Football's secret weapon: Menscots

Most people know part of the story of the prophet Jonah, how he spent three days in the belly of a whale without ill effects to himself. (As for the whale, no medical records have survived.) But few people remember how Jonah got there. He was thrown overboard by his waterlogged shipmates, who thought he had jinxed their smooth sailing. I feared the same fate at the Colgate game Saturday a week ago.

The athletic enterprise at Princeton is a big ship, and it makes waves. Its claims on our financial resources are significant and its influence on admissions policy profound. Most faculty don't think much about athletics at all, but, of those who do, some are uneasy and some frankly hostile. Fortunately Princeton has in Gary Walters an athletic director who understands, and indeed exemplifies, the concept of the "scholar-athlete." He has undertaken a number of initiatives to reach out to faculty, including encouraging the recruitment by many varsity teams of semiofficial faculty menscots — as in half mentor, half mascot.

The professor charged with that role for the football team is the noted historian Robert Tignor. In conjunction with the coaches, Tignor has taken things a step further yet. For each of this year's home events, one or two professors are being invited to see the games as most players do, pacing up and down the sidelines. Thus did I view the Colgate game, peering out from my dripping poncho on the wettest day of the year.

Empirical data had supported the hypothesis that the presence of the bench-warming professors brings luck. Going into this game the Tigers' record was 3-0 — a fact not without rebuke to me, since I am in print in the annual "Pigskin Picks" with the prediction of a 5-5 season. But within a minute of my toe's touching the sideline turf, the Tigers blundered fatally, and Colgate scored. Lots of water later, the record would be 3-1. By the second quarter I sensed or imagined hostile glares from the players. (Even paranoids have real enemies, after all.) Fearing the Jonah treatment, I slunk back to the stands for the second half.

Except for rare moments when you are right on top of the action, a central seat in the bleachers probably offers a better view, and you can hear just as clearly from either place why they call him the Offensive Line Coach. But the power rush of holding a field pass is heady. My mind went back half a century to the little southern town in which I myself played. There were always three or four old guys, special cronies of Coach, who hung around our home team bench, chewing on wooden matches and registering with vivid body language their approbation or disapprobation of our performance. One of them was a dentist, another the Chevrolet dealer, and they were exercising some ancient privilege unquestioned and unquestionable, granted in some unwritten constitution. There is a category of Special People, and those Special People shoot the breeze with coaches and stand importantly there on the field, right in front of everybody.

So despite the drenching rain and the intermittent waves of cloying self-consciousness, I felt that it was absolutely right — appropriate, condign, just — that I should be placed there among a Princeton bench so deep as to fortify the Energies of Youth with the Wisdom of the Ancients. My only lack was a blue-tipped match to chew on.

I hope that through the activities of the menscots, among other things, many more faculty will become active supporters of Tiger athletics — and of other performative activities, such as music-making and drama — which showcase the youthful enthusiasm and extraordinary talents of so many of our students. The recent monsoons are meteorological aberrations. On a fine autumn Saturday, there's really nothing much more life can offer than an unapologetically amateur Ivy sporting event.

After the season is over, there is a large, off-campus event called the Football Banquet at which all the players and coaches dine in the company of aging friends of Princeton football, including many ex-players among the alumni, a certain number of dragooned administrators and a small but loyal band of faculty fans. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride; but it would be my sincere wish that the Tigers win all six of the games that lie before them as I write this. That would vindicate the reckless and sycophantic optimism of Pigskin Pickers Hargadon and Tilghman, but it would probably mean that the waiter would arrive at my place with a roasted crow still sporting its black feathers. That would be a small price to pay for the team's success, and, anyway, a well-cooked crow couldn't taste much worse than the general run of hotel banquet rubber chicken. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.