Yale Bulldogs (1952)

The history of sports is filled with …. I don’t want to say “fringe” athletes; maybe “sideline” athletes is a better phrase. We’re talking about people who were associated with a team in some fashion, perhaps not on the roster, but eventually got into a game or two and had a moment or two of glory. Some of these people are truly inspirational (Jason McElwain), some are truly bizarre (Charlie Faust), some are still discussed today (Eddie Gaedel) and some get noticed by Hollywood (Rudy). All help make the sports world a funner place.

Into this cast of delightful oddities we can add one Charlie Yeager, a 5-foot-5, 138-pound Yale football manager who scored against Harvard in 1952 — even though he wasn’t listed on the Bulldogs’ game-day roster.

In the third quarter of a 41-14 Yale pasting at Harvard Stadium, Bulldogs quarterback Ed Molloy threw his fourth TD pass of the game to make the score 40-14. The Bulldogs lined up to kick the extra point — one of them a pint-sized player wearing No. 99 who stationed himself at right end. No player wearing 99 was listed on the program’s roster.

Molloy, the place-kick holder, took the center snap. But instead of holding the ball for kicker Bob Parcells, Molloy sprung up, darted to his right and tossed the ball to No. 99 — Yeager — who was all alone in the end zone while the Crimson blocked a kick that never came and sportswriters in the press box wondered who No. 99 was until they were informed by a Yale emissary. 

Yeager dashed off the field (“I had to get out of there so I wouldn’t get hit,” he quipped afterward) and was mobbed by teammates who acted as if he had just led Yale to the Rose Bowl title. 

Charlie Yeager: No. 99 on the field, if not in the program;

No. 1 in the hearts of Yalies.

This was no spur-of-the-moment action dreamed up that morning: Yeager, a Buffalo native whose football playing experience amounted to some six-man football as a ninth-grader at Milford Academy in New York State, had signed the necessary eligibility paperwork early in the season. When not adjusting chinstraps, lining up helmets or gathering dirty towels at practice, he’d get anyone available — including assistant coach Angelo Bertelli, a former quarterback who won the 1943 Heisman Trophy at Notre Dame — to throw passes at him. Finally, the day before the Harvard game, Yale coach Jordan Olivar told Yeager that if Yale took a big lead, the diminutive manager would get his moment in the sun (actually, the weather was dark and drizzly, but work with me here) and play in the game — excuse me, The Game.

When the game started, Yeager was in street clothes (“You can’t manage in a football uniform,” he said), but with Yale up big at the half, Olivar told him to suit up, and the rest became a part of Harvard-Yale lore.

While Harvardtonians took the play as rubbing dirt in the wounds (“Inexcusable,” former Cambridge mayor and 1955 Harvard graduate Francis Duehay said 50 years later), Yeager, who died in November 2019, insisted there were no ill intentions. “The idea certainly was not to embarrass Harvard,'' Yeager told the New York Times in 2002. ''It really was kind of a Walter Mitty fantasy thing.’’

The Associated Press named the trick play as 1952’s most humorous college football incident.

The 1952 Yale lettermen. Here's a hint: Charlie Yeager's 
the one not in uniform.

I wrote briefly about the ’52 Yale uniforms in this post. Yale wore white jerseys for one game that year (at Navy) back when the Bulldogs usually wore blue shirts both at home and on the road. Otherwise, they almost resemble the current unis, minus the iconic “Y” on the sides of the helmet. Note the bigger, blockier numbers that were coming into vogue at this time.

One final oddity: The Harvard game-day program shows an illustration of several Yale players running onto the field amid a group of Harvard fans. The number on one of the Yale jerseys? Ninety-nine, of course.

Much of the info here came from a pair of Buffalo News articles (here and here; the second piece is actually has an NYT byline), a Yale Daily News retrospective, the previously linked New York Times piece and John McCallum’s exhaustive “Ivy League Football Since 1872”, which is filled with fun anecdotes like this one and is worth tracking down.

The program from the 1952 Harvard-Yale game.
No. 99 may not be listed on the roster, but he made the cover.