Football -- Juvenile fiction; Phillips Exeter Academy -- Juvenile fiction; Schools -- Juvenile fiction
The game with the Harvard Second was at the same time Wolcott’s glory
and his undoing. He had opposite him a player of the familiar college
type,—big, strong, experienced, well versed in the tricks of the trade,
but without the power or the brains or the temperament necessary to make
a first-class varsity man. He played a game of smash and drive, much
like that which Wolcott had learned to expect from Butler,—high in the
air and slow. The ease with which the Seaton left guard did the work
expected of him set the coaches on the side-lines dancing with joy. So
unsuccessful was the bulky Harvard man in stopping his troublesome
opponent that toward the end of the second half he lost his head or his
temper; and in his struggles, by accident or design, one of his fists
landed smartly on Wolcott’s nose. As luck would have it, in the same
scrimmage, Wolcott also received a hard, numbing blow in the leg from
some heavy Harvard boot. Though the limping fellow protested that he was
quite able to play, Laughlin, fearing to take risks with a valuable man,
sent him to the side-lines and called in Butler to finish the game.
“Lindsay’s nose wasn’t broken, was it?” asked Mr. Graham, meeting the
school physician a few hours later.
Dr. Kenneth laughed. “Oh, no; he had nothing worse than nosebleed. His
thigh will be lame for a day or two from the kick that he got in the
last scrimmage, but neither injury requires my care.”
And while Wolcott was having his leg rubbed, and gossiping joyously with
Laughlin about the work of the eleven of which he was at last a
full-fledged member, the professional disseminator of evil tidings was
preparing the following “story” for the Boston _Trumpeter_:—
“The Harvard Second went to Seaton yesterday and received a drubbing to
the tune of 16 to 0. It wasn’t as easy as the score seems to indicate,
for the game was a fight from start to finish, only the gilt-edged
training and splendid team work of the Seatonians enabling them to pull
out a victory. Milliken was the sledge hammer most successfully used to
smash the Harvard line, though Buist also proved no slouch in pushing
the pigskin forward. Laughlin was as invincible as usual, while Lindsay,
Seaton’s new left guard, put up an especially lively, scrappy game,
until he was carried off the field near the end of the second half, with
the blood streaming down his face. It is to be hoped that his injuries
won’t keep him permanently off the gridiron, as he seems to be the great
find of the season.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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