Murder in broad daylight.

THIS IS NOT going to to be a column about Spinoza or the Great Books, but about something equally important. That is to say, Ivy League football.

Someone ought to remember how it used to be. Even when the team that year wasn't much, you would walk through one of tbose tunnels at the Yale Bowl or into the afternoon sunlight at Harvard's stadium, and the packed-in crowd would be singing-yes, singing, Everyone knew the traditional college songs. "Crash through that line of Blue . . ." "Ten thousand men of Harvard . . ." Cole Porter had written the famous Yale song: "Bulldog, bulldog, bow wow wow."

The atmosphere surrounding these Ivy League games was rich and palpable. The games themselves were only a part of it, but they nevertheless were important. I now recognize that when I was a freshman in the Ivy League, I was experiencing the twilight of an era that began before World War 1. Football weekends were full of songs, booze, dances, vast goings-on. Francis Russell has evoked the timeless atmosphere: "It is always the autumn of 1926, the last Saturday in September or the first in October, the ivy leaves on the stadium wall crisping to scarlet, the sun still warm, tbe lucent air all blue and gold . . . There is not a vacant seat in the fur-lined stadium. The saxophones of the band are muted. It is that hushed moment before the two teams surge onto the empty field and the rival captains walk toward each other for the toss-up. Any hushed moment, however, is apt to be shattered by the crash of a hip flask inadvertently dropped on the concrete."

"With Crimson in triumph flashing, / As we march to victory . . ." A Dartmouth freshman rolling down to Cambridge for the game, I had a blind date with a Radcliffe girl named Ann Tolstoy, a grandniece of the old Count himself. She wore a stiff velvet dress with a big lace collar, a big Dartmouth fullback named Herb Carey won the game, the stadium was packed, the dances went on until three in the morning, I think we wound up the evening at either the Hasty Pudding or the Porcellian, upstairs over a barber shop, and I slept on the floor of some high-school cronies in Eliot House.

A week or so later, it was more of the same, down to New Haven. The Yale Bowl was packed. "Boola-boola, boola-boola . . ." With the teams warming up, the crowd was in a frenzy. An odd thing happened this weekend. I had a date from Vassar, and had arranged for her to stay at a rooming house near the Yale campus. When I stopped by to pay in advance, eight dollars, the, elderly Italian landlady explained to me that for another three dollars I could sleep with the girl. This was my first glimpse of Europe, but I didn't think the Vassar girl had any such thing in mind. Yale had Levi Jackson and Ferdinand Nadherney (nicknamed "Ferdinand the Bull"), but Dartmouth won anyway, We danced until three again, the Vassar girl slept alone at the rooming house, and I dozed until noon on the couch of a fellow tennis player in some mockGothic Yale dorm.

"Going back, going back, going back to Nassau Hall . . ." Princeton had the amazing Dick Kazmaier running and passing out of its baroque version of the old-fashioned single wing. The Princeton single-wing offense was unique. The play took a long time to develop. Tbe player handling the ball did so with his back to the line, so the protective blocking had to be perfect. The Princeton backs would be spinning around and doing things with the football, then the play would happen-sometimes an explosion. Dick Kazmaier weighed about 155, but was one of the great players in football history, a Heisman Trophy winner.

Princeton's most important product, Scott Fitzgerald, decided to go there because he had seen Hobey Baker play football-Hobey, the last man to play without a helmet, playing with a bloody bandage around his head; Hobey, who, going to war, flew his squadron over Palmer Stadium, broke his plane loose from the group, and flew low to a standing ovation.

Professor Thomas Bergin of Yale, a great Dante scholar, wrote as his last book a marvelous history of the Harvard-Yale game entitled, simply, The Game. And even after his election to the Presidency of the United States, Woodrow Wilson regularly attended Princeton football practice.

TODAY'S Ivy LEAGUE is embarrassed by football and everything it represents and symbolizes. The stadiums are half full. The songs are little sung (Dartmouth has actually censored some of its best songs on ideological grounds-they refer to "Indians"). The football players themselves are still keen, but rather isolated in the campus atmosphere. Football in the Ivy league has become a minor event.

Where are you, Tom Bergin? Where are you, Cole Porter? Where are you, Hobey Baker? "Bulldog, bulldog, bow wow wow . . ." "Ten thousand men of Harvard want victory today . . ."

The great thing about Ivy League football was its vital life and the rich local culture surrounding it. That is why the Death Culture (liberalism) has hated it all along.