Bladderball
Encyclopedia
Bladderball was a game traditionally played by students of Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

, between 1954 and 1982, until being banned by the administration. Revival games were played in 2009 and 2011.

History

Bladderball was conceived by Yale student Philip Zeidman, owner of a six foot leather exercise ball, as a preliminary event before the Yale-Dartmouth
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...

 game
American football
American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...

 in 1954, according to Yale bladderball historian Sarah Hammond. Hammond traces the name "bladderball" back to a rugby
Rugby football
Rugby football is a style of football named after Rugby School in the United Kingdom. It is seen most prominently in two current sports, rugby league and rugby union.-History:...

-like game played by Yale students on the New Haven Green
New Haven Green
The New Haven Green is a privately owned park and recreation area located in the downtown district of the city of New Haven, Connecticut. It comprises the central square of the nine-square settlement plan of the original Puritan colonists in New Haven, and was designed and surveyed by colonist...

 in the first half of the 19th century, featuring an inflated animal bladder
Urinary bladder
The urinary bladder is the organ that collects urine excreted by the kidneys before disposal by urination. A hollow muscular, and distensible organ, the bladder sits on the pelvic floor...

.

Once each year, at 11 a.m. the Saturday before the Yale-Dartmouth game, the inflatable six foot ball was rolled through Yale's Phelps Gate onto Old Campus
Old Campus
The Old Campus is a complex of buildings at Yale University on the block at the northwest end of the green in New Haven, Connecticut, consisting of dormitories, classrooms, chapels and offices...

, where a throng of Yale students waited. At the sound of a whistle, teams from each residential college and various extracurricular organizations would fight for possession of the ball. Teams were allowed to use any means at their disposal to seize control. In 1975, the Jonathan Edwards College
Jonathan Edwards College
Jonathan Edwards College is a residential college at Yale University. Established in 1932, it is the oldest of Yale's residential colleges. Members of the Yale community refer to it informally as J.E....

 team attempted to capture the ball using a meat hook
Meat hook
A meat hook is a two-sided hook normally used in butcheries to hang up meat or the carcasses of animals such as pigs and cattle on a moving conveyor line. There are many types of hooks, but meat hooks are the only ones used in butchering....

 which predictably popped the ball, inciting enraged chants of "J.E. sucks!" from the other participants. The phrase "J.E. Sux" remains the unofficial motto of Jonathan Edwards College to this day.

In the absence of any scoring system, victory consisted of fervent declarations of victory by each team. Listeners to the Yale radio station, WYBC
WYBC (AM)
WYBC is a radio station operating on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. The station is owned by Yale Broadcasting Company, Inc.; however, it is programmed by Sacred Heart University under a time brokerage agreement...

, would invariably learn that the station team had won a mighty victory, while readers of the Yale print media were invariably informed that each particular publication had bested all other teams handily, by scores often ranging into the thousands of points. In 1977, the Pierson College
Pierson College
Pierson College is a residential college founded in 1933 at Yale University. The College takes its name from Abraham Pierson , one of the founders of the Collegiate School, which later became Yale University. A statue of Abraham Pierson stands on Yale's Old Campus...

 team literally took this to new heights, by chartering a helicopter (carrying not only the student team captain but also the Master of the College) to fly over the campus and drop leaflets saying "Surrender, Pierson has won!"; leaving nothing to chance, the Pierson team backed this claim up by chaining shut the doors of Branford College
Branford College
Branford College is the oldest of the 12 residential colleges at Yale University.-The Founding of Branford:Branford College was founded in 1933 by partitioning the Memorial Quadrangle into two parts: Saybrook and Branford...

 and Saybrook College
Saybrook College
Saybrook College is one of the 12 residential colleges at Yale University. It was founded in 1933 by partitioning the Memorial Quadrangle into two parts: Saybrook and Branford....

, trapping the opposing teams inside. 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 local TV station 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
New Haven, Connecticut
New Haven is the second-largest city in Connecticut and the sixth-largest in New England. According to the 2010 Census, New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, and...

 streets to the Yale president's house on Hillhouse Avenue
Hillhouse Avenue
Hillhouse Avenue, described, according to tradition, by both Charles Dickens and Mark Twain as "the most beautiful street in America," , is in New Haven, Connecticut and is home to many nineteenth century mansions including the president's house at Yale University...

, 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
Hewitt Quadrangle
Hewitt University Quadrangle is a plaza at the center of the Yale University campus in New Haven, Connecticut, which is the home of the university's administration, main auditorium and dining facilities...

, a few blocks from its starting point.

Preparing for bladderball competition involved alcoholic beverage
Alcoholic beverage
An alcoholic beverage is a drink containing ethanol, commonly known as alcohol. Alcoholic beverages are divided into three general classes: beers, wines, and spirits. They are legally consumed in most countries, and over 100 countries have laws regulating their production, sale, and consumption...

 consumption; unfortunately, this resulted in an escalating series of bladderball-related antisocial
Norm (sociology)
Social norms are the accepted behaviors within a society or group. This sociological and social psychological term has been defined as "the rules that a group uses for appropriate and inappropriate values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. These rules may be explicit or implicit...

 activities. In 1976, a car and its driver were badly trampled by the mob of students chasing the ball over the top of the vehicle. The Branford College
Branford College
Branford College is the oldest of the 12 residential colleges at Yale University.-The Founding of Branford:Branford College was founded in 1933 by partitioning the Memorial Quadrangle into two parts: Saybrook and Branford...

 dining hall was vandalized by overzealous students from Saybrook College
Saybrook College
Saybrook College is one of the 12 residential colleges at Yale University. It was founded in 1933 by partitioning the Memorial Quadrangle into two parts: Saybrook and Branford....

, who poured foul-smelling butyric acid
Butyric acid
Butyric acid , also known under the systematic name butanoic acid, is a carboxylic acid with the structural formula CH3CH2CH2-COOH. Salts and esters of butyric acid are known as butyrates or butanoates...

 mixed with food from the catwalk above the dining hall. Finally, in 1982, several participants were injured, and Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti
A. Bartlett Giamatti
Angelo Bartlett "Bart" Giamatti was the president of Yale University and later the seventh Commissioner of Major League Baseball. Giamatti negotiated the agreement that terminated the Pete Rose betting scandal by permitting Rose to voluntarily withdraw from the sport, avoiding further...

 declared bladderball's toll of minor injuries, property damage, and increasingly strange pranks too much to bear, and put an end to the tradition. The bladderball was rumored to be in the possession of the Yale Symphony Orchestra
Yale Symphony Orchestra
The Yale Symphony Orchestra is a symphony orchestra at Yale University which performs in Yale's Woolsey Hall and tours internationally and domestically. The present Music Director is Toshiyuki Shimada.-History:...

 for some reason; it reappeared briefly in 1999 in the symphony's Halloween Show film Jane Bond, during a short Raiders of the Lost Ark
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Raiders of the Lost Ark is a 1981 American action-adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by George Lucas, and starring Harrison Ford. It is the first film in the Indiana Jones franchise...

 sequence, playing the large boulder. It was subsequently under the control of the Yale Precision Marching Band
Yale Precision Marching Band
The Yale Precision Marching Band is the official marching band of Yale University. It is a scatter band , as distinct from university marching bands that emphasize precise movements and geometric field formations...

 which used it in the 2006 Princeton halftime show.

"The bladderball clearly incarnates the archetypal
Archetype
An archetype is a universally understood symbol or term or pattern of behavior, a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated...

 female form: the egg
Egg (biology)
An egg is an organic vessel in which an embryo first begins to develop. In most birds, reptiles, insects, molluscs, fish, and monotremes, an egg is the zygote, resulting from fertilization of the ovum, which is expelled from the body and permitted to develop outside the body until the developing...

," wrote Yale student Jonathan Tucker in the 1977 Yale Banner. "Magically released from the Fallopian tube
Fallopian tube
The Fallopian tubes, also known as oviducts, uterine tubes, and salpinges are two very fine tubes lined with ciliated epithelia, leading from the ovaries of female mammals into the uterus, via the utero-tubal junction...

-like tunnel of Phelps Gateway, it bounces rhythmically above the swarming hands of the crowd like a huge ripe ovum
Ovum
An ovum is a haploid female reproductive cell or gamete. Both animals and embryophytes have ova. The term ovule is used for the young ovum of an animal, as well as the plant structure that carries the female gametophyte and egg cell and develops into a seed after fertilization...

 being battered by thousands of frantic spermatozoa
Spermatozoon
A spermatozoon is a motile sperm cell, or moving form of the haploid cell that is the male gamete. A spermatozoon joins an ovum to form a zygote...

. The accumulated libidinal energy
Libido
Libido refers to a person's sex drive or desire for sexual activity. The desire for sex is an aspect of a person's sexuality, but varies enormously from one person to another, and it also varies depending on circumstances at a particular time. A person who has extremely frequent or a suddenly...

 aroused by the pre-game skirmishes (but largely repressed, because of homophobic
Homophobia
Homophobia is a term used to refer to a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards lesbian, gay and in some cases bisexual, transgender people and behavior, although these are usually covered under other terms such as biphobia and transphobia. Definitions refer to irrational fear, with the...

 anxiety) is immediately transferred onto the permitted female form of the bladderball.

"In symbolic transaction occurring during each game is this: each team strives to 'fertilize
Fertilisation
Fertilisation is the fusion of gametes to produce a new organism. In animals, the process involves the fusion of an ovum with a sperm, which eventually leads to the development of an embryo...

' the egg and thus become the sole possessor of its life-giving power. In this respect the game fits well with the competitive nature of Yale society. But this also markedly departs from the competitive mode in that everyone is permitted to claim victory in the end. (Some more vociferously than others, of course.) 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."

Return of Bladderball

2009

Bladderball returned to Yale University on October 10, 2009 (the day of the Dartmouth game), despite the remaining ban. The ball appeared at Phelps Gate at approximately 4 p.m. and ended with the ball being popped on Cross Campus, at which point students descended on the ball to bring pieces back to their residential colleges. Police arrived during the game when it blocked traffic on Elm Street, though their involvement was limited to keeping the street clear.

2011

Bladderball returned again to Yale University on October 8, 2011, despite the remaining ban. The ball appeared at Dwight Hall at approximately 4:30 p.m. The ball was popped on High Street, but the game continued with students fighting over the deflated ball. Police arrived on the scene as the ball was travelling on Elm Street, and the game ended 11 minutes after it had begun, when police interfered because of traffic that it had caused on Elm Street. The ball was confiscated by the police, who threatened to arrest students who continued to hold on to it. At least one piece of the ball was retained by a student.
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