Football Days Part 31

Prominent among those who have worked hard for Harvard and whose work has been more than welcome, are Arthur c.u.mnock, that brilliant end rush, George Stewart, Doctor William A. Brooks, a former Harvard captain, Lewis, Upton, John Cranston, Deland, Hallowell, Thatcher, Forbes, Waters, Newell, Dibblee, Bill Reid, Mike Farley, Josh Crane, Charlie Daly, Pot Graves, Leo Leary, and others well versed in the game of football.

Haughton had had some experience not only in coaching at Cambridge but coaching at Cornell, and the Harvard football authorities realized that of all the Harvard graduates Haughton would probably be the best man to turn the tide in Harvard football.

Percy, who played tackle on a winning Crimson eleven, and Sam Felton will be well remembered as the fastest punters of their day.

The first Harvard team coached by Haughton defeated Yale. It was in 1908 when Haughton used a spectacular method, when he rushed Vic Kennard into the Crimson backfield after Ver Wiebe had brought the ball up the field where Haughton's craft sent Vic Kennard in to make the winning three points and Kennard himself will tell the story of that game. The next year Percy Haughton's team could not defeat the great Ted Coy, who kicked two goals from the field.

The performance of the Harvard 1908 team was the more remarkable because Burr, who was the captain and the great punter at that time, had been injured and the team was without his services. How well I remember him on the side lines keenly following the play, but brilliant in his self-denial.

There have been times when victories did not come to Harvard with the regularity that they have under the Haughton regime, but the scales go up and down year by year, game by game, and from defeats we learn much.

Let us read what this premier coach says upon reflection:

"Surely the game of football brings out the best there is in one. Aside from the mental and physical exercise, the game develops that inestimable quality of doing one's best under pressure. What better training for the game of life than the acid test of a champions.h.i.+p game.

Such a test comes not alone to the player but to the coach as well.

"What truer and finer friends can one have than those whom we have met through the medium of football! And finally as the years tend to narrow this precious list, through death, what greater privilege than to a.s.sociate with the fellow whose muscles are lithe and whose mind is clean. Such a man was Francis H. Burr, captain of the Harvard team in 1908. Words fail me to express my sincere regard for that gallant leader. His spirit still lives at Cambridge; his type we miss.

"I am proud of the men who worked shoulder to shoulder in bringing about Harvard victories. The list is a long one. I shall always cherish the hearty co-operation of these men who gave their best for Harvard."

It was Al Sharpe, that great Cornell coach, who, in the fall of 1915 found it possible to break through the Harvard line of victories, and hanging on the walls in the trophy room at Cornell University is a much prized souvenir of Cornell's visit to Cambridge. That was the only defeat on the Harvard schedule. But sometimes defeats have to come to insure victory, and perhaps in that defeat by Cornell lay the reason for the overwhelming score against Yale.

[Ill.u.s.tration:

Whitney Dadmun Harte L. Curtis Dougherty Harris Haughton Taylor McKintock Weatherhead R. Curtis Cowen Blanchard King Parson Gilman Mahan Watson Wallace Soucy Boles Robinson Coolidge Horneen Rollins

HARVARD, 1915]

Slowly, but surely, Al Sharpe has won his way into the front ranks of football coaches. Working steadfastly year after year he has built up and established a system that has set Cornell's football machinery upon a firm foundation.

Glenn Warner

Glenn Warner has contributed a great deal to football, both as a player and coach.

Warner was one of the greatest linemen that ever played on the Cornell team. After leaving college he began his coaching career in 1895 at the University of Georgia. His success there was remarkable. It attracted so much attention that he was called back to Cornell in 1897 and 1898. In 1899 Warner moved again and began his historic work at the Carlisle Indian School, turning out a team year after year that gave the big colleges a close battle and sometimes beat them.

There never was a team that attracted so much attention as the Carlisle Indians. They were popular everywhere and drew large crowds, not only on account of their being Redmen, but on account of their adaptability to the game. Warner, as their coach, wrought wonders with them, and really all the colleges at one time or another had their scalps taken by the Indians. They were the champion travelers of the game. Their games were generally all away from home, and yet the long trips did not seem to hamper them in their play. They got enjoyment out of traveling.

Going from Princeton to New York one Friday night some years ago, I was told by the conductor that the Carlisle football team was in the last car. I went back and talked with Warner. The Indian team were amusing themselves in one end of the car, and thus pa.s.sing the time away by entering into a game they were accustomed to play on trips. One of the Carlisle players would stand in the center of the aisle and some fifteen or so men would group about him, in and about and on top of the seats.

This central figure would bend over and close his eyes. Then some one from the crowd would reach over and spank the crouching Indian a terrific blow, hastily drawing back his hand. Then the Indian who had received the blow would straighten up and try, by the expression of guilt on the face of the one who had delivered the blow, to find his man. Their faces were a study, yet nearly every time the right man was detected.

Who is there in football who will ever forget the Indian team, their red blankets and all that was typical of them; the yells that the crowds gave as the Indians appeared. They seemed always to be fit. They were full of spirit and anxious to clash with their opponents.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GREATEST INDIAN OF THEM ALL]

I recall an incident in a Princeton-Carlisle game, when the game was being fiercely waged. Miller, the great Indian halfback, had scored a touchdown, after a long run. It was not long after this that a Princeton player was injured. Maybe the play was being slowed up a little. Anyway, time was taken out. One of the Indians seemed to sense the situation.

The Princeton players were lying on the ground while the Carlisle men were prancing about eager to resume the fray, when one of the Indians remarked:

"White man play for wind. Indian play football."

In 1915 Warner went to the University of Pittsburgh. Here he has already begun to duplicate former successes. Cruikshank, Peck, and Wagner are three of Pittsburgh's many stars. Probably the greatest football player that Warner ever developed at the Carlisle Indian School was Jim Thorpe, whose picture appears on the opposite page. Unhappy the end, and not infrequently the back, who had to face this versatile player. Thorpe was a raider.

Billy Bull

Billy Bull of Yale is one of the old heroes who has kept in very close touch with the game. He has been a valuable coach at Yale and the Elis'

kicking game is left entirely in his hands. He is an enthusiastic believer in the game. Immediately after leaving New Haven in 1889 he started to coach and since that time he has not missed a year. Years ago he inaugurated a routine system of coaching for the various styles of kicks. "My object," he said recently, "has been to turn out consistent rather than wonderful kickers. As a player I was early impressed with the value of kicking, not only in a general way but also in a particular way, such as the punt in an offensive way. For more than twenty-five years I have talked it up. For a long time I talked it to deaf ears, especially at Yale. I talked it when I coached at West Point for ten years and was generally set down as a harmless crank on the subject, but I have lived to see the time when every one agrees on the great value of this offensive kick.

"When I entered Yale I was an absolute greenhorn, but the greenhorn had a chance then, for he was able to play in actual scrimmage every day; now the squads are so big that opportunities for playing the game for long daily periods are entirely wanting.

"To-day it is a case of a heap big talk, a coach for every position, more talk, lots of system, blackboard exercises and mighty little actual play.

"I have often wondered if things were not being overdone as far as coaching goes in the preparatory schools at the present time. The superabundance of coaches and the demand for victory combine to force the boy.

"If there is any forcing to do, the college is the place for it, when the boy is older and better able to stand the strain. In recent years I have seen not a few brokendown boys enter college. Boys are coming to college now who needs must be told everything, and if there is not a large body of coaches about to tell them, they mutiny. They seem to forget, or not to know, that most is up to the man himself.

"When a boy comes to college with the idea that all that is necessary is for him to be told, constantly told how to do this and that, and he will deliver in the last ditch, I cannot help thinking that something is wrong.

"I have in mind right now a player in the line, who came to college after four years of school football. Ever since his entry he has complained that no one has told him anything. Now this particular player spends ten months of each year loafing, and expects in his two months of football to do a man's job in a big game.

"No amount of blackboard and other talk is going to make a player do a man's job and whip his opponent. No man can play a tackle job properly if he does not realize the kind of a proposition he is up against twelve months in the year and act accordingly. He has got to do his own thinking, and see to it himself that he has the necessary strength and toughness, to play the game, as one must to win."

Sanford the Unique

George Foster Sanford is unique in football. He made splendid teams when he coached at Columbia, while his subsequent record with the Rutgers Eleven attracted wide attention.

In the _Columbia Alumni News_ of October, 1915, Albert W. Putnam, a former player, reviews seven years of Morningside football, and pays the following tribute to Foster Sanford:

"Sanford coached the teams of 1899, 1900 and 1901. He coached them ably, conscientiously and thoroughly, and in my opinion was the best football coach in the country."

"During my three years' experience as coach at Columbia," says Sanford, "we beat all the big teams except Harvard. I was fortunate enough to develop such men as Weekes, Morley, Wright, and Berrien, players whose records will always stand high in the Hall of Football Fame at Columbia.

I was particularly well satisfied with the work I got out of Slocovitch, a former Yale player, whom the Yale coaches had never seemed to handle properly. I did not allow him to play over one day a week. This was because I had discovered that he was very heavily muscled; that if he played continuously he would become muscle bound. My treatment proved to fit the case exactly and Slocovitch became a star end for Columbia. We defeated Yale the first year; the next year at New Haven the contest was a strenuous one, and the game attracted unusual attention. It was in my own home town, and I had to stand for a lot of good natured kidding, but those who were there will remember how scared the Yale coaches got during the last part of the game, when Columbia made terrific advances.

How Columbia's team fought Gordon Brown's Eleven almost to a standstill that day is something that the Yale coaches of that time will long remember."

An old Yale player, Bob Loree, whose father is a Trustee of Rutgers, induced Sanford to lend the college his a.s.sistance. Apparently this connection was an unmixed blessing. "Mr. L. F. Loree, Bob's father,"

says Sandy, "has frankly admitted that in his opinion Sanford's gift to the college (for he works without remuneration) has brought a spirit and a betterment of conditions which is worth fully as much as donations of thousands of dollars.

"From the first day I went there," continues Sandy, "I started to build up football for Rutgers and to rely on Rutgers men for my a.s.sistants. It was there that I met the best football man I ever coached, John T.

Toohey. This remarkable tackle weighed 220 pounds. The life he led and the example he set will always have a lasting influence upon Rutgers men. For sad to relate, Toohey was killed in the railroad yards at Oneonta, where he was yard master. Toohey was a great leader, possessing a wonderful personality, and winning the immediate respect of every one who knew him."

Twenty-five years have pa.s.sed since I saw Sanford that morning in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Since then I have followed his football career with enthusiasm. Boyhood heroes live long in mind. He is what might be called a major surgeon in football, for it is a matter of record that he has been called back to Yale, not when the patient was merely sick, but in a serious condition. Usually the operation has been performed with such skill that the patient has rallied with disconcerting suddenness.

Talking to the Yale teams between the halves, giving instructions, which have turned dubious prospects into flaming victories, is a service which Sanford has rendered Yale more than once. Victory, as it happens, is the princ.i.p.al characteristic of Sanford's work. Long is the list of players whom Sanford has developed.

"In my coaching experience," Sandy tells us, "I doubt if I ever coached a man where my hard work counted for more at Yale than the case of Charlie Chadwick in 1897. For many years there has been a saying that a one man defense is as good as an eleven men defense, providing you can get one man who can do it.