I have a lot of respect for the football brains of West Point.  My lot has been very happily cast with the Navy.  I have generally been on the opposite side of the field.  I knew the strength of their team.  I have learned much of the spirit of the academy from their cheering at Army and Navy games.  Playing against West Point our Princeton teams have always realized the hard, difficult task which confronted them, and victory was not always the reward.

Football plays a valued part in the athletic life of West Point.  From the very first game between the Army and the Navy on the plains when the Middies were victorious, West Point set out in a thoroughly businesslike way to see that the Navy did not get the lion’s share of victories.

If one studies the businesslike methods of the Army Athletic Association and reads carefully the bulletins which are printed after each game, one is impressed by the attention given to details.

I have always appreciated what King, ’96, meant to West Point football.  Let me quote from the publication of the Howitzer, in 1896, the estimated value of this player at that time: 

“King, of course, stands first.  Captain for two years he brought West Point from second class directly into first.  As fullback he outplayed every fullback opposed to him and stands in the judgment of all observers second only to Brooke of Pennsylvania.  Let us read what King has to say of a period of West Point football not widely known.

“I first played on the ’92 team,” he says.  “We had two Navy games before this, but they were not much as I look back upon them.  At this time we had for practice that period of Saturday afternoon after inspection.  That gave us from about 3 P. M. on.  We also had about fifteen minutes between dinner and the afternoon recitations, and such days as were too rainy to drill, and from 5:45 A. M., to 6:05 A. M. Later in the year when it grew too cold to drill, we had the time after about 4:15 P. M., but it became dark so early that we didn’t get much practice.  We practiced signals even by moonlight.

“Visiting teams used to watch us at inspection, two o’clock.  We were in tight full dress clothes, standing at attention for thirty to forty-five minutes just before the game.  A fine preparation for a stiff contest.  We had quite a character by the name of Stacy, a Maine boy.  He was a thickset chap, husky and fast.  He never knew what it was to be stopped.  He would fight it out to the end for every inch.  Early in one of the Yale games he broke a rib and started another, but the more it hurt, the harder he played.  In a contest with an athletic club in the last non-collegiate game we ever played, the opposing right tackle was bothering us.  In a scrimmage Stacy twisted the gentleman’s nose very severely and then backed away, as the man followed him, calling out to the Umpire.  Stacy held his face up and took two of the nicest punches in the eyes that I ever saw.  Of course, the Umpire saw it, and promptly ruled the puncher out, just as Stacy had planned.