New film explores football history

Fewer Princeton students, however, appreciate the role Princeton, and the Ivy League more broadly, had in shaping the sport of football, one of our nation’s most celebrated pastimes. Over the past two-and-a-half years, Mark Bernstein ’83 and Erik Anjou, a former college football player who graduated from Middlebury College in 1983, have co-produced a film titled “Eight: Ivy League Football and America.” The documentary on football in the Ancient Eight will premiere tonight at a sold-out event at the Yale Club of New York.

The motivations for the film, which is sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, arose from Bernstein’s 2001 book “Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession.” Bernstein, the film’s writer, and Anjou, the director, seek to underscore that the impact of Ivy League football has extended far beyond the schools’ campuses. As the film explains, the Ivy League was the birthplace of college football in 1869.

“Ivy League football is American football,” Anjou said. “From the coaches, the players, the rules of the game, everything that happens in football today, including some of the controversies, was first kind of confronted by the Ivy League schools.”

In tracing the history of football in the Ivies since 1869, Anjou and Bernstein — who were high school classmates — collected footage, photographs and other archived materials in addition to interviewing about 40 alumni, coaches and others affiliated with the league’s football establishment, with all eight conference members represented. The pair began interviewing in November 2005, beginning with one of Princeton’s own — former Secretary of State George Shultz ’42, who experienced an injury during his collegiate football career and later served as a coach for younger players in the Princeton program.

“His experience as a coach working with the players and … being on the sidelines and inspiring and teaching was a major force for him,” Anjou said. “I mean, it really inspired him and kind of thrust him along his way as a future politician, or statesman.”

The Ivy Football Association assisted Bernstein and Anjou in getting in touch with several well-known former players. As the film’s co-producers soon discovered, for many alumni, the intensity still has not dissipated from college football rivalries, even years after graduation. Rivalries remain nearly “poisonous — in a playful way,” Anjou said.

Some of the more high-profile alumni who Bernstein and Anjou interviewed include Tommy Lee Jones, a Harvard alumnus, and Calvin Hill, a Yale alumnus — former opponents on the gridiron who squared off against each other in an epic 29-29 tie in 1968.

“Tommy Lee Jones has won an Oscar,” Anjou said, “but he still hates Yale.”

As Anjou explained, the rivalries that exist in Ivy League football are often rooted on a more personal level.

“You play three or four years against the same guys you’ve been going up against, and you develop really intense personal rivalries with certain players and certain teams,” Anjou said. “Those personal rivalries end up trumping [school rivalries].”

Often one school might call another school its rival, but the rivalry is not reciprocated. There is one rivalry, however, that every Princeton student certainly can appreciate.

“It seems like one thing that everyone shares in common is that everybody [at every school] hates Harvard,” Anjou said. “That being said, Harvard at Yale easily seems the biggest rivalry, but a lot of the guys we talked to at Yale said Princeton was the biggest rival,” Anjou said.

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Beyond its appeal to Ivy League alumni and students, the film also aims to reach a much broader audience. Given the centrality of football in American culture, this film — despite being focused on the Ivy League — should attract viewers with no direct affiliation to any of the eight schools. Bernstein and Anjou want to market this film to Ivy Leaguers and non-Ivy Leaguers alike.

“Our goal in the best-case scenario would be to kind of broadcast the movie between now and the start of next football season,” Anjou said. “And then there would be a little window, and then after that window passes, we’d release it on DVD.”

For anyone with a passion for the Ivy League or football, the film will serve as an enlightening lens through which to view both the Ancient Eight and one of America’s greatest traditions.