Sunday morning these fine fall days are taken up with reading about
the "40,000 football enthusiasts" or the "gaily-bedecked crowd of
60,000 that watched the game on Saturday." And so they probably did,
unless there were enough men in big fur coats who jumped up at every
play and yelled "Now we're off!" thus obstructing the view of an
appreciable percentage.
But why stop at the mention of the paltry 50,000 who sat in the Bowl
or the Stadium? Why forget the twice 50,000 all over the country, in
Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, Atlanta, who watched the same game
over the ticker, or sat in a smoke-fogged room listening to
telegraphic announcements, play by play, or who even stood on the
curbing in front of a newspaper office and watched an impartial
employee shove a little yellow ball along a black-board, usually
indicating the direction in which the real football was _not_ going.
Since it is so important to give the exact number of people who saw
the game, why not do the thing up right and say: "Returns which are
now coming in from the Middle West, with some of the rural districts
still to be heard from, indicate that at least 145,566 people watched
the Yale-Princeton football game yesterday. Secretary Dinwoodie of the
San Francisco Yale Club telegraphed late last night that the final
count in that city would probably swell the total to a round 150,395.
This is, or will be, the largest crowd that ever assembled in one
country to watch a football game."
And watching the game in this vicarious manner isn't so bad as the
fellow who has got tickets and carfare to the real game would like to
have it. You are in a warm room, where you can stretch your legs and
regulate your remarks to the intensity of your emotions rather than to
the sex of your neighbors. And as for thrills! "Dramatic suspense" was
probably first used as a term in connection with this indoor sport.
The scene is usually some college club in the city--a big room full of
smoke and graduates. At one end is a scoreboard and miniature
gridiron, along which a colored counter is moved as the telegraph
behind the board clicks off the plays hot from the real gridiron.
There is also an announcer, who, by way of clarifying the message
depicted on the board, reads the wrong telegram in a loud, clear
tone.
Just as the crowd in the football arena are crouching down in their
fur coats the better to avoid watching the home team fumble the
kick-off, the crowds two and ten hundred miles away are settling back
in their chairs and lighting up the old pipes, while the
German-silver-tongued announcer steps to the front of the platform and
delivers the following:
"Yale won the toss and chose to defend the south goal, Princeton
taking the west."
This mistake elicits much laughter, and a witty graduate who has just
had lunch wants to know, as one man to the rest of the house, if it is
puss-in-the-corner that is being played.