The First Snap Was in 1954, and They\'re Still Playing

The 59th Swine Bowl got under way in Central Park at 2:10 p.m. on Saturday, 70 minutes after its theoretical start. In other words, this annual game of touch football began more or less on time.

Two things are not to be counted on at the Swine Bowl. Punctuality is No. 2.

Most elusive of all is anything that resembles touch football of the sort favored by weekend warriors, those oppressively serious types who act as if life itself were on the line. For example, when players showed up in smaller numbers than usual at Swine Bowl LVIII last year, the rules were hastily altered.

“People could be on either side, not only at the start of the game but on any given play,” recalled Dan Breslaw, who has been in all but a few bowl games since the first one in 1954. “In other words, each time the ball was snapped, you had no idea who was on your team and who wasn't. Naturally, this had a stylistic effect on the game. Chaos, it's fair to say, reigned supreme. ”

I first became aware of the Swine Bowl five years ago, and decided to check in on Saturday - the game is faithfully played on the Saturday after Thanksgiving - to see if tradition held. It did, admirably. A solid contingent of 36 went to the park on a blustery fall afternoon. Organizers, a word used loosely here, had no way to predict the turnout. As ever, people either showed up or they didn't.

Those on hand included seven Swine Bowl originals, men now in their 70s, plus wives, friends, children (several taking a bead on 50) and grandchildren, whose devotion to the game seemed unimpeachable.

Some came from afar, like Tony Hill, an original who lives in Berkeley, Calif. When he caught a pass for a touchdown on Saturday, he couldn't resist announcing with conviction, “Let that be a lesson to you.”

Richard Greeman, another original, came back from his home in southern France in time for the game. His former wif e, Julie Greeman, was there, too. Their daughter, Jenny, 37, has assumed her father's longtime role as a co-captain of the teams, which don't actually exist until they are formed just before game time.

When I expressed mild surprise to Julie Greeman that she had remained a regular even though she and her husband divorced more than 30 years ago, she reacted as she might upon hearing a blasphemy. “Omigod,” she replied. “It's a tradition.”

Enough said.

Indeed, the pride of the Swine Bowl is that it has to be the longest-running sports event in the country featuring the same players. Name another contest that has continued uninterruptedly with an unchanging core group for nearly six decades.

As you surely guessed by now, the game has always been less about football than about enduring friendship.

It started with teenagers who went to New Rochelle and Mamaroneck high schools in the early 1950s. They enjoyed one another's company so much that they regrouped for rounds of football when they returned home from college on Thanksgiving break. The game migrated to Central Park in the 1960s after one of the originals, Mark Bloom, moved to the Upper West Side. About 15 years ago, it settled into its present location, a patch of the park at the West 86th Street entrance.

How did it come to be called Swine Bowl? Theories abound, but no one has a clear answer. Mr. Greeman suggested that “it was to make fun of all the bowls, and we came up with the most disgusting thing.”

There are, to be sure, rules. But the most important of them are that the game must end in a tie and that it should maintain what Mr. Breslaw described to me five years ago as “a steady and solid atmosphere of buffoonery.” (Kind of like the New York Jets, you might say.)

Time has taken its inevitable toll. Two Swine Bowl originals have died. And while the survivors are a hardy bunch, they cannot be indifferent to their mo rtality and to the fact that the younger generations are now dominant on the field.

Mr. Breslaw, who came down from West Corinth, Vt., put it this way in an e-mail before the game: “With each passing year, the question looms larger: Do we just keep going till most of us have died and only a few geezers in wheelchairs are out there being pushed around by caretakers? Or do we call a dignified halt after some appropriate milestone?”

But, he said, “at this point we're still having a hell of a lot of fun, so it's hard to think of quitting.”

E-mail Clyde Haberman: haberman@nytimes.com