“Actually, it’s a football game,” a friend and I quickly responded in unison. “You’re supposed to stand.”
No luck. So I resorted to the quip that had dispatched the previous malcontent.
“I’m a tutor,” he barked. “Don’t fuck with me.”
Sure enough he was a tutor—Daniel Sussner of Kirkland’s ‘J’ entry, a history tutor and Foreign Cultures 21 TF, to be precise—though the relevance of that claim continues to elude all with whom I’ve shared the fact. Once it has been made clear that this entire saga played out in the stands, and not in his section, anyway.
According to Sussner’s official Kirkland biography, as posted on the House’s website, he “grew up in Paris and San Francisco, torn between Giant’s [sic] baseball and European soccer.”
Now I’m not intimately familiar with the cheering habits of the “hooligans” who fill the stands overlooking soccer pitches worldwide, but—based on their record of drunken rioting and routinely beating one another senseless—I’m going to go ahead and assume that standing up to take in particularly exciting portions of a game is an accepted part of their culture. It is, unfortunately, one which Sussner was not familiar with.
Informed a second time that neither my friends nor I had any intention of sitting while our beloved Crimson battled on the field, Sussner headed for an event staff representative, presumably to seek our ejection.
The tutor told the red-jacketed usher that we had been particularly belligerent, cursed at him, and probably didn’t attend Harvard anyway. All this as Yale mounted a second-quarter comeback push. I consider it nothing short of a miracle that I was able to enjoy Ricky Williamson’s 100-yard interception return at all.
Thankfully, as my assembled group of friends and I leapt for joy following that score, which extended the Harvard lead to 21, Sussner disappeared into the crowd, never to be heard from again. Yet, as the stands swelled to hold the drunken masses pouring in from the tailgate, I could not rest easy for fear that Sussner would re-emerge at a critical moment to rain on my metaphorical parade.
He didn’t. But someone like him probably will in the future. So, once-a-year fans, stay where you belong: on the Cambridge side of the river.
—Staff writer Timothy J. McGinn can be reached at mcginn@fas.harvard.edu.