John Hoffman '65, first-team All-Ivy tackle, honors English student, and actor, wrote the following article from notes he kept during the week before this fall's Harvard-Yale football game which Harvard won, 18-14. Hoffman whose right knee had been injured in the game against Princeton, missed the Brown game, the Saturday before Yale, because of injury. The next week, he started practicing again.

Monday

Monday is a day not of contact, but of review. We go over our own plays and the other team's plays; we learn what we missed because of injuries ("Are you whole?" Jim Feula asked nervously) and we work to sharpen up the things we've worked on all season long.

We reviewed Yale's offense carefully. "The big thing to watch is that fullback up the middle," said Jim Lentz. "They rely on it a lot. There's an option--they fake to the fullback off tackle and pitch to a halfback outside, but the fullback runs right at the tackle anyway. When he does that, I don't mind if you knock him down," he smiled happily.

Again and again we went over defense--weak, strong, power and normal--and then worked against the offense's pass attack. Dave Davis and Pete Peterson, still relatively new men, needed help remembering the "east" and "west" calls on pass defense (which determine whether a tackle charges the passer on a dropback pass)

We went to offense, charging a group that held blocking dummies in the position of the Yale defense. I realized that it was my first contact in a week as I went thundering into one of the sophomores. He threw down the blocking dummy in disgust--I had stepped on his toe.

Practice ended about 6:15 p.m., and for 45 minutes the team watched the movies of Saturday's Brown game in groups: guards and centers, tackles and ends, and backs, listening to the coaches point out mistakes. This time I stayed away; my knee injury had kept me out of the game.

I hitched my usual ride on Dan Calderwood's motorcycle and we drove to the Varsity Club, where the team eats together. Someone mentioned that people were thinking of having a prep rally the night before the game. Van Cunningham, the manager, thought it would be a good idea, but the team was against it. "We're just sacrificial cows," said Paul Barringer, and he spoke for a lot of us; the students who treat football players as a joke would treat the pep rally as a joke, and this week no one was in a joking mood.

Usually I leave the world of football after dinner, but on Mondays there is a team meeting to go over the scouting reports on the week's opponent. The coaches handed out a 20-page brochure on Yale: the roster, statistics, play diagrams, defense diagrams, and on and on. Bob Gongola, the offensive backfield coach, had scouted them. Gongola, tall, blond, and muscular, with a flat-top haircut, stands out by inches when the coaches pose for pictures. He is, in his own immortal phrase, "a big stud."

"That Mercein, he's a big stud," he was saying (the coaches never considered, at least to us, the delicious possibility that Yale's star fullback might not play). "He's the spark of the team. They're a great comeback team, they love to come back at you in the fourth quarter, and he's the guy who sparks them."

It was a heavy team, Gongola told us. The line averaged 217 pounds, and they had good depth. He warned us about Bill Henderson, a speedy halfback with a 6.7-yard average, and about Mercein (but Mercein, Gongola had noticed, had a weakness--on a play that was to send him into the line, he lined up on his toes. If he was to run around end, he stayed back on his heels. It was something any lineman could see and exploit).

We split up into positions again; I stayed with the tackles and ends as we watched Yale play Dartmouth on film. They had beaten Dartmouth, 24-14; we had lost to Dartmouth 48-0. But they weren't unbeatable. "Yeah, they can be had," said Jim Lentz.

Tuesday

Chuck Reischel is a big, fast, tough right guard, who is in Group II and wants to be a political scientist. While Jack Fadden taped his hip, Reischel explained Machiavelli to an awed audience of junior Tom Choquette. Reischel had been looked on with awe all fall for his football playing as well as his academic status. His fellow linemen called him "the iron horse" since almost everybody else on the line had missed some kind of work because of injuries.

I was a good example. I was a bit slow getting down to the Field House, and took so long getting my various sore joints taped that I was five minutes late to practice. I missed calisthenics and ran over to where Feula was leading the tackles through practice blocking.