“Certainly; I believe that if done scientifically and with sufficient force it would kill him. And there we are again. The natural impulse is to kill enough of the opposing team to enable you to win the game. The object of the game is to win. The surest way to win is to kill off the other team as fast as possible. But there the very persons who should do all in their power to advance the sport step in with a foolish, contradictory rule prohibiting you from slaying your man in any save one or two almost impossible methods. Any one who has played football at all knows that you can’t kill your opponent by throwing him or by pawing him on the chest with the open hand. It’s the dreariest nonsense! Consider the one or two real killings that football history shows. In each case the deed has been done either by stamping the fellow’s brains out or jumping onto his spinal column so as to break his neck, or in some way that the idiotic rules prohibit. Rules! Why, they’re the very things that are retarding the true development of the game.” “Oh, shut up, Guy!” sputtered Chester. Phillip laughed uncertainly. Of course Bassett was only fooling, but he did it with such a straight face, thought Phillip, that any one might be deceived. They turned in at the Newell Gate and followed the path around the Locker Building. The field was already well dotted with fellows; it looked to Phillip as though every man who could beg, buy or borrow a pair of football trousers had turned out. “Think over what I’ve said,” pleaded Guy, as they approached the group of waiting candidates for the freshman team. “You’ve got the making of a great football player, Ryerson; you start in with the most valuable asset of all, ignorance. Be true to your impulses and resist to the last drop of blood in your veins the coercion of narrow-minded, hide-bound, bigoted coaches and captains. You have a great future before you, my boy. Remain true to yourself, and Chester and I will look back to this day in which we were privileged to know you ere you were discovered to fame as the proudest day of our lives.” A half-hour later Phillip had begun to doubt whether he was destined to cut such a wide swath in the football landscape as he had believed. His opinion of his prowess had shrunk to such modest dimensions that he was ready to acquit Chester of all such designs on him as he had momentarily suspected him of. And, moreover, he was rather glad that he had not attempted the ’varsity team, as he had at first intended doing. Physical fatigue is conducive to self-disparagement, and Phillip ached in all the bones that he had known himself the possessor of and in several the presence of which inside his anatomy came to him as a startling and painful surprise.