Rivalries & rituals / The Hill game · November 1932
Lawrenceville's Lucky Red Shirt and the Problem of a Tie
For more than a century, Lawrenceville's football captains wore an unwashed red shirt before the Hill game. The rule covered winning and losing. In 1932 the game ended 7-7.
In 1931, at his class's 35th reunion, the novelist Owen Johnson, Lawrenceville class of 1895, told a reporter the story of the Red Shirt, according to the school's alumni magazine. A captain in the 1890s used to wear a red shirt before all the games and called it the luckiest shirt in the world. He handed it down to the next captain and made him swear to leave it at the school. Then it disappeared, packed away with some school supplies.
It had turned up, Johnson said, after 34 years in a former captain's attic. "It has never been washed," he added, since it was first handed down. The current captain had it.
Thirty-four years in an attic, unwashed. That is not a shirt. That is an archive.
By 1932, the custom, as TIME described it that November, was that the captain wore the shirt the day before the game against The Hill School. If Lawrenceville lost, the shirt was washed at once, to restore its power. If they won, it stayed as it was.
That year the game ended in a 7-7 tie. TIME reported that the school then argued for three weeks about whether to wash it. In the end most of the school favored leaving it unwashed for another year.
The rule covered winning and losing. Nobody had thought about a tie, and the school thought about it for three weeks.
The class of 1948 remembered shouting "We won't wash the shirt!" the week of the Hill game, without anyone ever explaining what it meant. In 2021 the alumni magazine admitted that the original shirt's whereabouts were not known, and asked whether it might still be out there, unwashed for more than 125 years.
The rivalry goes on. Since 2019 the schools have competed for the Meigs-Green Cup, awarded to whichever wins the most contests on Hill Day. In 2025, at the 138th, Lawrenceville took the cup, ten wins to five with one tie.
There is one tie in there. I hope somebody asked what to do with the shirt.
At our house the middle one has a lucky soccer sock. One sock. He has worn it every game since spring. It is not washed after wins. It is washed after losses. After a 2-2 draw in September, he stood in the laundry room holding it over the basket for a long time, and then he put it back in his drawer.
My wife has asked me to talk to him. I have explained that there is precedent.
Sources
The public records, school pages and published accounts this story draws on. Where the story imagines a scene or a line of dialogue, that is the column’s telling, not a quotation.
- TIME: Sport — At School, November 21, 1932 time.com
- The Hill School: Introducing the Meigs-Green Cup (2019) thehill.org
- The Lawrentian, Fall 2021, class of 1948 notes, printed page 43 case.org
- Lawrenceville: Spirit and trophy at the 138th Hill Day (November 19, 2025) lawrenceville.org