Harlow Claims Individual Psychology Reason For Lack of Harvard Indifference on Gridiron

"You're dealing with boys at an impressionable age. . . . If they are taught honestly to believe in what they are working for, there are no limits to their devotion to the principles they are taught."

This is not a quotation from Conant, Hutchins, Father Sill, or Frisky Merriman. It comes instead from an article in the current issue of the Saturday Evening Post called "They Didn't Need Coaching: The Coach's Story of Recent Harvard Football" written, according to standard Post formula, by "Dick Harlow as told to Cleveland Amory."

Gloomy 1935

The title is derived from Harlow's first disastrous spring practice at a Harvard, indifferent to the point of hostility. It was in 1935, and according to Harlow, "I was stunned. . . . Something was wrong. These boys evidently expected their coach to brew some magic formula to waft the other team away before each game in the fall. . . . They didn't need coaching; it was a matter of psychology."

And it was psychology that Harlow gave his teams, although he cautions, "I am not only against fight talks, I am against any kind of mass psychology which interferes with individual work."

"I have not discovered any type Harvard boy, as people seem inclined to think of them," Harlow writes. "The boys here are just as individualized as at any other college. And there is even a bit of the small-college-football atmosphere."

Harlow's collaborator, Cleveland Amory, former CRIMSON president and football enthusiast, graduated from Harvard in 1939 and is on the Post editorial staff.