Goalposts, Goons and an Unsung Samaritan
By S.E. Schaible
When you consider the classic rivalries in college football, it is easy to picture Michigan v. Ohio State or Alabama v. Auburn, but two neighboring Pennsylvania schools leave them all in the dust. As of November 2025, Lafayette and Lehigh faced off a record 161 times, playing each other twice in several seasons. The Rivalry, as these Lehigh Valley schools simply call it, has been played since 1884 and as an alum, I am proud to point out that Lafayette leads the series 82-74. The 150th playing was held at Yankee Stadium before a sellout crowd of 48,256.
Within weeks of arriving on campus in September of 1982, the upperclassmen were already talking up the game – typically played in mid-November. This storied clash is a stand-alone, high holiday for both schools – far from something as pedestrian as homecoming weekend. Many goalposts hung in the Chi Phi barroom, the fraternity I pledged that October and coincidentally, where my father was a member 25 years earlier. Dating back to the late 1960s, these wooden totems – covered in a patina of beer, blood and other DNA – were emblazoned with a Sharpie to chronicle the year and the final score, after which every brother and pledge scribbled signatures and trash talk messages. For all those that had secured and escaped with the lumber after storming the field en masse, signing the post was a boozy rite of passage.
In my era the Chi Phis were mainly diminutive soccer and rugby types, but what we lacked in individual height and weight, we made up for in numbers. The 25 pledges that accepted bids that semester brought the headcount to 74, which probably ranked us among the two or three largest groups on campus. I would learn during future rush meetings that a premium was placed on any freshman taller than 6 feet, eliciting enthusiastic outbursts like “He would be key for the post,” meaning, an asset to help secure a goalpost. The calculus was real: If a guy my size was a borderline dork, the rush process would work as intended and invitations to dinners and parties would cease. Place that same borderline personality into a guy who was 6 feet or taller, and many would say give that man a bid!
Decades of fuckery between Lafayette and Lehigh surrounded The Rivalry. Shirts emblazoned with slogans like “Lehigh was my safety school” would emerge in the weeks leading up to the game, and the statues on campus – specifically the namesake Marquis de Lafayette and the pouncing Lafayette Leopard – would be carefully boxed as if in the path of a hurricane. This would help prevent Lehigh types from sneaking onto campus in the middle of the night and throwing buckets of paint (or worse) onto these landmarks. I was tapped to participate in the annual pledge class drink-off on the Tuesday night before the game – our 10 best chuggers against the chosen 10 from the Lehigh Chi Phi chapter – to see which team could drain a quarter-barrel of beer the fastest. The kegs were supplied by the opposing team – ostensibly to prevent cheating on quantity. I became social chairman during my sophomore year, and I learned from my elders that this keg should be purchased at least 2 weeks before the drink-off and put through its paces – warmed, frozen, thawed again, rolled downstairs and anything else that might make it foul-tasting. “Always use Genessee Cream Ale or a dark imported brew,” Ted Gumbart advised. “Put that keg in the boiler room for a couple days, to really heat it up,” said Mark Schwarzmann. The rules were simple: The first team to finish their keg won the day, and if you hurled you were out, not to return. The prize? All the pride in the universe.
The game was at home freshman year, on November 20th, and as expected our crew got their mitts on the largest piece of the splintered goalpost. Hoisting it onto our shoulders, we hiked it out of Fisher Field. From the moment we stormed the field, bodies bounced into each other; like throwing a ping pong ball into a roomful of mousetraps, it was the definition of chaos. The pledges were so hyped up that none of us questioned the risks. We were warned to keep our heads on a swivel and watch out for each other, but nothing prepared us for the on-field adrenaline dump. 40 dudes hiked a cadence like a platoon of Navy SEAL candidates carrying a log. Brothers not attached to the lumber scanned the crowd and repelled salvos – Lehigh guys or rival fraternities from our campus attempting last-ditch runs at the precious hickory. This was no friendly tug-of-war for gym class bragging rights; it was dangerous and messy, approaching tribal, with many suffering bloody noses and black eyes. In the scrum to raise a 15-foot length of goalpost you heard savage grunts and agonizing screams from every direction. Some guys wore a cup for added protection; I wore a goofy black Naugahyde bomber cap with the chin strap snapped, resembling a socially awkward municipal snowplow driver.
It was the closest thing to going into battle most of us would ever know. We arrived at the house chanting triumphant songs, taking turns autographing the post, but soon learned that a senior brother, Phil, had become separated from the group and had been viciously attacked. His nose was broken and his knee badly injured after falling and being trampled. He spent some hours at the emergency room and the next day I visited him and couldn’t help but ask who had sucker-punched him. “Random townie. Big guy. Never seen him before,” he whispered, his face a mess. This was the dark secret of The Rivalry – people with no connection to the schools, random locals, considered it sporting to run onto the field and target college students 100 pounds their junior. As I often did, I envisioned finding the guy who had gone after my friend. Phil deserved justice.
The following year at Lehigh the Bethlehem cops indiscriminately sprayed mace and released German Shepherd dogs when the throng stormed the field 10 seconds before the final whistle – my eyes burned for hours, and I couldn’t taste food for days. We were a bunch of tri-state area kids wearing LL Bean boots and barn jackets. Back at our home field in 1984, I experienced for the first time what Phil likely felt two years prior: how quickly one could get separated from one’s mates. I was tucked between Matt Marinelli and another brother, and the next moment I floated away from the goalpost – my feet not even touching the ground for 30 seconds. The pressure that held me aloft suddenly released and I fell into a pile of humanity. I didn’t recognize anyone around me. My crew was gone; nobody was looking for me. All around people were being kicked and punched and helped by their friends. I felt a hand grasp my shoulder from behind and thought, “It’s going to be okay.”
It turned out that I was far from being okay. The large hand was connected to the massive, tattooed arm of a scary man. A man that I’d never seen before, maybe in his late 20s. A couple of years later when I read Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides, I had a name for the terror I felt: It was my Callanwolde moment, the personification of evil. The giant spun me around, his right arm already cocked back ready to smash my face. I wondered if this was the guy who assaulted Phil, this angry townie in the black engineer boots and flannel shirt. Right as he released the haymaker, someone fell hard across the back of his legs, causing his swing to glance off the top of my head. Everyone collapsed into a pile of heads and elbows. A moment later I stumbled to my feet and saw the giant getting back to his, recalibrating, tossing interlopers aside like Andre the Giant, then turning his sinister attention on me. I was processing fight or flight chemicals and preparing to turtle into a tight ball with elbows protecting kidneys and palms over my ears – anything to survive the beating that was about to begin – when a voice came from my left.
“Hey Schaible, is there a problem here?” He must have barked the words for me to hear them over the din and my fear. It was Mark Royer, a sophomore I knew. Chi Phi had rushed him the prior year, but he had Phi Delta written all over him from the start. He had joined a great house, a decision that lucky freshmen were faced with when receiving bids from two legendary fraternities. Amidst all the confusion, Mark had spotted me and grasped what was transpiring, and before I could even nod a reply, he punched the goon in the ear and dropped him. The giant collapsed with a thud to the Fisher Field turf, and I staggered back to the fraternity in a daze.
Mark and I never spoke about the incident with the townie, in part because just weeks later I violated my academic probation by receiving an F on my transcript, triggering a semester off. One late night my senior year I ran into him at a party and offered my heartfelt thanks for intervening – for saving not just my teeth but possibly my life – and he smiled and handed me a cold beer. He wasn’t having any of it; wouldn’t consider that it warranted any further discussion. For 42 years I have tracked this debt – plus interest – that I owe to Mark. While the odds may be slim that the guy he clocked was the same guy who had savaged Phil, they are greater than zero. I like to think that in a moment of graceful intervention on my behalf, there was also a parallel moment of vengeance.