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Gallery: Harvard Lampoon
Magazines of The Game |
 
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The Harvard Lampoon, the country's oldest humor magazine, has parodied the Harvard-Yale football game since it's inception: in its first year in existence in 1876, it was already covering the H-Y game, which itself was only in its second year! The Lampoon also has another claim to fame by playing a direct role in Princeton dropping Harvard football from its athletic schedule for eight years (1926-33). Capitalizing on increasing bad blood in the mid-1920's, the final break came over an issue of the Harvard Lampoon published on the day of the Harvard-Princeton game. In it, an editorial read: "Lampy looks forward to no chivalrous exhibition of sportsmanship; it will be a glorious free-for-all masquerading under the name of football. Once more the old eye-gouging, bottle-heaving days will return." It also infuriated Tiger alumni by referring to “Old Nassau” as “Old Nausea.” Although no one at Harvard really believed that the issue would result in any drastic action by Princeton, nevertheless on November 10, 1926, at a meeting in New York, the Princeton trustees voted unanimously to sever athletic relations with Harvard. And despite a series of apologies from Harvard's president, the chairman of the Lampoon, and the president of the Harvard Crimson, the two teams would not play again until 1934.
For a complete
account of the incident and the break in
general, please see The article
The “Big Three” and the Harvard-Princeton Football
Break, 1926-1934
(Adobe Acrobat file) |
