Restic leaned forward. "The one thing I do here more than anything else is not football," he said. "I write recommendations. For business opportunities, for graduate school. The other things? Not even close.

"I believe that football on this level should be amateur. I believe in the League, I believe in the philosophy. But even as I say this, things are starting to change a little bit, and that concerns me. But not at Harvard. Not...at...Harvard."

At his team's spring practice in early May, Head Football Coach Joe Restic announced he would retire following the upcoming season. The 1993 Game, held at Yale on November 20, will be his 23rd and last.

Restic will leave as Harvard's all-time winningest and losingest coach. He will also have coached Harvard football longer than anyone else in the school's history.

When Restic first came to Harvard in 1971, he was a hotshot fortysomething coach from the Canadian Football League with many unorthodox ideas about how football should be played. Now, as he prepares to leave, his "radical" ideas--such as single-back formations and the importance of a strong passing game--have become the norm in both the college and professional leagues. But Restic is still an oddity in college sports. In this era of "big money" college athletics, Restic has become one of the nation's leading spokespeople for the ideal of the student-athlete and the value of football as a life-shaping experience.

"The philosophy of 'win at all costs' and the attempt by many to make football a high-powered promotion and a money-making business could quickly change its nature and destroy the value of the game," Restic said in 1977.

Restic's legacy in this era of creeping professionalization has been to fight it everywhere he could. Even when his own league voted to discontinue freshman football--a Harvard tradition since 1876--he resisted.

Not at Harvard, he says. Not at Harvard.

Joe Restic once struck out Mickey Mantle.

Restic was a pitcher for the Philadelphia Triple-A farm club, and Mantle was on the fast track for the majors. Restic doesn't like to tell this story, and it shows. He's bored. It was a long time ago. But at one point during his narrative, his eyes light up.

"Mantle, of course, goes on to be a great player," Restic says. "And he could hit from both sides, both sides of the plate."

Like Mantle, Restic built a career on the philosophy that doing many things is better than doing one. Although he didn't start playing football until he was 15 (a high school coach saw Restic kicking a football with his friends and recruited him on the spot, George Gipp-style), Restic and his "Multi-Flex" offense opened doors for coaches throughout the sport.

Instead of featuring a conservative three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust attack, the Multi-Flex was designed to attack a defense on every front. Putting men in motion, spreading the field, throwing the ball--the Multi-Flex probed for a weakness and exploited whatever it found.

Restic wanted the defense on its heels, not sure of what was coming next. He wanted confusion, and he got it.

In his first Yale game, Restic put the quarterback in motion. The ball was snapped to the fullback (who was also a backup quarterback), and he threw it to the original quarterback for a touchdown. The play made the papers as far away as Louisville, Kentucky.

"If you saw the eyes on [Yale's] two defensive backs," Restic says fondly. "I watched those eyes as the quarterback went in motion, and those Yale backs, their eyes got so big..."