Born on Leap Year

Edward Matthews III appeared on the third page of the first ever issue of Sports Illustrated. The year was 1954. He was wearing a crewneck Princeton sweater and his arm was cocked back about to release a football – a stereotypical Princeton man at the tailgate before the Yale game.

Matthews’ name appeared in an article in the Finance section of the Boston Globe, some 5 years later. “Merill’s associates Thaddeus Anderson and Edward Matthews posit a different theory about the effects of the bubble. They believe that, should the Japanese…” It was a rather dull article about Japanese economic growth. Matthews was an untenured professor at Harvard at the time. He seemed to be on the fast track to a grand old Ivy League career in Academia.

Matthews never again appeared in any publication of note. Some historians of Japanese agrarian imports may disagree, as Matthews published a series of extraordinarily mind-numbing articles on the subject in the Illinois Historical Review. But for any real academic, Matthews was never really heard from again.

His downfall began the day his son Edward Matthews IV was born in St. Mary’s Hospital in Cambridge. That was the day Matthews’ longtime rival and fellow Tiger alumnus Thaddeus Anderson gained a serious advantage over him. The advantage was a spotless record, which, after that day, Matthews could never boast again.

It was all his wife Judy’s fault, Matthews would reason in later years. She lost him his spotless record, and subsequently his job, and subsequently his sobriety, and subsequently his brilliance. She did all this because she couldn’t push out their damn son Edward David Matthews IV five minutes early. Instead of being born on February 28, the boy was born on February 29. He’d only have a birthday every 4 years. Matthews couldn’t stand not having a normal son.

While Judy rested in the hospital that night, Ed went to a bar, got drunk, ended up driving two lovely ladies – actually hookers – through Harvard Square, where he was arrested for drunk driving and soliciting. Later that year, Matthews was fired and suffered the awful indignity of begging for jobs from the other garbage Ivy League schools. At first, Ed thought he would only have to stoop as low as Yale, but soon he had run the gamut all the way down to Cornell (Cornell!). But even they wouldn’t give him a job.

Certainly his drunk driving played a part in the rejection, but more importantly was the drunkenness itself. Ed began to drink earlier and earlier every day. By the time he’d applied, interviewed, and been rejected at all the Ivies and even some godforsaken liberal arts schools, he was drinking a glass of vodka with breakfast. He finally shamefacedly and quite drunkenly appeared at an interview at the University of Illinois, a public school.

The senile head of the History department, Amos Smith, failed to notice the smell of hard liquor and the apparent shame emanating from Ed’s red face. All he saw were the words “Harvard University” on his resume and said “you’re hired.”

Matthews’ life in Champaign, Illinois, was depressingly second-rate. Ed never invited his family to visit – his only sister Abigail soon became a Yale professor – because he was ashamed of the town in which he lived. He was extremely bitter towards his wife. “I thought Radcliffe girls were supposed to be first-class” he wrote in his diary the day of Dave’s 4th birthday, reflecting on his son Dave’s birth. Judy, for her part, became so confused by her husband’s surliness and contempt that she lost her way, and became a prattling, too-cheery caricature of her former self. Ed, during his sober days, felt guilty about what he was doing to his family, and insisted on taking long scenic drives and making up with Judy. Inevitably the romantic glasses of wine that followed these trips served to remind him of his wife’s failures, and his surliness would return. Dave, meanwhile, had a lonely and unhappy childhood living in their second-rate house.

Matthews refused to celebrate his son’s birthday on February 28. He spent that day drinking a fifth of vodka and wondering about what might have been. Every four years on February 29, he made a point to get a cake that said “Happy birthday Dave! Thanks!” Dave didn’t understand the sarcasm, and figured the extra word was there because his birthday was so special it came around only once every four years.

By Max Wilson