BOSTON -- He looks back on a nomadic professional football career and sees frustration -- pit stops with four NFL teams and two years in the ill-fated World Football League.
But Brian Dowling could have given up his professional pigskin pursuits to hawk sea shells and few would have cared. He has a safe niche in New England college football history.
The former Yale quarterback led the Elis to two Ivy League titles in 1967-68 as the team compiled a 16-1-1 record. He still holds seven school records, including season marks in touchdown passes and total yardage.
And he is undoubtedly Yale's No. 1 folk hero, the all-everything talent at an Ivy school whose athletic prowess prompted the creation of the right-wing super jock 'B.D.' by Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau.
'I guess the B.D. thing was accurate back then,' Dowling said Tuesday at a football luncheon to promote this weekend's Harvard-Yale game. 'But it's not accurate any more.'
Dowling-led football teams in high school and college lost only two games out of 68. After graduating from Yale in 1969, he was an 11th-round draft choice of the Minnesota Vikings, who dropped him after trying him at three positions.
He was picked up by the New England Patriots, spending two years on the taxi squad and two more as Jim Plunkett's understudy. In 1972 he played enough to complete 29 of 54 passes for two touchdowns.
In 1973, he threw none and then it was off to the WFL for two more years. Brief stints with Los Angeles, Green Bay and Washington precipitated his retirement after the 1978 season.
'It was really frustrating,' Dowling says. 'Unless someone gets hurt, you don't get the chance. I remember Plunkett getting hurt in a game and asking (coach Chuck) Fairbanks to take him out, but Fairbanks wouldn't.
'You have to be in the right place at the right time. I was in college,' he says.
Dowling doesn't regret for a moment his decision to attend Yale. As one of Cleveland's greatest schoolboy athletes, he had 100 colleges pursuing him and nearly chose Southern Cal.
'I don't think I could have had a more rewarding career anywhere,' he recalls. 'The only way that a USC might have helped me is preparation for pro football with spring practices and all. But I really like the Ivy League atmosphere and the competition it offers. Guys are playing because they want to and you don't have that win-at-all-costs philosophy.'
For the past 18 months, Dowling has been working for a building supplier in Boston. But he still keeps close tabs on the game that made him one of the most publicized athletes in New England history.
He nearly had a job with the Chicago Bears as an assistant to general manager Jim Finks, who drafted him out of college. And this weekend he'll be a television analyst at the Harvard-Yale game.
'I feel I have a good grasp of the game and I've kept in touch with people over the years,' says Dowling, who also is a proficient tennis and basketball player. 'Who knows, something might happen. I have 26 years of background in sports and it's an area familiar to me. It would be a challenge.'
Dowling, however, could face his greatest challenge this weekend. He would like to set up a televised halftime chat with Trudeau, but the cartoonist is known to avoid interviews.
'But he owes me one,' Dowling says. 'When we were at Yale, he came over to my room and asked me to write the foreword to one of his books. That's the only time I ever met him. Maybe we'll meet again Saturday.'
