Cozza's 'True Blue' truly terrific but terribly trite

Pizza and football were invented in New Haven. While others may think that Little Caesar's is real pizza and that the Nokia-Blockbuster-Viacom-CBS-Sugar Bowl is real football, we here in New Haven know that real pizza means Sally's and Pepe's and real football means Carm Cozza.

COURTESY YALE UNVERSITY PRESS

For those of you who haven't picked up a sports section in any of the last four decades, Cozza was Yale's head football coach from 1965 until 1996. Adored by players, students, professors, and administrators alike, Cozza led Yale to 10 Ivy League championships and coached five Rhodes Scholars, in addition to future NFL star Calvin Hill, PC '69, and Dick Jauron, PC '73, the current head coach of the Chicago Bears.

Cozza's recently published autobiography, True Blue: The Carm Cozza Story, is a discursive, anecdotal account of Cozza's life from his childhood in Parma, Ohio, to his minor league baseball career, to his last game as coach of the Bulldogs.

Cozza's comments on Yale football are magical. From the get-go, Cozza transports the reader back to those halcyon days when Bulldog football had a palpable mystique: windswept November mornings in the '60s, the Game, the Yale Bowl filled with students in pea coats. Cozza opens the first chapter with the story of one particular Game: Yale's infamous 1968 "loss" against Harvard, which was actually a 29-29 tie that cost Yale the league championship. This is Cozza at his best; he can recall every minute detail with remarkable accuracy—the way Hill broke a tackle, or the wacky eccentricites of a barefooted field-goal-kicking virtuoso. It's pithy sentimentality, but so is all good sportswriting.

Unfortunately, Cozza writing about anything other than Yale football is simply dull. "Some kids are good at art or music or whatever, I was good at athletics," is probably the most telling sentence in the book. Cozza should definitely leave "art or music or whatever" to others. The book is riddled with instances of terrible writing and pointless pontification that come across as comical. Some of the descriptive passages sound like a parody of an athletic coach straight out of The Simpsons.

Most of Cozza's personal perspectives are hilariously trite. One of the finest examples is Cozza discussing the decline of modern culture. "The world was very different then," Cozza writes. "We didn't have a lot of the things kids have today, like computers, Nintendo games, or a house full of toys." And then, there's Cozza posing as Stephen King: "It was just after dark when I left the field house on a rainy Halloween night, one of those spooky October twilights that stir childhood memories of ghosts and goblins." Maybe the best is Cozza starring in It's a Wonderful Life: "We didn't have a lot of material things, but we had...an abundance of love in the family. I wish everybody had what we had growing up."

Cozza's book also presents an outdated, old-world outlook. Cozza, himself a three-sport athlete, is a guy's guy, a stereotypical, straight-laced son of Italian immigrants whose political and social views might upset many members of today's student body. During the Vietnam War, Cozza refused to let his players wear armbands on their uniforms and refused to let them have long hair. During one night of especially violent anti-war protests, he sat in the field house with a loaded rifle to protect "expensive uniforms and memorabilia."

Politics and writing style aside, Cozza was still a great football coach. One might wonder, though, how he let Yale football slip to the mediocre level that characterized the campaigns of the late '80s and early '90s. Cozza discusses this issue for the last third of his book. He raises crucial questions about what football means to Yale and what sports in general mean to an academic institution. He begins by cataloguing the changes that spelled disaster for Yale football: high mandatory academic indices for recruits, a series of unresponsive Deans of Admissions, and the Ivy League's refusal to allow athletic scholarships. College football has seen a revolution since the '60s when Cozza was at the helm and the Administration made the decision to move away from big money football. In his book, Cozza remarks flippantly that trying to compete under such regulations was like boxing with one hand tied behind your back.

As a fierce competitor and coach he obviously wanted to win and compete with the big boys, but as a reasonable person, he recognizes now that perhaps some of the changes enacted during his tenure were for the best. Cozza understands that the Yale football team doesn't have to be a national champion to be a positive influence on the Yale community.

Ultimately, however, Cozza believes that the rules went too far. His book takes the contro-versial stance that Ivy League schools should be allowed to give partial "merit" scholarships to athletes. He points to Duke and Stanford as examples of excellent schools whose academic reputations are not tarnished by the fact that they give out athletic scholarships.

Coach Cozza's book appeals mainly to Yale football history buffs. If you get the least bit excited when the Bulldogs score a touchdown and the Yale Precision Marching Band leads the "Bulldog" chant at the Bowl on Saturdays, then spending a few dollars and hours in order to gain a deeper appreciation of the history of Yale football and of its greatest coach might not be such a bad investment.

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