Football days : $b memories of the game and of the men behind the ballEdwards, William H. (William Hanford)
General
Football days : $b memories of the game and of the men behind the ball
Edwards, William H. (William Hanford)
Football
"In my day the principal quality sought was beef. Being embryo sailors
we had to have nautical terms for our signals, and they made our
opponents sit up and take notice. When I played halfback I remember my
signals were my order relating to the foremast. For instance,
'Fore-top-gallant clew lines and hands-by-the-halyards' meant that I was
the victim. On the conclusion of the order, if the captain could not
launch a play made at once, he had to lengthen his signal, and sometimes
there would be a string of jargon, intelligible only to a sailor, which
would take the light yard men aloft, furl the sail, and probably cast
reflections on the stowage of the bunt. Anything connected with the
anchor was a kick. The mainmast was consecrated to the left half, and
the mizzen to the fullback.
"In one game our lack of proper uniform worked to our advantage. I was
on the sick list and had turned my suit over to a substitute. I braved
the doctor's disapproval and went into the game in a pair of long
working trousers and a blue flannel shirt. The opposing team,
Pennsylvania, hailed me as 'Little Boy Blue,' and paid no further
attention to me, so that by good fortune I made a couple of scores. Then
they fell upon me, and at the close all I had left was the pants."
J. W. Powell, captain of the '97 team, tells of the interim between
Army-Navy games.
"Our head coach was Johnny Poe," he says, "and he and Paul Dashiell took
charge of the squad. Some of our good men were Rus White, Bill Tardy,
Halligan and Fisher, holding over from the year before. A. T. Graham and
Jerry Landis in the line. A wild Irishman in the plebe class, Paddy
Shea, earned one end position in short order, while A. H. McCarthy went
in at the other wing. Jack Asserson, Bobby Henderson, Louis Richardson
and I made up the backfield. In '95, Princeton had developed their
famous ends back system which was adopted by Johnny Poe and the game we
played that year was built around this system. Johnny was a deadly
tackler and nearly killed half the team with his system of live tackling
practice. This was one of the years in which there was no Army and Navy
game and our big game was the Thanksgiving Day contest with Lafayette.
Barclay, Bray and Rinehart made Lafayette's name a terror in the
football world. The game resulted in an 18 to 6 victory for Lafayette.
"My most vivid recollections of that game are McCarthy's plucky playing
with his hand in a plaster cast, due to a broken bone, stopping Barclay
and Bray repeatedly in spite of this handicap, and my own touchdown,
after a twelve yard run, with Rinehart's 250 pounds hanging to me most
of the way."
I recall a trip that the Princeton team of 1898 made to West Point. It
was truly an attack upon the historical old school in a fashion de luxe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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