kardplayer
November 1st, 2007, 09:28 PM
Since this month is Lehigh/Lafayette month, I thought it would be great for anyone who’s been to, played in, cheered for, or otherwise participated in college football’s most played rivalry to share some of their memories. I’ll go first.
My first Lehigh/Lafayette experience was my freshman year – 1990, the last year students got to “go for post” before the administrations decided that was a bad idea (in retrospect, they were right, but as you’ll read in a future post, not many students agreed, but I digress).
Walk into any fraternity bar at Lehigh, and you’ll see a trophy of Lehigh/Lafayette games past – a piece of a goalpost. My fraternity was new at the time – our founding fathers were seniors, and this was the first year we had enough brothers and pledges to go after it and get a trophy of our own.
During the week before the game, we had a house meeting to make our game plan. One of the brothers (I was a pledge) gave us the rules.
1. No fraternity letters – so we couldn’t be ID’ed by security, or by other houses going for post
2. No pledge pins – so it was clear we weren’t forced to do this
3. No hoods – so we couldn’t be pulled down from behind
4. Protect each other above all else
With rules in place, we then discussed our plan to actually get the post.
Our plan was simple, go hard for the post, grab on to what we could, and then have those not holding on beat up the guys that were trying to beat up our guys who were holding on (gee, I wonder why they stopped this tradition). Get it back to the bus (the game was at Lafayette), and we were home free.
The day before the game, I thought would be “business as usual” in class, but I was very wrong. Halfway through my economics lecture (class size – a couple hundred), the Marching 97 (the Lehigh band) came in. They took the stage of the auditorium, played some of the fight songs, and led us in a raucous chant of Lafayette S***s (a high class bunch we were). To cap it off, they handed the professor a beer, which he promptly chugged to wild applause.
Finally gameday was upon us. The good guys won 35-14, but I remember very little of the game itself. What I do remember was standing at the gate to the football field as the game clock wound towards 0, with a few hundred (thousand?) people waiting around me to make that charge and “go for post”. The security guard who was holding the gate asked us not to jump over the fence, but to just wait until the game was over and he’d open it up for us.
Sure enough, the clock struck zero, the student-athletes evacuated the field, and the student-idiots took over. As we raced towards the post along with the rest of the mob, a near tragedy occurred - my pledge brother took a header and was lying face down on the ground. Worried that he would be trampled, I started shoving people so they would go around him, and then helped him up. The good news was, he wasn’t hurt. The bad news was, we had lost the rest of our fraternity. I looked up, and the goalposts were not only down, but they were nowhere in sight.
We headed back to the bus, feeling like we had let our fraternity down, but there was a surprise waiting for us – a good long piece of goalpost was taking the ride home with us. After fighting with another house, and giving and getting some black eyes and bloody lips, the guys decided to split it down the middle – and it hung in our bar from that night onward.
My next memory will be about the 1991 game – the year they decided to not let students tear down the goalposts – and the police vs. student riot that occurred as a result.
My first Lehigh/Lafayette experience was my freshman year – 1990, the last year students got to “go for post” before the administrations decided that was a bad idea (in retrospect, they were right, but as you’ll read in a future post, not many students agreed, but I digress).
Walk into any fraternity bar at Lehigh, and you’ll see a trophy of Lehigh/Lafayette games past – a piece of a goalpost. My fraternity was new at the time – our founding fathers were seniors, and this was the first year we had enough brothers and pledges to go after it and get a trophy of our own.
During the week before the game, we had a house meeting to make our game plan. One of the brothers (I was a pledge) gave us the rules.
1. No fraternity letters – so we couldn’t be ID’ed by security, or by other houses going for post
2. No pledge pins – so it was clear we weren’t forced to do this
3. No hoods – so we couldn’t be pulled down from behind
4. Protect each other above all else
With rules in place, we then discussed our plan to actually get the post.
Our plan was simple, go hard for the post, grab on to what we could, and then have those not holding on beat up the guys that were trying to beat up our guys who were holding on (gee, I wonder why they stopped this tradition). Get it back to the bus (the game was at Lafayette), and we were home free.
The day before the game, I thought would be “business as usual” in class, but I was very wrong. Halfway through my economics lecture (class size – a couple hundred), the Marching 97 (the Lehigh band) came in. They took the stage of the auditorium, played some of the fight songs, and led us in a raucous chant of Lafayette S***s (a high class bunch we were). To cap it off, they handed the professor a beer, which he promptly chugged to wild applause.
Finally gameday was upon us. The good guys won 35-14, but I remember very little of the game itself. What I do remember was standing at the gate to the football field as the game clock wound towards 0, with a few hundred (thousand?) people waiting around me to make that charge and “go for post”. The security guard who was holding the gate asked us not to jump over the fence, but to just wait until the game was over and he’d open it up for us.
Sure enough, the clock struck zero, the student-athletes evacuated the field, and the student-idiots took over. As we raced towards the post along with the rest of the mob, a near tragedy occurred - my pledge brother took a header and was lying face down on the ground. Worried that he would be trampled, I started shoving people so they would go around him, and then helped him up. The good news was, he wasn’t hurt. The bad news was, we had lost the rest of our fraternity. I looked up, and the goalposts were not only down, but they were nowhere in sight.
We headed back to the bus, feeling like we had let our fraternity down, but there was a surprise waiting for us – a good long piece of goalpost was taking the ride home with us. After fighting with another house, and giving and getting some black eyes and bloody lips, the guys decided to split it down the middle – and it hung in our bar from that night onward.
My next memory will be about the 1991 game – the year they decided to not let students tear down the goalposts – and the police vs. student riot that occurred as a result.