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
"People who live far away from New York and who cannot understand from
the faint echoes they receive how great is the enthusiasm that this
contest arouses, may possibly get some idea of what it means to the
contestants themselves through the story of a remarkable incident, that
occurred after the game in the Princeton dressing room. The team were
being rubbed down for the last time and after their three months of
self-denial and anxiety and the hardest and roughest sort of work that
young men are called upon to do, and outside in the semi-darkness
thousands of Princeton followers were jumping up and down and hugging
each other and shrieking themselves hoarse. One of the Princeton coaches
came into the room out of this mob, and holding up his arm for silence
said,
"'Boys, I want you to sing the doxology.'"
"Standing as they were, naked and covered with mud, blood and
perspiration, the eleven men that had won the championship sang the
Doxology from the beginning to the end as solemnly and as seriously, and
I am sure, as sincerely, as they ever did in their lives, while outside
the no less thankful fellow-students yelled and cheered and beat at the
doors and windows and howled for them to come out and show themselves.
This may strike some people as a very sacrilegious performance and as a
most improper one, but the spirit in which it was done has a great deal
to do with the question, and any one who has seen a defeated team lying
on the benches of their dressing room, sobbing like hysterical school
girls, can understand how great and how serious is the joy of victory to
the men that conquer."
Introducing Vic Kennard, opportunist extraordinary. Where is the Harvard
man, Yale man, or indeed any football man who will not be stirred by the
recollection of his remarkable goal from the field at New Haven that
provided the winning points for the eleven Percy Haughton turned out in
the first year of his regime. To Kennard himself the memory is still
vivid, and there are side lights on that performance and indeed on all
his football days at Cambridge, of which he alone can tell. I'll not
make a conversation of this, but simply say as one does over the 'phone,
"Kennard talking":--
[Illustration: VIC KENNARD'S KICK]
"Many of us are under the impression that the only real football fan is
molded from the male sex and that the female of the species attends the
game for decorative purposes only. I protest. Listen. In 1908 I had the
good fortune to be selected to enter the Harvard-Yale Game at New Haven,
for the purpose of scoring on Yale in a most undignified way, through
the medium of a drop-kick, Haughton realizing that while a touchdown was
distinctly preferable, he was not afraid to fight it out in the next
best way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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