As Teenagers, They Started the Swine Bowl. As Octogenarians, They Played the Last Game.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/25/nyregion/swine-bowl-thanksgiving-football.html

Version 0 of 1.

[What you need to know to start your day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]

It is a safe bet that the Egg Bowl, the Iron Bowl and the Palmetto Bowl, college football rituals of Thanksgiving weekend in certain circles, will be played again in 2019.

It is a safe bet that the Swine Bowl, a ritual of Thanksgiving weekend in a different circle, will not.

The original roster of Swine Bowl players, a dozen or so men now hitting 80, have called time out for good; the touch football game played on Saturday in Central Park was their last.

They have faced off every year since 1954: At first they played in New Rochelle and Larchmont, in Westchester County, where the founding players grew up as younger men, and in Central Park since the early 1960s.

Of the 15 or so original players, most still show up. One spends most of his time in France. Another flew in this year from California, and his sister came from Florida. Yet another arrived from South Carolina. At least two ex-wives cheered from the sidelines.

Dan Breslaw, who now lives in West Corinth, Vt., said the only Swine Bowl games he ever missed were during the six years he lived in Alaska. Mark Bloom, a science writer and editor, said he had missed only a single game. His excuse? He slept through it. He even slept through calls from players who left the field and ran to a pay phone.

Longevity alone gives them bragging rights. “Other bowl games, they have different players every year,” Mr. Breslaw said. “This, I would claim, is the only one played by the same personnel since it began.”

But it is not just the same players. Over the decades, the rosters have expanded to include wives, children, grandchildren and their friends. Three of the original players have died, and one is in an assisted living facility with Alzheimer’s disease.

“Originally, it was antifootball,” said Richard Greeman, the one who now mostly lives in France. “We did throw a football, and sometimes there were rather spectacular plays, but we didn’t play to win, we played to be silly. Now that it’s our sons and daughters and grandchildren, they’re getting very good.

“There are actually plays where people catch passes.”

Which means that there was a football to be thrown and caught. “One year, there almost wasn’t,” said Wendy Stasolla, who has attended seven Swine Bowls with Mr. Bloom’s nephew, John Gregg. The ball was “deflated,” she said.

A mini Deflategate? No. Someone dashed off to a sporting goods store and bought a football with air inside.

Saturday’s Swine Bowl was delayed because one of the captains was stuck in the subway. Someone served Cognac from a thermos. The first touchdown was scored by Liam Breslaw, Mr. Breslaw’s 6-year-old grandson, who returned the opening kick. As the game ended, the consensus was that the score was 70-70, generous, perhaps. But there were a lot of touchdowns and there was no official scorekeeper. No scoreboard, either.

For decades the Swine Bowl has had a tradition of ending in a tie.

“The nice thing about Swine Bowl is you don’t have to worry about who’s going to win, or who did win, or anything else,” Mr. Breslaw said.

Calling it the Swine Bowl may or may not have been a play on the Shrine Bowl, a long-defunct college matchup, or the East-West Shrine Bowl, an all-star game played in January.

And just as there are Super Bowl parties, there are Swine Bowl parties. For years there has been an after-party in Mr. Bloom’s apartment on the Upper West Side — his partner, Susan Lyons, described the fare as “Zabar’s on steroids” — but they have been spending most of their time in South Carolina lately. Mr. Greeman gives a warm-up party the night before the game at an apartment he keeps in Harlem.

The original players were teenagers who had been buddies in high school in New Rochelle and Mamaroneck. Back home for Thanksgiving as college freshmen, they got together again and decided to mock football. “We were geeks,” Mr. Breslaw said. “They didn’t call us geeks back then, but that’s what we were.”

There have been some on-field injuries. Mr. Breslaw said he was knocked unconscious one year, and whoever takes the pregame photograph might be vulnerable. The players have been known to charge the photographer.

Other holiday-season bowls have teams with eligibility rules and recruiting policies. Not the Swine Bowl. “There were two or three times, I would go over to a family and say, ‘Would you like to play with us?’” recalled Polly Landess, a public-radio producer in Miami whose brother, Tony Hill, was one of the original players. “Sometimes they showed up the next year, too.”

The Swine Bowl has teams, although it was hard to tell them apart on Saturday, and the teams have captains. The players also have nicknames, which only makes things more confusing for newcomers.

“Boom” — Mr. Bloom — “was the captain of the New Rochelle team, even though he grew up in Larchmont and went to Mamaroneck High,” Mr. Hill explained, “and Richard” — Mr. Greeman — “was the captain of the Larchmont side, although he can’t really play anymore. He’s always had a bad back, and frankly, I thought he was a terrible football player, but don’t tell him that.” (Officially, anyway, Mr. Greeman’s daughter Jenny succeeded him as the Larchmont captain some years ago.)

For 40 years or so, after leaving Westchester, the Swine Bowl’s home was on the Great Lawn Oval in Central Park. “We were booted out of there when the park started to be beautified” in the 1980s, Mr. Breslaw said.

The Swine Bowl moved to a spot near 86th Street, but there, the Swine Bowl banner attracted attention. Parks Department employees “came around on their motor scooters and made us take it down and threatened to call the cops,” he said.

In anticipation of this year’s finale, he applied for a permit. But Mr. Breslaw said the Parks Department “seemed to be under the impression that the Swine Bowl is a ‘competitive sporting activity,’” which would be against park rules.

“I would challenge anybody to watch the Swine Bowl for more than a minute and decide it was an organized sport,” he said.

Even so, he said, the Parks Department did issue a permit, not for the 86th Street field but for two other places in the park. But the Swine Bowl was defiantly played at 86th Street anyway. “I figured having any kind of permit we could wave when they came around would show good faith, as in, ‘We tried,’” Mr. Breslaw said before Saturday’s kickoff.

He waved the permit when a worker from the Central Park Conservancy came by, apparently alerted by someone clearing leaves not far away. The worker put on his glasses, read the permit and pointed out that it for somewhere else.

Eventually another conservancy employee arrived, and Mr. Breslaw and Mr. Greeman pleaded their case. The conservancy workers left, and the Swine Bowl regulars said the word was that the game could go on if the players left by 3 p.m. It was then about 1:40.

“That’s more time than we need,” said David Greeman, a nephew of Mr. Greeman.

The decision to end the tradition and let Saturday’s Swine Bowl be the last was made after a number of heated emails went back and forth in the fall.

“A couple of people have died already,” Mr. Breslaw said. “If we continue playing, more will die. How far do we want to carry this — until there are two or three of us standing in the rain, or sitting in wheelchairs?

“The Swine Bowl was always predicated on the denial of death and mortality. We just sort of ignored it, but it is a reality. People have to face it at some point.”