Change of Heart

When Chancellor Robert Hutchins announced ten years ago that the University of Chicago was dropping football, Harvard Athletic Director Bill Bingham threw one of the first stones. It was shrewdly aimed at both Chicago football and Chicago's Robert Hutchins, who liked to say that whenever he felt like exercising, he just lay down until the impulse passed away. Said Bingham, whose team had walloped Chicago, 61-0: "Not everybody can develop a physique like Sir Galahad's by lying down." In a snappy reply, Hutchins reminded Bingham that "Sir Galahad was not noted for his physique; his strength was as the strength of ten because his heart was pure."

Last week stone-throwing Bill Bingham found out what it was like to live in a glass house. Harvard had finished the most calamitous season on record (one victory, eight defeats), and the Boston press was having a field day. Wrote Bill Cunningham in the Herald: ". . . Harvard still thinks of herself as a national power when, as a matter of fact, she's only the champion of Middlesex County, and that only ... because she didn't meet Arlington High School . . ."

Stung by this and the fire-the-coach cries of alumni like ex-Congressman Ham Fish ('10), sometime All-America tackle, Bill Bingham last week announced his personal ideas about the course Harvard football should take: no more intersectional games, no more games outside the Ivy League. Cracked Chicago's Hutchins, in a quick recall of the Galahad go-round of ten years ago: "I'm glad to notice the cardiac changes in Mr. Bingham."

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