Jeff Jacobs: Yale football players are brothers for life

Recommended Video:

NEW HAVEN — The group chat among Yale recruits continued to grow during their senior year in high school. They’d greet, give fun facts about themselves and by the time they met on campus in 2016, the nearly 30 freshmen felt as if they had known each for much of their lives.

Such is the glory of technology. Introductions arrive with the tap of an index finger. Social media relationships form with a few well-delivered emojis.

With a victory over Harvard on Saturday, those freshmen who have become the Yale Class of ’20 can become the first since the 1981 season to complete their careers with multiple Ivy League championships.

Carm Cozza didn’t use emojis in 1981. Rich Diana, Jeff Rohrer, John Rogan and Pat Ruwe weren’t part of a group chat in the late 1970s. There were no iPhones.

“I just packed a duffle bag and headed east for my freshman year,” said Rohrer, who graduated in 1977 from Mira Costa High in Manhattan Beach, Calif. “I had never been to Connecticut other than the recruiting trip. I didn’t know one person on the team.

“To go into that experience, to be with those guys that became my brothers for life is one of the most amazing experiences in my lifetime. And it’s going to be for those kids Saturday.”

Kurt Rawlings, Sterling Strother, the current seniors use the same words Diana and Ruwe, Connecticut orthopedic surgeons, Rogan, a partner at Russell Reynolds Associates, and Rohrer, an award-winning producer of television commercials, use. Friends for life. Brothers for life.

“Serge Mihaly was a defensive lineman from Trumbull High and we faced them for the state (Class LL) championship in 1977,” said Diana, who played for Hamden before a Yale career ended with a 10th place finish in the Heisman Trophy balloting. “We went for the two-point conversation with a minute left. Serge deflected the pass.”

Yale's Jeff Rohrer in a game against Brown. Yale's Jeff Rohrer in a game against Brown. Photo: Yale Athletics / Contributed Photo Photo: Yale Athletics / Contributed Photo Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Jeff Jacobs: Yale football players are brothers for life 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

Trumbull 22, Hamden 21.

“Everywhere I went for visit, Brown, Harvard, there was Serge. It felt like he was following me. I couldn’t avoid Serge. It was something where I was kind of embarrassed where he beat me. And then I realized something. He was the nicest guy you could ever meet. We became such close teammates.”

Diana paused.

Mihaly, a unanimous 1981 All-Ivy league selection, died on Oct. 25 at 59.

“Such a bitter loss for all us in Yale football,” Diana said.

Brothers for life.

The 1981 team, briefly ranked in the Top 20, was the school’s last in Division I-A. Rohrer, Diana and Curt Grieve were taken in the top six rounds of the 1982 NFL draft. Rogan would sign a contract with the Jets before playing a few years in the CFL. Save a 35-31 loss at Princeton in 1981 and a stunning 22-7 loss to Harvard in front of 72,000 at the Yale Bowl in 1979, the Class of ‘82 could have been part of two perfect seasons.

“Our biggest disappointments,” Rogan said.

The ’81 game was named Princeton’s greatest victory of the 20th century.

“Yeah, they announced it at the stadium,” Ruwe said of Yale’s 51-14 win at Princeton last weekend. “This week in Princeton history … I’m like you’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Thank God, I wasn’t at the game,” Rogan said, laughing. “I would have gone up to the booth after the guy.”

Rogan, whose older brother Kevin played at Yale, arrived from Chaminade High on Long Island and pointed to the existence of freshman football in those days as a way for the class to get to know each other. The group included his quarterback competition: Ron Darling.

Darling gave up football after his freshman year. Rogan gave up baseball after his.

Good decisions.

“After getting to know each other as freshmen, a lot of us got playing time as sophomores,” said Rogan, who lives in Greenwich. “We learned how to win while playing. Carm and his staff had been there a long time and had a lot of success. Expectations were high. It was a great formula.”

The 23-19 victory over Navy on Oct. 3, 1981 at the Yale Bowl was a substantial one. Years later, Diana came across the game’s announcers, Al Michaels and Ara Parseghian, noting that Yale’s offensive line averaged 50 pounds fewer than Navy’s. Parseghian predicted if the Bulldogs were to win, they would have to use their passing attack. With 3:19 left, sure enough, Rogan found Grieve on a 24-yard pass between two defenders in the right corner of the end zone for the winning score.

“Curt and I practiced what we called the ‘post-corner’ probably 50 times a week,” Rogan said.

Servicemen could appreciate the preparation, if not the outcome.

“If you look throughout the history of Yale football, you’ll find a lot of amazing guys,” said Diana, who’ll miss Saturday’s game because of his nephew’s wedding. “It’s a misrepresentation to think those who haven’t won as much are not as great people.”

Diana considered the duality of his Yale experience.

“Winning is certainly something that bonds us,” he said. “It’s hard to celebrate losing.”

Diana, who played in the Super Bowl for the Dolphins, was a slow roll now.

“The locker room is a cross-section of the population,” he said. “Some guys were more somber, introverted, contemplative. Some guys were just maniacs. You get a spectrum of people. No one is ever going to forget Kevin Czinger (Class of ’81). He was the craziest of crazies and the most fantastic, most remarkable defensive lineman I’d ever seen for the Ivy League.

“You can’t underestimate the power of some of these guys. You look what they’ve done in lives. Their intelligence, ambition and motivation underline the concept of great athlete, great people.”

There is a reunion of the 1979 team Friday, a team that won the outright Ivy title despite that loss to Harvard. The 1980 team, which lost to BC and Cornell, was the last outright winner before the 2017 team under Tony Reno. This year’s team could match the co-title the 1981 Bulldogs shared with Dartmouth.

“The special culture was developed by coach Cozza,” said Ruwe, a three-year starter, captain of the ’82 team and long-time president of the Yale Football Association. “When I got recruited to Yale vs. Harvard, the Yale family, you didn’t see that any other place. Now with coach Reno, it’s part of his ethos. It’s tangible. It’s real.”

Ruwe, who arrived as valedictorian from Eisenhower High in Decatur, Ill., remembers the first 4 p.m. meeting as a freshman player. He’d met only three or four of them. Each guy walked in. Guys from all over the country, from all different backgrounds.

“It was like learning to swim by getting thrown in the pool,” Ruwe said. “Flash immersion. But to this day that’s my closest group of friends I still have in my life.”

And this is where technology has closed the circle for the guys just hitting their 60th birthday.

“There has developed a tighter fraternity of Yale players and frankly it’s through social media and email,” Rogan said. “We had a distribution list run forever by Greg Hall (the Yale tight end died last December at 64). It’s managed by Tom Kokoska now (who also caught a Rogan TD pass against Navy) and these days we’ve got upward of 100 people going round and round 10 times a week on stories and different things. Technology has made us one step closer to each other.”

The Class of ’20 can give a thumbs up emoji to that.

Rohrer, a second-round NFL pick who went on to play six seasons for the Cowboys, said it doesn’t matter if it’s 10 years or two months, when he sees a former Yale teammate there is a big hug, a big laugh and a conversation picked up like it was yesterday.

“Of anywhere I played, it was the most complete team feeling on all levels,” Rohrer said. “It didn’t matter whether you played a lot or not, everyone was off the bench and into it. Players, coach, trainers, it was a true family.”

Late last year, Rohrer became the first-known NFL player to marry another man, celebrity aesthetician Joshua Ross. He continues to raise his two teenage children with his wife Heather. There were national headlines. He is secure in who he is. He did not want to lose the bonds he had.

“It was my biggest fear in life,” Rohrer said. “Every one of those guys sent me a note, a text, called, they all said, ‘Brother we love you. We always will.’ Nothing changed. I needed to hear that. I love them for that. That was a big f-ing deal for me. I never wanted anything to come between us. I prayed to God, cried myself to sleep some nights, I did not want that to happen.”

It didn’t happen.

It doesn’t when brothers are forever.

jeff.jacobs@hearstmediact.com; @jeffjacobs123