FRAPPÉD FOOTBALL
As a rule there is only about one thing to mar the joy of college days
and nights and early mornings. That is the Faculty. Honestly, I used to
sit up until long after bedtime every little while trying to figure out
some real reason for a college Faculty. They interfere so. They are so
inappropriate. Moreover, they are so confoundedly ignorant of college
life.
How a professor can go through an assorted collection of brain
stufferies, get so many college degrees that his name looks like
Halley's Comet with an alphabet tail, and then teach college students
for forty years without even taking one of them apart to find out what
he is made of, beats my time! That's a college professor for you, right
through. He thinks of a college student only as something to
teach--whereas, of all the nineteen hundred and eighty-seven things a
college student is, that is about the least important to his notion. A
boy might be a cipher message on an early Assyrian brick and stand a far
better chance of being understood by his professor.
A college Faculty is a collection of brains tied together by a firm
resolve--said resolve being to find out what miscreant put plaster of
Paris in the keyhole of the president's door. It is a wet blanket on a
joyous life; it is a sort of penance provided by Providence to make a
college boy forget that he's glad he's alive. It's a hypodermic syringe
through which the student is supposed to get wisdom. It takes the place
of conscience after you've been destroying college property. When I sum
it all up it seems to me that a college Faculty is a dark, rainy cloud
in the middle of a beautiful May morning--at least that's the way the
Faculty looked to me when I was a humble seeker after the truth in
Siwash College.
The Faculty was to boys in Siwash what indigestion is to a jolly good
fellow in the restaurant district. It was always either among us or
getting ready to land on us. Our Faculty had thirty-two profs and
thirty-three pairs of spectacles. It also had two good average heads of
hair and considerable whiskers. It could figure out a perihelion or a
Latin bill-of-fare in a minute, but you ought to hear it stutter when it
tried to map out the daily relaxations of a college full of husky young
hurricanes, who had come to school to learn what life looks like from
the inside. Fairy tales in the German and tea and wafers with quotations
looked like a jolly good time to the Faculty; and it couldn't understand
why some of us liked to put gunpowder in the tea.
Now don't understand me to say that there isn't anything good about a
college professor. Bless you, no! There's a lot of it. A Faculty is a
lot of college profs in a state of inflammation, but individually most
of the Siwash profs were nearly human at times. I look back at some of
them now with awe. They really knew a lot. They knew so much that most
of them are there yet; and I go back and look at them with a good deal
more respect than I used to have. I'll tell you it fills a chap with awe
to see a man teaching along for twenty years at eighteen hundred dollars
per, and raising children, and buying books, and going off to Europe now
and then on that princely sum--and coming through it all happy and
content with life. I go around them nowadays with my hat off and try to
persuade them that if it wasn't for my sprained arm I could quote Latin
almost as well as the stone dog in front of Prexy's house.
And some of them are bully good fellows, too. Nowadays they take me into
their studies at Commencement and give me good cigars, making sure first
that there are no undergraduates around. Why, one of the profs I worried
the most, when I was a cross between a Sophomore and a spotted hyena, is
as glad to see me nowadays as though I owed him money. He runs a little
automobile, and I hope I may get laid out in the subway if I haven't
heard him cuss in real United States when the clutch slipped. And he was
the chap who used to pick out the passages in Livy that had inflammatory
rheumatism and make me recite on them, and who always told me that a
student who smoked cigarettes would be making a wise business move if he
brought his hat to recitation and left the less important part of his
head at home.
But, as I was saying, the Faculty at Siwash, like all other Faculties,
didn't know its place. It wasn't satisfied with teaching us Greek and
Latin and Evidences of Christianity and tall-brow twaddle of all sorts.
It had to butt into our athletics and regulate them. Did you ever see a
farmer regulate a weed patch with a hoe? You know how unhealthy it is
for the weeds. Well, that was the way the Faculty regulated our
athletics. It didn't believe in athletics anyway. They were too
interesting. They might not have been sinful, but they were not literary
and they were uneconomic. Of course all the professors admitted that
good outdoor exercise was healthy for college boys, but most of them
believed that you ought to get it in the college library out of Nature
books. And so the way they went at the real athletics, to keep them pure
and healthful, almost drove us into the violent ward.
Those were the days at Siwash when our football team could start out for
a pleasant stroll through any teams in our section and wonder after it
had passed the goal line, why those undersized fellows had been jogging
their elbows all the way down the field. That was the kind of a team we
built up every fall; and it wasn't half so much trouble to keep other
teams from beating it as it was to keep the Faculty from blowing it to
pieces with non-eligibility notices. There was something diabolical
about that Faculty when it was wrestling with the athletic problem. It
wasn't human. It was like Mount Etna. You never could tell just when it
would stop being lovely and quiet, and scatter ruin all over the
vicinity.
Its idea of regulating athletics at Siwash was to think up excuses for
flunking every man who weighed over one hundred and fifty-five and could
have his toes stepped on without saying "Ouch!" And it never got the
excuses thought up until the night before the most important games. The
Faculty pretended to be as bland and innocent as Mary's lamb, but no one
can ever tell me it didn't know what it was about. Men have to have real
genius to think up the things it did. You couldn't do it accidentally.
When a Siwash Faculty could moon along happily all fall until
twenty-four hours before the Kiowa game and then discover with regret
that our two-hundred-and-twenty-pound center had misspelled three words
in an examination paper the year before; that our two-hundred-pound
backs didn't put enough rear-end collisions into their words when they
read French; and that Ole Skjarsen read Latin with a Norwegian accent
and was therefore too big an ignoramus to play football, I decline to be
fooled. I never was fooled. Neither was Keg Rearick. But that is
hurdling about three chapters.
Honestly, we used to spend one day out of six building up our football
team and the other five defending it from the Faculty. It positively
hungered for a bite out of the line-up. It had us helpless. If we didn't
like the way it ran things we could take our happy young college life up
by the roots and transplant it to some other school, where the football
team moved around the field like a parade. Theoretically the Faculty
could sit around and take our best players off the team, as fast as we
developed them, for non-attention to studies. But, as a matter of fact,
it wasn't an easy matter. It beats all how early in the morning you have
to get up to get ahead of college lads who have got it into their heads
that the world will gum up on its axle and stop dead still if their
innocent little pleasures are interfered with.
I remember the fall that the Faculty decided Miller couldn't play
because he hadn't attended chapel quite persistently enough the spring
before. Miller was our center and as important to the team that year as
the mainspring of a watch. The ponderous brain trust that sat on this
case didn't decide it until the day before the big game with
Muggledorfer; then they practically ruled that he would have to go back
to last spring and take his chapel all over again. It took us all night
to sidestep that outrage, but we did it. The next morning an indignation
committee of fifty students met the Faculty and presented alibis that
were invincible. It was demonstrated by a cloud of witnesses that Miller
had been absent nine times hand-running because he had been sitting up
nights with a sick chum. The Faculty was inexperienced that year and let
him play; but, when it found out the next day by consulting the records
that the chum had attended chapel every one of those nine mornings, it
got more particular than ever and its heart seemed to harden.
On the day before the Thanksgiving game that year the Faculty held a
long meeting and decided that our two guards were ineligible. There
wasn't a word of truth in it. They weighed two hundred and twenty pounds
apiece and were eligible to the All-American team, but you couldn't make
the human lexicons look at it that way. They found them deficient in
trigonometry and canned them off the team. It was an outrage, because
the two chaps didn't know what trigonometry meant even and couldn't take
an examination. We had to call the trig. professor out of town by a
telegram that morning and then have the suspended men demand an
immediate examination. That worked, too; but every time we managed to
preserve a glory of old Siwash, the Faculty seemed to get a little more
crabby and unreasonable and diabolically persisted in its determination
to regulate athletics.
The next fall it was well understood when football practice began that
there was going to be war to the knife between the Faculty and the
football team. We were meek and resigned to trouble, but you can bet we
were not going to sit around and embrace it. The longest heads in the
school made themselves into a sort of an unofficial sidestepping
committee; and we decided that if the Faculty succeeded in massacring
our football team they would have to outpoint, outfoot, outflank and
outscheme the whole school. Just to draw their fire, we advertised the
first practice game as a deadly combat, in which the honor of Old Siwash
was at stake. It was just a little romp with the State Normal, which had
a team that would have had to use aeroplanes to get past our ends; but
the Faculty bit. It held a special session that night and declared the
center, the two backs and the captain ineligible because they had not
prepared orations the spring before at the request of the rhetoric
professor. That was first blood for us. We chased the Normalites all
over the lot with a scrub team and Keg Rearick sat up nights the next
week writing the orations. The result was we got four fine new
dry-cleaned records for our four star players and the Faculty was so
pleased with their fine work on those orations that we could scarcely
live with it for a week.
That was only a skirmish, however. We knew very well that the sacred
cause of education would come right back at us and we decided to be
elsewhere when it struck its next blow for progress. We talked it all
over with Bost, the coach, and the result was that a week before the
Muggledorfer game, the last week in September, Bost gave out his line-up
for the season in chapel. There were a good many surprises in the
line-up to some of us. It seemed funny that Miller shouldn't make the
team out and that Ole Skjarsen should have been left off; but the best
of men will slump, as Bost explained, and he had picked the team that he
thought would do the most good for Siwash. It was a team that I wouldn't
have hired to chase a Shanghai rooster out of a garden patch, but the
blind and happy Faculty didn't stop to reason about its excellence. It
held a meeting the night before the Muggledorfer game and suspended nine
of the men for inattention to chapel, smoking cigarettes during vacation
and other high crimes. The whole school roared with indignation. Bost
appeared before the Faculty meeting and almost shook his fist in Prexy's
face. He told the Faculty that it was the greatest crime of the
nineteenth century; and the Faculty told him in very high-class language
to go chase himself. So Bost went sorrowfully out and put in the regular
team as substitutes. The next day we whipped Muggledorfer 80 to 0.
[Illustration: Our peculiar style of pushing a football right through
the thorax of the whole middle west
_Page 205_]
I think that would have discouraged the Faculty if it hadn't been for
Professor Sillcocks. Did I ever tell you about Professor Sillcocks? It's
a shame if I haven't, because every one is the better and nobler for
hearing about him. He was about a nickel's worth of near-man with
Persian-lamb whiskers and the disposition of a pint of modified milk.
Crickets were bold and quarrelsome beside him. He knew more musty
history than any one in the state and he could without flinching tell
how Alexander waded over his knees in blood; but rather than take off
his coat where the world would have seen him he would have died. He was
just that modest and conventional. He had to come to his classes through
the back of the campus up the hill; and they do say that one day, when
half a dozen of the Kappa Kap Pajama girls were sitting on the low stone
wall at the foot of the hill swinging their feet, he cruised about the
horizon for a quarter of an hour waiting for them to go away in order
that he might go up the hill without scorching his collar with blushes.
That was the kind of a roaring lion Professor Sillcocks was.
Well, to get back from behind Robin Hood's barn, Professor Sillcocks had
a great hobby. He believed that college boys should indulge in
athletics, but that they should do it with their fingers crossed. Those
weren't his exact words, but that was what he meant. It was noble to
play games, but wicked to want to win. In his eyes a true sport was a
man who would start in a foot race and come in half a mile behind
carrying the other fellow's coat. Our peculiar style of pushing a
football right through the thorax of the whole Middle West nearly made
him shudder his shoes off and every fall in chapel he delivered a talk
against the reprehensible state of mind that finds pleasure in the
defeat of others. We always cheered those talks, which pleased him; but
he never could understand why we didn't go out afterward and offer
ourselves up to some high-school team as victims. It pained him greatly.
Naturally Professor Sillcocks participated with great enthusiasm in the
work of pruning our line-up, and after the Faculty had thrown up its
hands he climbed right in and led a new campaign. We had to admire the
scientific way in which he went about it, too. For a man whose most
violent exercise consisted of lugging books off a top shelf, and who had
learned all he knew about football from the Literary Pepsin or the
Bi-Weekly Review, he got onto the game in wonderful style. Somehow he
managed to learn just who were our star players--what they played and
how badly they were needed--and then he went to work to quarantine these
players.
First thing we knew the Millersburg game, which was always a fierce
affair, arrived; and on the morning of the game Bumpus and Van
Eiswaggon, our two star halfbacks, got notices to forget there was such
a game as football until they had taken Freshman Greek over again--they
being Seniors and remembering about as much Greek as their hats would
hold on a windy day. I'll tell you that mighty near floored us; but
virtue will pretty nearly always triumph, and when you mix a little luck
into it, it is as slippery to corner as a corporation lawyer. We had the
luck. There were two big boners, Pacey and Driggs, in college who wore
whiskers. There always are one or two landscape artists in college who
use their faces as alfalfa farms. We took Bumpus and Van Eiswaggon and
the leading man of a company that was playing at the opera house that
night over to these two Napoleons of mattress stuffing and they kindly
consented to be imitated for one day only. Old Booth and Barrett had a
tremendous layout of whiskers in his valise and before he got through he
had produced a couple of mighty close copies of Pacey and Driggs. That
afternoon the two real whisker kings went out in football suits and ran
signals with the team until their wind was gone. Then they went back
into the gym and their improved editions came out. Most of the college
cried when they found that the two eminent authorities on tonsorial art
were going to try to interfere with Millersburg's ambition, but those of
us who were on to the deal simply prayed. We prayed that the whiskers
wouldn't come off. They didn't, either. It was a grand game. We won, 20
to 0; and the school went wild over Pacey and Driggs. Even Prexy came
out of it for a little while and went into the gym to shake hands with
them. It took lively work to detain him until we could get them stripped
and laid out on the rubbing boards. They were the heroes of the school
for the rest of the year and, being honest chaps, they naturally
objected. But we persuaded them that they had saved the college with
their whiskers; and before they graduated we begged a bunch from each of
them to frame and hang up in the gym some day when the incident wasn't
quite so fresh.
Naturally, by this time, we believed that the Faculty ought to consider
itself lucky to be allowed to hang around the college. Professor
Sillcocks looked rather depressed for a day or two, but he soon cheered
up and seemed to forget the team's existence. We swam right along,
beating Pottawattamie, scoring sixty points on Ogallala and getting into
magnificent condition for the Kiowa game on Thanksgiving. That was the
game of the year for us. Time was when Kiowa used to beat us and look
bored about it, but that was all in the misty past. For two years we had
tramped all the lime off her goal lines; and maybe we weren't crazy to
do it again! As early as October we used to sit up nights talking over
our chances, and as November wore along the suspense got as painful as a
good lively case of too much pie. We watched the team practise all day
and dreamed of it all night. And then the blow fell.
It wasn't exactly a blow. It was more like a dynamite explosion. School
let out the day before Thanksgiving, and when announcement time came in
chapel Professor Sillcocks got up and begged permission to make a few
remarks. Then this little ninety-eight-pound thinking machine, who
couldn't have wrestled a kitten successfully, paralyzed half a thousand
husky young students and a whole team of gladiators with the following
remarks:
"I have long held, young gentlemen, that the pursuit of athletic
exercises for the mere lust of winning is one of the evils of college
life. It does not strengthen the mind or build up one's manhood. It does
not encourage that sporting spirit which leads a man to smile in defeat
or to give up his chances of winning rather than take an undue
advantage. It does not make for gentleness, mildness or generosity. I
have, young gentlemen, endeavored to make you see this in the past year
by all the poor means at my disposal. I have not succeeded. But this
morning I propose to bring it to you in a new way. As chairman of the
credentials committee which passes upon the eligibility of your football
players I have decided that the entire team is ineligible. If you ask
for reasons, I have them. They may not, perhaps, suit you, but they suit
me. These players are ineligible because they play too well. With them
you cannot hope to be defeated and I am determined that the Siwash
football team shall be defeated to-morrow. Your college experience must
be broadened. Your football team, I understand, has not been defeated in
three years. This is monstrous. All of you, except the Seniors, are
totally uneducated in the art of taking defeat. This education I propose
to open to you to-morrow. I have made it more certain by suspending all
of what you call your second team and your scrubs--I believe that is
correct. And the Faculty joins me, young gentlemen, in assuring you that
if the game with Kiowa College is abandoned--abrogated--called off, I
believe you express it--football will cease permanently at Siwash. Young
gentlemen, accept defeat to-morrow as an opportunity and try to
appreciate its great benefits. That is all."
That last was pure sarcasm. Imagine an executioner carving off his
victim's head and murmuring politely, "That is all," to the said victim
when he had finished! There we were, wiped out, utterly
extinguished--legislated into disgrace and defeat--and all by a smiling
villain who said "That is all" when he had read the death sentence!
There wasn't a loophole in the decree. Sillcocks had carved the entire
football talent of the school right out of it with that little list of
his. We would have to play Kiowa with a bunch of rah-rah boys who had
never done anything more violent than break a cane on a grandstand seat
over a touchdown. The chaps who were butchered to make a Roman holiday
didn't have anything at all on us. We were going to be tramped all over
by our deadly rival in order to afford pleasure to a fuzzy-faced old
fossil who had peculiar ideas and had us to try them out on.
I guess, if the students had had a vote on it that day, Professor
Sillcocks would have been elected resident governor of Vesuvius. We
seethed all day and all that night. The board of strategy met, of
course, but it threw up its hands. It didn't have any first aid to the
annihilated in its chest. Besides, Professor Sillcocks hadn't played the
game. He had just grabbed the cards. It was about to pass resolutions
hailing Sillcocks as the modern Nero, when Rearick began to come down
with an idea. Nowadays people pay him five thousand dollars apiece for
ideas, but he used to fork them out to us gratis--and they had twice the
candle-power. As soon as we saw Rearick begin to perspire we just
knocked off and sat around, and it wasn't two minutes before he was
making a speech.
"Fellows," he said, "we're due for a cleaning to-morrow. It's official.
The Faculty has ordered it. If I had a Faculty I'd put kerosene on it
and call the health department; but that's neither here nor there. We've
got to lose. We've got to let Kiowa roll us all over the field; and if
we back out we've got to give up football. Now some of you want to
resign from college and some of you want to burn the chapel, but these
things will not do you any good. Kiowa will beat us just the same.
Therefore I propose that if we have to be beaten we make it so emphatic
that no one will ever forget it. Let's make it picturesque and
instructive. Let's show the Faculty that we can obey orders. Let's play
a game of football the way Sillcocks and his tools would like to see it.
You let me pick the team now, and give me to-night and to-morrow morning
to drill them, and I'll bet Kiowa will never burn any property
celebrating."
Bost was there with his head down between his knees and he said he
didn't care--Rearick or Sillcocks or his satanic majesty could pick the
team. As for himself, he was going to leave college and go to herding
hens somewhere over two thousand miles from the Faculty. So we left it
to Rearick and went home to sleep and dream murderous dreams about
meeting profs in lonesome places.
The first thing I saw next morning when I went out of the house was a
handbill on a telegraph pole. It was printed in red ink. It implored
every Siwash student to turn out to the game that afternoon. "New
team--new rules--new results!" it read. "The celebrated Sillcocks system
of football will be played by the Siwash team. Attendance at this game
counts five chapel cuts after Thanksgiving. Admission free. Tea will be
served. You are requested to be present."
Were we present? We were--every one of us that wasn't tied down to a
bed. There was something promising in that announcement. Besides, the
greenest of us were taken in by that chapel-cut business. Besides, it
was free! College students are just like the rest of the world. They'd
go to their great-grandmother's funeral if the admission was free. Our
gang put on big crêpe bows, just to be doing something, and marched into
the stadium that afternoon with hats off. It was packed. Talk about
promotion work. Rearick had pasted up bills until all Jonesville was red
in the face. And the Faculty was there, too. Every member was present.
They sat in a big special box and Sillcocks had the seat of honor. He
looked as pleased as though he had just reformed a cannibal tribe. I
suppose the programs did it. They announced once more that the
celebrated Sillcocks system of football as worked out by the coach and
Mr. Keg Rearick would be played in this game by the Siwash team. The
whole town was there too, congested with curiosity. In one big bunch
sat all the Siwash men who had ever played football, in their best
clothes and with their best girls. They were the guests of honor at
their own funeral.
The Kiowa team came trotting out--behemoths, all of them--ready to get
revenge for three painful years. They had heard all about the massacre
and regarded it as the joke of the century on Siwash. They also regarded
it as their providential duty to emphasize the joke--to sharpen up the
point by scoring about a hundred and ten points on the scared young
greenhorns who would have to play for us. All our ex-players stood up
and gave them a big cheer when they came. So did everybody else. It's
always a matter of policy to grin and joke while you're being dissected.
Nothing like cheerfulness. Cheerfulness saved many a martyr from worry
while he was being eaten by a lion.
Then our gymnasium doors opened and the brand-new and totally innocent
Siwash football team came forth. When we saw it we forgot all about
Kiowa, the Faculty, defeat, dishonor, the black future and the
disgusting present. We stood up and yelled ourselves hoarse. Then we sat
down and prepared to enjoy ourselves something frabjous.
Rearick had used nothing less than genius in picking that team. First in
line came Blakely, a mandolin and girl specialist, who had never done
anything more daring than buck the line at a soda fountain. He had on
football armor and a baseball mask. Then came Andrews. Andrews
specialized in poetry for the Lit magazine and commonly went by the name
of Birdie, because of an unfortunate sonnet that he had once written.
Andrews wore evening dress, and carried a football in a shawl strap.
Then came McMurty and Boggs, sofa-pillow punishers. They roomed together
and you could have tied them both up in Ole Skjarsen's belt and had
enough of it left for a handle. James, the champion featherweight fusser
of the school, followed. He carried a campchair and a hot-water bottle.
Petey Simmons, five feet four in his pajamas, and Jiggs Jarley, champion
catch-as-catch-can-and-hold-on-tight waltzer in college, came next. Then
came Bain, who weighed two hundred and seventeen pounds, had been a
preacher, and was so mild that if you stood on his corns he would only
ask you to get off when it was time to go to class. He was followed by
Skeeter Wilson, the human dumpling, and Billings, who always carried an
umbrella to classes and who had it with him then. Behind these came a
great mob of camp-followers with chairs, books, rugs, flowers, lunch
tables, tea-urns and guitars. It was the most sensational parade ever
held at Siwash; and how we yelled and gibbered with delight when we got
the full aroma of Rearick's plan!
The Kiowa men looked a little dazed, but they didn't have time to
comment. The toss-up was rushed through and the two teams lined up, our
team with the ball. It would have done your eyes good to see Rearick
adjust it carefully on a small doily in the exact center of the field,
mince up to it and kick it like an old lady urging a setting hen off the
nest. A Kiowa halfback caught it and started up the field. Right at him
came Birdie Andrews, hat in hand, and when the halfback arrived he bowed
and asked him to stop. The runner declined. McMurty was right behind and
he also begged the runner to stop. Boggs tried to buttonhole him.
Skeeter Wilson, who was as fast as a trolley car, ran along with him for
twenty-five yards, pleading with him to listen to reason and consent to
be downed. It was no use. The halfback went over the goal line. The
Kiowa delegation didn't know whether to go crazy with joy or disgust.
Our end of the grandstand clapped its hands pleasantly. Down in the
Faculty box one or two of the professors, who hadn't forgotten
everything this side of the Fall of Rome, wiggled uneasily and got a
little bit red behind the ears.
The teams changed goals and Rearick kicked off again. This time he
washed the ball carefully and changed his necktie, which had become
slightly soiled. The other Kiowa half caught the ball this time; he
plowed into our boys so hard that McMurty couldn't get out of the way
and was knocked over. Our whole team held up their hands in horror and
rushed to his aid. They picked him up, washed his face, rearranged his
clothes and powdered his nose. He cried a little and wanted them to
telegraph his mother to come, but a big nurse with ribbons in her
cap--it was Maxwell--came out and comforted him and gave him a stick of
candy half as large as a barber-pole.
By this time you could tell the Faculty a mile off. It was a bright red
glow. Every root-digger in the bunch had caught on except Sillcocks. He
was intensely interested and extremely grieved because the Kiowa men did
not enter into the spirit of the occasion. As for the rest of the crowd,
it sounded like drowning men gasping for breath. Such shrieks of pure
unadulterated joy hadn't been heard on the campus in years. When the
teams lined up again Kiowa had got thoroughly wise. They had held a
five-minute session together, had taken off their shin, nose and ear
guards, had combed their hair and had put on their hats. The result was
what you might call picturesque. You could hear ripping diaphragms all
over the stadium when they tripped out on the field. The two teams lined
up and Rearick kicked off again. This time he had tied a big loop of
ribbon around the ball; when it landed a Kiowa man stuck his forefinger
through the loop and began to sidle up toward our goal, holding an
imaginary skirt. Our team rushed eagerly at him, Billings and his
umbrella in the lead. On every side the Kiowa players bowed to them and
shook hands with them. The critical moment arrived. Billings reached the
runner and promptly raised his umbrella over him and marched placidly on
toward our goal. Hysterics from the bleachers. The Kiowa man didn't
propose to be outdone. He stopped, removed his derby and presented the
ball to Billings. Billings put his hand on his heart and declined. The
Kiowa man bowed still lower and insisted. Billings bumped the ground
with his forehead and wouldn't think of it. The Kiowa man offered the
ball a third time, and we found afterward that he threatened to punch
Billings' head then and there if he didn't take it. Billings gave in and
took the ball.
"Siwash's ball!" we yelled joyfully. The two teams lined up for a
scrimmage. Right here a difficulty arose that threatened to end the
game. The opposing players insisted on gossiping with their arms around
each other's necks. They would not get down to business. The referee
raved--he was an imported product, with no sense of humor, and was
rapidly getting congestion of the brain. "Don't hit in the clinches!"
yelled some joker. For five minutes the teams gossiped. Then our quarter
gave his signal--the first two bars of "Oh Promise Me"--and passed the
ball to Wilson, who was fullbacking.
It was twice as interesting as an ordinary game because nobody knew what
Wilson would do; in fact, he didn't seem to know himself. He stood a
minute dusting off the ball carefully and manicuring his soiled nails.
The Kiowa team and our boys strolled up, arm in arm. Wilson still
hesitated. The Kiowa captain offered to send one of his men to carry the
ball. Wilson wouldn't think of causing so much trouble. Our captain
suggested that the ball be taken to our goal. The Kiowa captain
protested that it had been there twice already. Some one suggested that
they flip for goals. The captains did it. Siwash won. Calling a
messenger boy, our captain sent him over to Kiowa's goal with the ball,
while the two teams sat down in the middle of the field and the Kiowa
captain set 'em up to gum.
By this time people were being removed from the stadium in all
directions. There was a sort of purple aurora over the Faculty box that
suggested apoplexy. The learned exponents of revised football looked
about as comfortable as a collection of expiring beetles mounted on
large steel pins--that is, all but Professor Sillcocks. He was beaming
with pleasure. I never saw a man so entirely wrapped up in manly sports
as he was just then. Evidently the new football suited him right down to
the ground. He clapped his hands at every new atrocity; and whenever
some Siwash man put his arm around a Kiowan and helped him tenderly on
with the ball, he turned around to the populace behind him and nodded
his head as if to say: "There, I told you so. It can be done. See?"
When the Kiowa center kicked off for the next scrimmage he introduced a
novelty. He produced a large beanbag, which I presume Rearick had
slipped him, kicked it about four feet and then hurriedly picked it up
and presented it to one of our men. All of our boys thanked him
profoundly and then lined up for the scrimmage. Immediately the Kiowa
captain put his right hand behind him. Our captain guessed "thumbs up."
He was right and we took the ball forward five yards. Deafening applause
from the stadium. Then our captain guessed a number between one and
three. Another five yards. Shrieks of joy from Siwash and desperate
cries of "Hold 'em!" from the Kiowa gang. Then the Kiowa captain
demanded that our captain name the English king who came after Edward
VI. That was a stonewall defense, because Rearick had flunked two years
running in English history. Kiowa took the ball, but the umpire butted
in. It was an offside play, he declared, because it wasn't a king at
all. It was a queen and it was Siwash's ball and ten yards. That made an
awful row. The Kiowa captain declared that the whole incident was "very
regrettable," but the umpire was firm. He gave us the ball; and on the
very next down Rearick conjugated a French verb perfectly for a
touchdown.
All of this was duly announced to the stadium and the excitement was
intense. I guess there were as many as two hundred Chautauqua salutes
after that touchdown. Both teams had tea together and our rooters'
chorus sang "Juanita," while old Professor Grubb got up, with rage
printed all over his face in display type, and went home. He never went
near the stadium again as long as he lived, I understand.
It was a most successful occasion up to this point, but somehow college
boys always overdo a thing. The strain was telling on the two teams;
for, when you come right down to it, no Siwash man loves a Kiowa man
any more fervently than a bull pup loves a cat. The teams lined up again
and began playing "ring-around-a-rosy" to find who should make the next
touchdown, when something happened. Klingel, the
two-hundred-and-ten-pound Kiowan guard, started it. He was just about as
good a fellow as a white rhinoceros, and an hour of entire civilization
was about all he could possibly stand. He had the beanbag and he was
tired of it. Beanbags meant nothing to him. He couldn't grasp their
solemn beauty. He offered it to Petey Simmons. Petey declined, with
profuse thanks. Klingel insisted. Petey bowed very low and swore that
rather than make another touchdown on Kiowa he would suffer wild horses
to tear him into little bits. Then Klingel began to get offside.
"You hear what I say, you little shrimp!" he said politely. "If you
don't take this thing and quit your yawping I'm going to make you do
it."
"Listen, you overfed mountain of pork!" said Petey, with equal
cordiality. "If you don't like that beanbag eat it. It would do you
good. You don't know beans anyway."
Then Klingel, without further argument, hit Petey in the eye and laid
him out.
[Illustration: "If you don't like that beanbag eat it"
_Page 220_]
Wow! Talk about irritating a hornet convention. Klingel was a great
little irritator. The whole game had been torture for our real team,
cooped up among the ruffles in the stadium; and when they saw little
Petey go down they gave one simultaneous roar and vaulted over the
railing. It was a close race, but Ole Skjarsen beat Hogboom out by a
foot. He hit Klingel first. Hogboom hit him second, third, fifth and
thirty-fourth. Then the two teams closed together and for five minutes a
cyclone of dust, dirt, sweaters, collars, arms, legs, hair and bright
red noses swept up and down the field. The grandstand went crazy. The
five hundred Kiowa rooters grabbed their canes and started in. They met
about seven hundred Siwash patriots and then the whole universe
exploded.
The police interfered and about half an hour later the last Siwash
student was pried off the last Kiowan. It was the most disgraceful riot
in the history of the college. I don't think there was a whole suit of
clothes on the field when it was over; and the Siwash man who didn't
have two or three knobs on his head wasn't considered loyal. The girls
all cried. The Faculty went home in cabs, the mayor declared martial law
and the Kiowa gang walked out of town to the crossing and took the train
there to avoid further hard feelings. We were all ashamed of ourselves
and I think the two schools liked each other a little better after that.
Anyway, we regarded the whole affair as only logical.
The Faculty held a meeting that lasted all the next day. Then it
adjourned and did absolutely nothing at all except to pile upon us more
theses, themes and special outrages that semester than any body of
students had ever been inflicted with in a like period. The profs
wouldn't speak to us. They regarded us as beneath notice. But when the
real Kiowa game was scheduled by mutual consent, two weeks afterward,
there wasn't a remark from headquarters. We played Kiowa and spread them
all over the map--and not a Faculty member was in town that day.
I understand Professor Sillcocks is not yet thoroughly persuaded that
his style of football wasn't a success. "But for that unfortunate riot,
which comes from playing with less cultured colleges," he remarked to a
Senior the next spring, "that would have been the most successful
exhibition of mental control and inherent gentility ever seen at
Siwash."
True, very true.