But, happy as we were, Bost wasn't nearly content. He had ideals. I
believe one of them must have been to run that team through a couple of
brick flats without spoiling the formation. Nothing satisfied him. He
was particularly distressed about the fullback. Hogboom was a good
fellow and took signal practice perfectly, but he was no fiend. He
lacked the vivacity of a real, first-class Bengal tiger. He wouldn't
eat any one alive. He'd run until he was pulled down, but you never
expected him to explode in the midst of seven hostiles and ricochet down
the field for forty yards. He never jumped over two men and on to
another, and he never dodged two ways at once and laid out three men
with stiff arms on his way to the goal. It wasn't his style. He was good
for two and a half yards every time, but that didn't suit Bost. He was
after statistics, and what does a three-yard buck amount to when you
want 70 to 0 scores?
The result of this dissatisfaction was Ole Skjarsen. Late in September
Bost disappeared for three days and came back leading Ole by a rope--at
least, he was towing him by an old carpet-bag when we sighted him. Bost
found him in a lumber camp, he afterward told us, and had to explain to
him what a college was before he would quit his job. He thought it was
something good to eat at first, I believe. Ole was a timid young
Norwegian giant, with a rick of white hair and a reënforced concrete
physique. He escaped from his clothes in all directions, and was so
green and bashful that you would have thought we were cannibals from the
way he shied at us--though, as that was the year the bright hat-ribbons
came in, I can't blame him. He wasn't like anything we had ever seen
before in college. He was as big as a carthorse, as graceful as a dray
and as meek as a missionary. He had a double width smile and a thin
little old faded voice that made you think you could tip him over and
shine your shoes on him with impunity. But I wouldn't have tried it for
a month's allowance. His voice and his arms didn't harmonize worth a
cent. They were as big as ordinary legs--those arms, and they ended in
hands that could have picked up a football and mislaid it among their
fingers.
No wonder Ole was a sensation. He didn't look exactly like football
material to us, I'll admit. He seemed more especially designed for light
derrick work. But we trusted Bost implicitly by that time and we gave
him a royal reception. We crowded around him as if he had been a T. R.
capture straight from Africa. Everybody helped him register third prep,
with business-college extras. Then we took him out, harnessed him in
football armor, and set to work to teach him the game.
Bost went right to work on Ole in a businesslike manner. He tossed him
the football and said: "Catch it." Ole watched it sail past and then
tore after it like a pup retrieving a stick. He got it in a few minutes
and brought it back to where Bost was raving.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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