Join Harvard Club of Chicago and co-sponsor Yale Club of Chicago, for an online conversation with The Game author, George Howe Colt.
Special guests joining Mr Colt are players from The Game, 1968:
Gus Crim, Harvard fullback, Bob Levin, Yale fullback (also Harvard Masters of Ed 1972) and JP Goldsmith, Yale’s starting safety.
Anticipate raffles, prizes, and a fascinating discussion looking back at The Game.
About George Howe Colt and The Game
George Howe Colt is a bestselling National Book Award finalist and author of The Game: Harvard, Yale and America in 1968 , “a narrative packed with top-notch reporting and relevance for our own time” (The Boston Globe) about the young athletes who battled in the legendary Harvard-Yale football game of 1968 amidst the sweeping currents of one of the most transformative years in American history.
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 a fullback who dated a young Meryl Streep. Whether they played side-by-side or across the line of scrimmage, together they unwittingly forged a moment of startling grace amidst the storm.
Fast-forward fifty-three years, one year after this legendary gridiron rivalry was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic, to a time when America is once again in the midst of polarizing times and challenges, please join the Harvard Club of Chicago and the Yale Club of Chicago as we celebrate the highly anticipated resumption of The Game and hear from George Howe Colt on his timeless masterpiece that spans the worlds of sport and play, two revered institutions, and the challenges confronting our nation.
“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).
Date: Wednesday, November 10, 2021
Time: 5:30 - 6:30pm Central
Zoom Event!
Cost:
Harvard Alumni - Complimentary
General Public $10
Zoom Meeting information will be included in your HCC registration confirmation email. A reminder will also be sent on the day of the event.