Because both sides have heard the complete series of exortations, everybody is fusions. The players are as angry at Williams as they are at their opponents, and they play with an aroused fury. Laughs come a bit later. In the meantime, the stratagem has had its desired effect.

Williams has always wanted to coach. Born in Mars, a small town close to Pittsburgh, he attended the University of Pittsburgh, from which he was graduated in 1931. Short and wiry, he played wingback--a left-handed one, too--for Pitt, travelling to the Rose Bowl in 1930. (Southern Cal murdered us," he recalls.)

In the course of his coaching career, he has moved from Pitt to Florida to Temple, and back to Pitt. The second stretch with the Panthers terminated in 1950 when Lloyd Jordan, newly-appointed here, asked Williams to come to Cambridge.

At Florida, Williams had coached the golf team, a task he has recently assumed here. He disclaims any exceptional ability ("I'm just out there for the fun of it"), and, indeed, laughs aside inquiries about his scores.

"It's going to be tough," he says, in reference to his new post, "To do a decent job, we really ought to be out on the greens all fall, then practice on the indoor range during the winter.

"But even with the handicaps, I hope we can bring Harvard's golf team up to where it should be."

Right now, however, Williams is turning all his abundant energies toward football, and final preparations for Saturday's finale. The game is to Williams something more than a sport, to be forgotten when winter comes. It is a contribution to life, in the very best sense of the phrase.

"I'll tell you," he says. "Football is a team game, and of course your aim is to have all eleven men functioning as a unit.

"But before you can have teamwork, each man has to do his own job well. Everybody fulfills his particular function, and then the whole thing moves."

Which, it would seem, is a solid outlook for a man who is a teacher as well as a producer of victories.