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
"Here was a man built like the bole of a tree, alight with fire,
determination, love of sport, and hunger for the task in hand. He was no
easy taskmaster, but always a just one. Many a young man of that period
will remember, as I do, the grinding day's work when everything seemed
to go wrong, when mere discouragement was gradually giving way to actual
despair, when, somewhat clogged with mud and dust and blood, he felt a
sudden slap on the back, and heard a cheery voice saying, 'Good work
to-day. Keep it up.' Playing hard football himself, Newell demanded hard
football of his pupils. I wish, indeed, that some of the players of
to-day who groan over a few minutes' session with the soft tackling
dummy of these times could see that hard, sole leather tackling dummy
swung from a joist that went clear through it and armed with a shield
that hit one over the head when he did not get properly down to his
work, that Newell used.
"It was grinding work this, but through it one learned.
"That ancient and battered dummy is stowed away, a forgotten relic of
the old days, in the gymnasium at Cornell. There are not a few of us
who, when returning to Ithaca, hunt it up to do it reverence.
"Let him for a moment transfer his allegiance to the scrub eleven, and
in that moment the Varsity team knew that it was in a real football
game. They were hard days indeed on Percy Field, but good days. I have
seen Newell play single-handed against one side of the Varsity line,
tear up the interference like a whirlwind, and bring down his man. Many
of us have played in our small way on the scrub when for purposes of
illustration Newell occupied some point in the Varsity line. We knew
then what would be on top of us the instant the ball was snapped. Yet
when the heap was at its thickest Newell would still be in the middle of
it or at the bottom, as the case might be, still working, and still
coaching. Both in his coaching at Harvard and at Cornell he developed
men whose names will not be forgotten while the game endures, and some
of these developments were in the nature of eleventh-hour triumphs for
skill and forceful, yet none the less sympathetic, personality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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