Single-wing days: Princeton athletes, including Dick Kazmaier, were national gods. Photograph from Princeton Athletic Communications

At a reception in Castine, Maine, years ago, I was introduced to and then left alone with Dick MacPherson, who at the time was the head coach of the New England Patriots. I had no idea what to say. What on earth could I possibly say to the coach of the New England Patriots? Then, out of somewhere, I remembered that Dick MacPherson was born and raised in Old Town, Maine, on the Penobscot River, next door to the University of Maine, in Orono. When I was seven, eight, nine years old, in Princeton, New Jersey, our next-door neighbor was Tad Wieman, Princeton’s football coach, who went on to become the athletic director at the University of Maine.

So I said to Dick MacPherson, “You must have known Tad Wieman.”

Responding in a split second, he said, “Unbalanced line, unbalanced mind.”

In the mid-twentieth century, Princeton football hung on to a fossil offense called single wing while most college teams were mating the quarterback to the center of the line in the formation called “T.” Tad Wieman’s single wing was pure power football. The center was not in the center. One side was overloaded, and, with certain exceptions, you battered that side.

I acquired some of this knowledge at an early age, by osmosis. Not only were Wieman and his family next door but my father, an M.D., was the football team’s doctor. Margaret Wieman, the coach’s wife, was a close friend of my mother. In the fall in Palmer Stadium, the two of them attended every home game in a fifty-yard-line box over a vomitorium. I was six or seven when they took me with them for the first time. I sat between my mother and Mrs. Wieman. On each play, offense and defense, Mrs. Wieman screamed. It began low. As a play developed, it crescendoed. Before runner and tackler came together, it had become a major shriek, which abruptly stopped as the play ended. Bronco Van Lengen took the snap from center, followed his blockers on a sweep, and before he was halfway around, Mrs. Wieman’s voice was curdling blood. And that was my basic introduction to football.

Aged eight, I was promoted to a position on the field. Actually, I was with the college players on various fields all week long. I was in grade school in what is now a university building, and every fall day after soccer I went down the street to university football practice and hung around my father, the trainers, the student managers, the coaches, the team. A football jersey—black with orange tiger stripes on the sleeves, the number 33 front and back—was made for me by the same company that made the big guys’ uniforms. On Saturdays, I went down a slanting tunnel with the team and onto the playing field in Palmer Stadium. After they scored—and in those days they really scored—I went behind the goalpost and caught the extra point.

There were indelible moments. Bronco Van Lengen goes off tackle at the closed end of the horseshoe and a great cheer rises, but Bronco is lying on the grass and not getting up. It looks so serious that not only the head trainer but my father as well hurry to the scene and kneel beside Bronco’s unstirring body. Bronco opens one eye. He sees the teams collected on the one-yard line and waiting to resume play. He says, “Didn’t I score?” Actually, not that time, Bronco. Bronco leaps up off the grass, adjusts his helmet, and joins the huddle.

Wieman won four straight against Yale in those years. Before one Yale game, he collected his team and unfurled before them a banner large enough to cover ten guys at once, or so it seemed to me. The banner was black with orange block letters a foot and a half high that said “Princeton.” Speaking quietly, Wieman told his cloistered team that the banner before them represented what they were about to do, and nothing they had ever done was more important. Before then, I had never witnessed such a solemn scene. Wieman, of course, was not alone in this genre of forensic coaching. And, a decade later, Herman Hickman, of Yale, was said to up the ante, telling his players that representing Yale on the football field would forever be the pinnacle of their lives.

My father played football at Oberlin, class of 1917, notably in a game won by Ohio State 128–0. Before Oberlin, he had been a three-season athlete at Rayen High School, in Youngstown. Contemplating one or more of his varsity letters there, he cut the leg off the “R.” He had never been east of western Pennsylvania, but he had nonetheless developed a mystical sense of Princeton, whose athletes were national gods during his high-school years. Later, as a doctor, he worked first at Iowa State, but he soon found his career post at Princeton. The younger of my father’s two brothers had the same names I have, first and last. He was my Uncle Jack. He was executive secretary of the Youngstown Y and later sold industrial lubricants to the steel industry, but on weekends he was a football official. It was Uncle Jack who threw the first flag in big-time football. Ordinarily a field judge or head linesman, he was in this instance refereeing a game at Ohio State. Officials used to carry wee horns strapped to their wrists. On observing an infraction—anywhere on the scale from offside to unnecessary roughness—they blew the horns, and that was their penalty signal for more than fifty years. Uncle Jack had been there, blown that, and in Ohio Stadium he had experienced louder, more continuous dins than he ever would in any steel plant. Much of the time, no one on the field could hear the wee horns. At the suggestion of his friend Dwight Beede, the coach of Youngstown College, Uncle Jack took a red-and-white bandanna to Columbus and, instead of blowing the horn, whipped the bandanna out of his pocket and dropped it on the ground. The idea had arisen here and there across the years, but now its time had come. John Griffith, the conference commissioner, instructed all Big Ten officials to show up at all Big Ten games with flags in their pockets the following week.

Before that, when I was a child, Uncle Jack had been an Eastern College Athletic Conference official, and his work included games in what is now the Ivy League. In the locker room before my first of those games—when I was with the team and about to go onto the field—my father leaned down and said to me, in a low steely voice, “Remember: do not talk to, or even recognize, your Uncle Jack.” I had long since been taught that Uncle Jack—head linesman, in black and white stripes—was an official officially impartial.

Down the tunnel we went and out onto the stadium field. I saw the officials clustered near the fifty-yard line. I have never suffered from oppositional defiant disorder. Pure excitement stripped me of restraint, and in my orange-and-black tiger-striped jersey I shouted, “Uncle Jack! Uncle Jack! Uncle Jack!”

A year or two later, on a November Saturday of cold, wind-driven rain—when I was about ten—I was miserable on the stadium sidelines. The rain stung my eyes, and I was shivering. Looking up at the press box, where I knew there were space heaters, I saw those people sitting dry under a roof, and decided then and there to become a writer.