Billy Gillispie's long fall
Friday, September 21, 2012
What is a Yale man?
We find not an archetype but an anti-type in the most famous fictional Yale footballer: Fitzgerald's Tom Buchanan, "one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterwards savours of anti-climax." The same novel's Nick Carraway gets a bit closer. He, who like Greg Hall, "decided to go East and learn the bond business" since "everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man."
William F. Buckley Jr. made the protagonist of his novels, Blackford Oakes, a Yale man. Between serving American foreign policy interests and bedding European monarchs, Blackford took on those principal characteristics of a Yale man: namely, "self-confidence and a worldliness that is neither bookish nor anti-intellectual." Mike McLeod excepted, Blackford Oakes is also the most distinguished member of Yale's Zeta Psi fraternity.
Bulldogs of a more recent vintage, prone to strutting around shirtless, should take caution. Never forget that Yale men become Yale middle-aged men. It does seem hard to believe, but Dick Cheney was once a 160 lb. scatback on the Yale football team.
One thing Yale men do is beat Cornell. Bulldogs who fall short of this standard are doomed to a lifetime of humiliation and shame. They are also forced to endure an 8 hour bus trip back to New Haven. In total silence.
Beat Cornell,
Stephen Schmalhofer '08
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