“Ned Mahan,” said Pooch, “was the best all-around football man I have ever handled.  He was easy to handle, eager to do as he was told, and he never caused the trainer any worry.  Up to the very last moment he played, he was eager to learn everything he could that would improve his game.  He had lots of football ability.

“You know Mahan was a great star at Andover.  He kicked wonderfully there and was good in all departments of the game, and he improved a hundred per cent. after he came to Harvard.”

Pooch Donovan told me about the first day that Eddie Mahan came out upon the Harvard field.  At Cambridge, little is known by the head coach about a freshman’s ability.  One day Haughton said to Pooch Donovan: 

“Where is that Natick friend of yours?  Bring him over to the Stadium and let’s see him kick.”

Donovan got Mahan and Haughton said to Mahan: 

“Let’s see you kick.”

Mahan boosted the ball seventy yards, and Haughton said: 

“What kind of a kick is that?”

Mahan thought it was a great kick.

“How do you think any ends can cover that?” said Haughton.

Mahan thereupon kicked a couple more, low ones, but they went about as far.

“Who told you you could kick?” quoth Haughton.  “You must kick high enough for your ends to cover the distance.”

“Take it easy and don’t get excited,” Donovan was whispering to Mahan on the side.  “Take your time, Ned.”

But Mahan continued kicking from bad to worse.  Haughton was getting disgusted, and finally remarked: 

“Your ends never can cover those punts.”

Mahan then kicked one straight up over his head, and the first word ever uttered by him on the Harvard field, was his reply to Haughton: 

“I guess almost any end can cover that punt,” he said.

Donovan tells me that he used to carry in his pocket a few blank cartridges for starting sprinters.  Sitting on a bench with some friends, on Soldiers’ Field, one day he reached into his hip pocket for some loose tobacco.  Unconsciously he stuffed into the heel of his pipe a blank cartridge that had become mixed with the tobacco.  The gun club was practicing within hearing distance of the field.  As Donovan lighted his pipe the cartridge went off.  He thought he was shot.  Leaping to his feet he ran down the field, his friends after him.

“I was surprised at my own physical condition—­at my being able to stand so well the shock of being shot,” says Donovan in telling the story.  “My friends thought also that I was shot.  But when I slowed up, still bewildered, and they caught up with me, they were puzzled to see my face covered with powder marks and a broken pipe stem sticking out of my mouth.

“Not until then did any of us realize what had really happened.  The cartridge had grazed my nose slightly, but outside of that I was all right.  Since then I am very careful what I put in my tobacco.”