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
"There were some amusing incidents in connection with that particular
game that come back to me now. I remember that when going down on the
train from New York to Princeton, I was very much amused at Mike
Murphy's efforts to get Tom Shevlin worked up so he would play an extra
good game. Mike kept telling Tom what a good man Davis was and how the
latter was going to put it all over him. Tom clenched his fists, put on
a silly grin and almost wept. It really did me a lot of good, as it
helped to keep my mind off the game. When it did come to the game, his
first big game, Shevlin certainly played wonderful football.
"I had been ill for about a week and a half before this game and really
had not played in practice for two or three weeks. Mike was rather
afraid of my condition, so he told me to be the last man always to get
up before the ball was put in play. I carefully followed his advice and
as a result a lot of my friends in the stand kept thinking that I had
been hurt.
"Toward the end of the game we were down about on Princeton's 40-yard
line. It was the third down and the probabilities were that we would not
gain the distance, so I decided to have Bowman try for a drop-kick. I
happened to glance over at the side line and there was old Mike Murphy
making strenuous motions with his foot. The umpire, Dashiell, saw him
too, and put him off the side lines for signalling. I remember being
extremely angry at the time because I was not looking at the side lines
for any signals and had decided on a drop kick anyhow.
"In my day it was still the policy to work the men to death, to drill
them to endure long hours of practice scrimmage. About two weeks before
the Princeton game in my senior year, we were in a slump. We had a long,
miserable Monday's practice. A lot of the old coaches insisted that
football must be knocked into the men by hard work, but it seemed to me
that the men knew a lot of football. They were fundamentally good and
what they really needed was condition to enable them to show their
football knowledge. It is needless to say that I was influenced greatly
in this by Mike Murphy and his knowledge of men and conditioning them.
Joe Swann, the field coach, and Walter Camp were in accord, so we turned
down the advice of a lot of the older coaches and gave the Varsity only
about five minutes' scrimmage during the week and a half preceding the
Princeton game, with the exception of the Bucknell game the Saturday
before. During the week before the Princeton and Harvard games we went
up to Ardsley and had no practice for three days. There was a
five-minutes' scrimmage on Thursday. This was an unusual proceeding, but
it was so intensely hot the day of the Princeton game, and we all lost
so much weight something unusual had to be done. The team played well in
the Princeton game, but it was simply a coming team then. In the Harvard
game, which we won 23 to 0, it seemed to me that we were at the top of
our form.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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