Bladderball

Hammond traces the name "bladderball" back to a rugby-like game played by Yale students on the New Haven Green in the first half of the 19th century, featuring an inflated animal bladder.

The crew in the helicopter filmed the entire event, created a news package "verifying" Pierson's victory, and brought the film to New Haven's WTNH-TV, which that evening broadcast the aerial footage, read the script as written by the stringers, and confirmed Pierson's "win" in the mainstream media.

In the 1960s, a new dimension was added to the game, as teams began to move the ball out of Old Campus and roll it through the New Haven streets to the Yale president's house on Hillhouse Avenue, while simultaneously protecting it from city police.

As might be expected, the path taken by the ball under the influence of the myriad squads trying to seize possession was not direct; in 1971, the ball rolled a six-mile swath through downtown streets leaving massive traffic tangles in its wake, only to be trapped and deflated by police at Beinecke Plaza, a few blocks from its starting point.

Preparing for bladderball competition involved alcoholic beverage consumption; unfortunately, this resulted in an escalating series of bladderball-related antisocial activities.

Finally, in 1982, several participants were injured, and Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti declared bladderball's toll of minor injuries, property damage, and increasingly strange pranks too much to bear, and put an end to the tradition.

[3] "Magically released from the fallopian tube-like tunnel of Phelps Gateway, it bounces rhythmically above the swarming hands of the crowd like a huge ripe ovum being battered by thousands of frantic spermatozoa.

The accumulated libidinal energy aroused by the pre-game skirmishes (but largely repressed, because of homophobic anxiety) is immediately transferred onto the permitted female form of the bladderball."

Thus the potentially destructive aspect of the game (the necessity of a loser) is resolved in a non-threatening manner, producing an increase in group solidarity by removing those elements of competition that would tend to alienate students from one another.

In addition, the game produces a revitalization of the community through the symbolic release of libidinal energy, which can be redirected (sublimated) into academic achievement and, more specifically in this case, victory on the football field."