"Glory, Glory to the Black and Orange!": Princeton, The Ivy League Football Hero, And the Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald‪.‬

A many of his biographers have noted, E Scott Fitzgerald had a lifelong interest in football, both as a player and a fan. Several scholars have also duly noted in books or individual articles how this interest is reflected in his work, especially in two or three of his short stories, the Princeton scenes in This Side of Paradise, and most notably in the character of Tom Buchanan in his most famous work, The Great Gatsby. Indeed, there are passing football references in every one of his major novels and in many of his short stories. Nonetheless, apart from Christian Messenger's review of Fitzgerald's football fiction (in his essay "The Demise of the Ivy League Athletic Hero," 1974, and the chapter in his Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner (1981), and Jarom McDonald's more recent article on Fitzgerald's football rhetoric in his short stories (FSF Review, 2003), no scholar seems to have made an inclusive study of Fitzgerald's love of football and its role in his fiction as a whole. Moreover, both Messenger's and McDonald's appraisals are selective and thematic in their assessments rather than comprehensive. This paper, therefore, is an attempt to coordinate and expand their research, for it is my belief that such a detailed study will reveal that Fitzgerald has made an underestimated but interesting contribution to the development of the college football hero in twentieth-century American fiction. Fitzgerald's interest in football began as a child in Buffalo where, as Arthur Mizener reports, he persuaded his parents to turn the attic of their home into a gymnasium and to "give him a football outfit, complete with shinguards" (12). He played on the Highland Corner neighborhood team called The Young Americans, and although he was "fast and fairly strong," according to his biographer Andrew Turnbull, "he was small and not too well coordinated" (21). Moreover, as he played guard or tackle he ruefully admitted he was "usually scared silly" (Mizener 14; Turnbull 15). On returning to Minnesota at twelve years of age, Fitzgerald entered St. Paul's Academy and continued to play football, even though his size was increasingly against him. He was frequently knocked down and once suffered a broken rib. But he always "tried hard and could force himself to be brave," Turnbull remarks, and, indeed, Fitzgerald's most "memorable feat" was a heroic tackle (in which he injured himself) of Central High's captain, "the biggest player on the field," as the latter crashed through the special team returning a kick-off (Turnbull 21).