Football Days eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 400 pages of information about Football Days.

Football Days eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 400 pages of information about Football Days.

[Illustration: 

Hunkin   Tilley   Bailey   Snyder   Jewett   Gillies   Miller   Lalley
Shiverick   Anderson   Menler   Barrett   Cool   Shelton   Collins
Eckley   Schock   Schlicter   Zander

CORNELL’S GREAT TEAM—­1915]

“I enjoyed my football days at Harvard so well that I would like to go back each fall and play football for the rest of my life.  I wish to goodness I could go back and play just one game over—­that is the Cornell game of 1915.  My freshman team won all its games, and during the three years that I played for the Harvard Varsity I never figured in a losing game except that one.  Cornell beat Harvard 10 to 0.  The score of that game will haunt me all my life long.  This game has been a nightmare to me ever since.  Every time I think of football that game is one of the first things that comes to mind.  I fumbled a lot.  I don’t know why, but I couldn’t seem to hold onto the ball.

“We blocked four kicks, but Cornell recovered every one.  We sort of felt that there was more than the Cornell team playing against us—­a goal from the field and a touchdown.  Shiverick, of Cornell, stands out in my recollection of that game.  He was a good kicker.  Once he had to kick out from behind the goal post down in his own territory.  Watson and I were both laying for a line buck; playing up close.  Shiverick kicked one over my head, out of bounds at his own 45-yard line.

“I felt like a burglar after this game, because I felt that I had lost it.  I was feeling pretty blue until the Monday after the game, when the coaches picked eleven men as the Varsity team, and just as soon as they sent these eleven men to a section of the field to get acquainted with each other—­that was the beginning of team work.  From the way those fellows went at it that day, and from the spirit they showed, we felt that no team could ever lick us again, neither Princeton nor Yale.  The Cornell game acted like a tonic on the whole crowd.  Instead of disheartening the team it instilled in us determination.  We said: 

“’We know what it is to be licked, and we’ll be damned if we’ll be licked again.’”

Jack de Saulles’ football ambitions were realized when he made the Yale team at quarterback, the position which his brother Charlie, before him, had occupied.  His spectacular runs, his able generalship, his ability to handle punts, coupled with that characteristic de Saulles’ grit, made him a famous player.

Let this game little quarterback tell his own story: 

“Billy Bull and I have often discussed the fact that when an attempt for a goal from the field failed, one of the players of the opposing side always touched the ball back of the goal line (thereby making it dead), and brought it out to the 25-yard line to kick.  Of course, the ball is never dead until it is touched down.  It was in the fall of 1902 when we were playing West Point.  In the latter part of the second half of that game, with the score 6 to 6, Charlie

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Project Gutenberg
Football Days from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.