There are bright lights, freshly cut grass painted with crisp white lines and a big stadium. Players decked in shoulder pads and helmets race across the field while screaming fans yell, "Touchdown!" It is a Saturday afternoon in September 1956 at Brandeis, and you and several friends are watching a Brandeis University football game.

While the Brandeis football program was cancelled in 1960, in its nine-year history, the team played 86 games and had 41 wins, 41 losses and four tied games. A varsity squad was formed in 1951 two years after Brandeis came into existance, with a freshman football program.

According to the Robert D.?Farber University Archives, Abram Sachar, the University's first president, hired Benny Friedman to run the athletic program. A popular figure in the Jewish community because of his athletic achievements, Friedman had been a star quarterback at the University of Michigan before going on to play professional football.

Sachar added varsity football to the athletic program because he wanted Brandeis to be more than a Yeshiva- type university. He envisioned a nonsectarian school, and he saw football as the perfect way to demonstrate that. However, the creation of a football program was rather ambitious; none of the members of the Brandeis Board of Trustees had ever experienced varsity athletics, especially not popular football. According to a memo written in 1960 by Sachar, football ended because of financial pressure felt by the institution. The memo said that the per capita cost of fielding varsity football was high in relation to other varsity sports.

"The elimination of varsity football will release resources that will broaden and strengthen intramural and [other forms] of athletic activity," Sachar's memo says.

Around campus, there are lots of theories about why the program ended, but the actual reasons are a bit different from popular opinion. According to the archives, at one time there was a campus rumor that former board member Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to end the program because of the image she thought football players portrayed. Others believed that the team was not good enough to even bother playing.

Mike Uhlberg '55 and Bill McKenna '54 were on Brandeis' football team in its early years. McKenna was a captain of the team and Uhlberg is in the Brandeis Athletic Hall of Fame for football. They both have definite ideas about what happened to Brandeis football.

Uhlberg is now an author of children's books and Hands of My Father, a memoir about growing up with deaf parents in Brooklyn, and is currently working on a memoir about his time at Brandeis, for which he has done extensive archival research.

McKenna is originally from Salem, Mass. After graduating with a degree in physics, he was a draft pick for the Philadelphia Eagles but decided to play professionally in Canada for the Calgary Stampeders so that he could pursue geophysics.

McKenna says that the football program's ending was devastating, and the decision has plagued him and former fellow teammates since.

According to Uhlberg, in the football program's beginnings, the Brandeis community enthusiastically supported the football teamby cheering at home games. At home games, Uhlberg says most of Waltham was in attendance in addition to hundreds of Brandeis students.

The team was well-regarded on campus, according to Uhlberg. "Most students thought the [football] program was one of the greatest things about the [athletics] program," says Uhlberg.

McKenna agrees with Uhlberg but notes that campus reception to the football team was mixed.

"Certain parts of the University welcomed us. Some professors were very warm and open, [and] a good part of the student body was the same way. [However], there were some bad feelings toward us; a bit of snobbery," says McKenna.

Still, Uhlberg says that the image of diversity was also only seen in football because that was the only place it existed. "The majority of athletes were non-Jews. I was a commodity," says Uhlberg. "My [African-American] roommate was also on the team. The starting team had a couple of African-Americans, a few Irish Catholics, a few Italians and only a couple of Jews."

Uhlberg says that this was the beautiful thing about the football team. "Part of [Sachar is and the Board's idea for creating a football team was to use it] as the face to America to establish that Brandeis was nonsectarian and was open to everyone," he says. "The football team was a true expression of what the school was envisioned as."

In the years after Uhlberg and McKenna graduated, positive feelings toward the football team changed.

"It was a product of the times. It was certain that the [Brandeis] leaders were anti-football," says McKenna.

In Uhlberg's opinion, the students were more anti-football than Brandeis leaders. In the latter half of the decade, Uhlberg claims that students hated everything that had to do with the conventions of the era, like football.

Still, Uhlberg also feels that the original purpose of football as a scheme to introduce a complete, nonsectarian university was accomplished by 1960, and that was Sachar's reason to end the program.

When the program ended, much of the football community, including Friedman, was unaware that the decision was under consideration.

In fact, when the Board of Trustees voted to drop football, according to Uhlberg, no one knew publicly that the subject was on their agenda. In the end, though, Friedman gave up his fight for football, saying in a memo, "With a small school, high academic requirements and the cost, it was better that we discontinue [football] at this time."

"I think it was a jealousy thing. Friedman brought more publicity to this school then Sachar ever did," says McKenna.

Uhlberg believes the situation draws similarities to the Rose Art Museum controversy that took place last year. However, in the case of the Rose, there was a group of people outside of the Brandeis community that stood up to defend the museum.

Uhlberg says that had he and his former teammates been aware of the situation, they, too, would have tried to defend the football program.

"You will see now that the Rose will never be short of money: a treasure. Football could've been that as well," says Uhlberg.

In the time that football was here, though, McKenna and Uhlberg both agree that it was Brandeis' golden age.

"If you look at the start of the university, the spirit was built by athletes like football players. I think Sachar made a huge mistake," says McKenna.

"Every day you woke up at Brandeis [when I was a student] was a new page. [There was] no history. You couldn't talk about alum. [You could talk about] the football team that could beat the University of New Hampshire. Whoa! You could talk about all these Jewish kids playing football. That's kind of interesting. If having football was a decision made for purely cynical purposes, by 1960 it had served its purpose. [At one point, though], it was great," says Uhlberg.