Bring Back The Game

It was never just a game. The contest that took place the weekend before Thanksgiving, every year for some half a century until this one, had history, pageantry, pathos, unforgettable characters and a trophy called the Island Cup. The annual football game between Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket has been described as Harvard-Yale without the ivy and compared to the Army-Navy rivalry. With fire truck sirens and spray, boatloads of fans filling decorated stands, and a season of strategy focused on this one game, the Vineyarders-Whalers contest was even, perhaps tastelessly, in the early Eighties, compared to the invasion of Grenada. But exaggeration goes with the big game.

When, after a particularly bitter and unsportsmanlike contest in Nineteen Eighty-Seven, this newspaper called for a halt in playing Nantucket until emotions cooled, the letters came at a furious pace, under headings including Most Revolting and Unconscionable.

Now, the economy has called a halt to the Island Cup game, and this newspaper for one is sorry. There is no money to fly the team over this year. Back in the day, players traveled between Islands by slow boat the night before, spent the evening in the home of an opposing player and shared breakfast before beating up on each other on the field, but that changed in Sixty-Seven. Because in Sixty-Six the beating up started early, with a blaze of fists flying the night before the game; “Two Vineyard players were airlifted off Nantucket, perhaps the first schoolboys in Massachusetts history to be banned from their biggest game for roughhousing,” the Boston Globe reported. From then on, teams flew in and stayed in hotels.

Some say it’s not just due to money, blaming soccer, lacrosse and confusion among administrators. Whatever the cause, the cancelation of the Island Cup leaves an absence, like a family holiday after the patriarch has died. Vineyard football patriarch Don Herman is very much alive and spitting mad about not playing Nantucket. Decades ago he was embraced by the community after he turned the Vineyard’s program around, after the Island Cup had sat on Nantucket’s shelves for years. It’s now in Vineyard hands, but Coach Herman wants to earn it every year.

Longtime Nantucket patriarch Vito Capizzo similarly revived Nantucket’s football fortunes in the Seventies, and he once recalled his return from a victory over the Vineyard: “They paraded us around like veterans coming back from World War Two.” He may be as sparky as ever, but he has retired from coaching football. Still, he’s disappointed. He told a national newspaper that “Not playing the Vineyard is like apple pie without the ice cream.”

Mr. Capizzo’s former player John Aloisi, who has succeeded him as the Whalers’ coach, wants the game back. Sure, the Vineyard has been heavily favored in recent years, but the Cup has seen some wonderful upsets; that’s why they say, you have to play the game. Mr. Aloisi calls the cancellation a temporary thing. We hope he’s right. Because we’re two small Islands far away from most other places, with common problems — a seasonal economy, a fast-eroding shoreline, a sorry market for shellfish, and simply too many prized traditions disappearing too fast.

Oh, and because there’s nothing sweeter than a gridiron victory over the Whalers.