The Story | Cast | Crew | Mark F. Bernstein's Book

THE STORY

"8: Ivy League Football and America" explores the unique role that the Ivy League schools played in developing American football. From the day Princeton played the first intercollegiate game in 1869 football caught America in its grip. By the 1880s, New York's Manhattan Field overflowed to watch Princeton and Yale play for the national championship on Thanksgiving Day, and Ivy League teams produced many of the men who would build football as we know it today: Walter Camp, Pop Warner, Amos Alonzo Stagg, John Heisman, and John Outland. But by the turn of the 20th Century, the Ivy League schools also forged a game so violent that it took the intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt to save it.

Football's development in the Ivy League mirrored American culture. The ideal of the scholar-athlete developed on the Ivy League campuses, as did the first huge TV broadcast contracts. Four of its teams-Harvard, Brown, Penn, and Columbia--have played in the Rose Bowl and three Ivy League stars - Yale's Larry Kelley and Clint Frank and Princeton's Dick Kazmaier - have won the Heisman Trophy. But by the time the Ivy League was officially formed in 1954, the schools had decided to walk away from the over-commercialized game they had done so much to create. They chose to preserve their ideals, even at the cost of their stature as national powerhouses. Today many still wrestle with that fundamental question: are the highest tiers of collegiate athleticism and academic achievement mutually exclusive?

"8" is narrated by two-time Tony Award-winning actor Brian Dennehy (Columbia '60) and features interviews with Academy Award-winning actor Tommy Lee Jones (Harvard '69), Penn State Coach Joe Paterno (Brown '50), ESPN anchor Chris Berman (Brown '77), General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt (Dartmouth '78), former Secretary of State George Shultz (Princeton '42), College and Pro Football Hall of Famer Chuck Bednarik (Penn '49), four-time Pro Bowl running back Calvin Hill (Yale '69), Chicago Bears standout lineman Dan Jiggetts (Harvard '76), Heisman Trophy winner Dick Kazmaier (Princeton '52), actor and Heisman Trophy runner-up Ed Marinaro (Cornell '72), Intuit Chairman Bill Campbell (Columbia '62), and many others.