the new documentary “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29” might possibly win you over.

And even if it doesn’t, there’s enough fascination in this film to keep you interested. This movie is an account of the 1968 match-up of college football’s oldest rivalry.

The score of the game is in the film’s title, so there’s little suspense there. But the circumstances of the contest were incredible at every level: The turbulent era made for an fascinating backdrop, both teams were unbeaten when they met in the last game of the season, and what happened in the final minute is a sterling example of how exciting football can be.

And then there are the personalities involved. One Harvard lineman, Tommy Lee Jones, would become a movie star, and a Yale player, Bob Levin, was dating a future star, Meryl Streep, a Vassar undergrad. Jones’ college roommate was Al Gore.

Yale had a quarterback, Brian Dowling, who’d never lost a game he’d completed; his nickname was God. The campus newspaper cartoonist used Dowling as the basis for his comic strip; the helmet-wearing B.D. survives in Garry Trudeau’s “Doonesbury” even today.

The well-known Yale cheerleader, George W. Bush, had already graduated before the 1968 game, although his roommate, Ted Livingstone, was still on the team. Livingstone recalls his roomie’s shenanigans involving a goal post-destroying incident.

Many of the players — dozens of them — are interviewed for the film by director Kevin Rafferty. Their memories of the game, but also of the times, are threaded throughout the picture, interspersed with wonderful game footage from the original TV broadcast.

There’s almost no other supporting material, except for a few of Trudeau’s cartoons — no narration, no updates on what the players are doing today, no explanation of why one of the biggest names from the game, future NFL star Calvin Hill, isn’t interviewed.

Also no mention that Rafferty himself, the man behind the memorable political documentary “Feed,” is a cousin of Bush.)

This leaves you wanting more, yet what you get is completely involving. The game was 40 years ago, but it’s obviously alive to each of the players. At one point Jones, whose demeanor sometimes threatens to freeze the camera lens, muses on how a lot of lives might have been different if Harvard had just made an extra-point kick early in the game.

The game is still on.