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
"Frank Bergen was quarterback," he says. "I saw he was not going right,
and surprised the coaches by asking them to make a change. They asked me
to wait. In a few minutes I went to them again, with the same result. I
came back a third time, and insisted that he be taken out. A substitute
was put in. I will never forget Bergen's face when he burst into tears
and asked me who was responsible for his being taken out. I told him I
was. It almost broke his heart, for he had always regarded me as a
friend. I knew how much he wanted to play the game out. He lived in New
Haven. When the doctor examined him, it was found that he had three
broken ribs. There was great danger of one of them piercing his lungs
had he continued in the game. Of course, there are lots of boys that
are willing to do such things for their Alma Mater, but the gamest of
all is the man who, with a broken neck to start with, went out and put
in four years of college football. I refer to Eddie Hart, who was not
only the gamest, but one of the strongest, quickest, cleanest men that
ever played the game, and any one who knows Eddie Hart and those who
have seen him play, know that he never saved himself but played the game
for all it was worth. He was the life and spirit of every team he ever
played on at Exeter or Princeton."
Ed Wylie, an enthusiastic Hill School Alumnus, football player at Hill
and Yale, tells the following anecdote:
"The nerviest thing I ever saw in a football game was in the
Hill-Hotchkiss 0 to 0 game in 1904. At the start of the second half,
Arthur Cable, who was Hill's quarterback, broke his collar-bone. He
concealed the fact and until the end of the game, no one knew how badly
he was hurt. He was in every play, and never had time called but once.
He caught a couple of punts with his one good arm and every other punt
he attempted to catch and muffed he saved the ball from the other side
by falling on it. In the same game, a peculiar thing happened to me. I
tackled Ted Coy about fifteen minutes before the end of the game, and
until I awoke hours later, lying in a drawing-room car, pulling into
the Grand Central Station, my mind was a blank. Yet I am told the last
fifteen minutes of the game I played well, especially when our line was
going to pieces. I made several gains on the offensive, never missed a
signal and punted two or three times when close to our goal line."
No less noteworthy is the spirit of a University of Pennsylvania player,
who was handicapped during his gridiron career with Penn' by many severe
injuries. This man had worked as hard as any one possibly could to make
the varsity for three years. His last year was no different from
previous seasons; injuries always worked against him. In his final year
he had broken his leg early in the season. A short time before the
Cornell game he appeared upon the field in football togs, full of spirit
and determined to get in the game if they needed him. This was his last
chance to play on the Penn' team.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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