Football for public and player

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Preface

Twenty years of football, as player — in an humble capacity, albeit begun under the best of coaching — spectator on the side line or in the stand, and as a sporting writer, have taught me that of all those who are boxmd up in the most fascinating of school and college games, the spectators form the class that has suffered the most serious neglect. Football coaches are usually secretive persons, and they have succeeded in bewildering the man in the stand even when failing to outwit the man on the field. It is the spectator who needs the coaching nowadays, and it is in the hope of clearing away for his benefit and that of the imcoacbed schoolboy much of the mystery that has been deftly Jhrown around the game by those in close touch with the great football universities that this book is offered to a sometimes puzzled football public.

For any particular system or institution the author holds no brief, for years of careful analysis of the big games have convinced him that no one football system has been able to corner all the gridiron knowledge in the coimtry, and that the gridiron leaders are treading practically the same paths nowadays, and building for the future in the main upon principles that are considered soimd by the master minds of football.

There are both strategy and tactics in football as in war — ^the season is a campaign, the big game a battle. These are the salient features that lift the game out of the ruck of sport to the plane it now occupies. Men of mature years and large business interests still take the time to direct

v o vi PREFACE

the playing of this glorified field chess, but they do not take the public into their confidence, and the spectator too often leaves the field without even having faintly begun to understand the groundwork of the great game he has just witnessed.

In the pages that follow the author has endeavored by means of simple diagrams, and explanations shorn as far as possible of technicality, to give alike to the spectator and the younger player, especially the ambitious schoolboy who has not had the advantage of expert coaching either on the blackboard or afield, some idea of the plays that have been and are successful under the existing rules, and of the generalship that either wins games or loses them with honor. The plays and the use of them tell the story, and if the spectator will apply inductive reasoning to the big games, finding his rule of play from the cases at hand, he will find the fascination of the game more than trebled.

No one knows better than the author the difficulties imder which the man in the stand labors, and it is in his interest that the writer has sought to take the game apart in these pages, in order that he may put it together agam, which, after all, is the real fun of football.

Credit where credit is due has been given for discovery and progress, remembering always, however, that the game is bigger and broader, more enduring and progressive than the men who teach it and play it.

Contents

CHAPTER PAOB

Preface vii

I The Game and the Players 1

Chapter I The Game And The Platers

It requires no experience in prophecy to predict that the future history of the football with which our schoolboy, collegian, and grandstand enthusiast are familiar is to be as American as its past. Temperament, climatic conditions and other factors operate to insure a steady progress along lines wide apart from English, Canadian or Australian. It has been so in the case of almost every game requiring physical contact played in the United States. There are those who will point to the Association, or "Soccer" game as an exception, but it would not surprise me if in the not too distant future certain departures would be made from the English style of play, a style, by the way, with which we have become familiar slowly. In its recent form in this country the Association game will never take the place of American Rugby, which is nearer and dearer to the hearts of the best type of American college athlete and his friends and followers than any other game could ever be.

The beginnings of football were much alike on both sides the ocean, but while the Englishmen built up tradition, and worked out a game suited to the maximum of team, or as they call it in England, "combination" play, consistent with extreme individualism, the restless Americans continued their experimentation in the hope of eventually establishing a sport that, while governed by certain rules, would be one of limitless possibilities — ^a game of personal sacrifice of the highest order extending over a brief period, of team play and of progress. The restless, inventive, American temperament could not well stop short of this. The result has been that while the British Isles have — with rare periods of innovation and unrest — a settled game, the United States has an ever-changing one — a game that makes its tactical and strategical appeal to the humblest member of every eleven.

There breathes no player with the inventive faculty so smothered that he does not at some period of his gridiron career aspire to be a field general, to originate the plays, the tactics and the strategy that are to bring victory to his team.

This inventive tendency is encouraged in the American game, discouraged in the English. I do not think that the great mass of American football players will ever, through their legislative representatives, pass on to the officials who handle the games the supreme authority that is vested in an English referee. They will not allow invention and progress to be choked at the outset, but will be content, when such invention becomes a menace to the health of the sport, with making such rules as will discourage further progress along lines proved to be dangerous, thus turning the progressives into 6ther channels. This was what happened after the season of 1911, when it was generally admitted that progress in the attack had been checked to such a degree that monotony was threatened. Radical re-arrangement of the rules was undertaken in the hope that the progressive tacticians and strategists might resume their onward march and so restore to the game much of the brilliance that had been dimmed by a too severe restriction of the attack.

Just as in previous years there were many who believed that the Rules Committee had gone too far, but it was felt that such evils as might creep into the game might be remedied in succeeding seasons as players and coaches developed in freer play, in individual skill and in generalship. So it is that the American game is always on trial with the players and the public, and so it is that the restlessness of the American temperament keeps football thoroughly alive, and thoroughly representative of the changing point of view of its followers.

In England it is quite another matter. The game serves an athlete from boyhood, through school and college, and thereafter. The Englishman wants a game that he can play through the thirties, and much at his own convenience, calling for the least possible amount of personal sacrifice, even though this restriction prevents the university fifteens from reaching that height of efficiency in combination attained by the best American university elevens. The busy American demands a game that can be played to the maximum of his powers and self-sacrifice while in school and college, being quite willing thereafter to turn to other sports for his fun and exercise. The Englishman wants to keep up his football, while the American does not. The latter would rather return to see his successors develop the game beyond the stage at which he was a star, to counsel and advise, to give his brain to this advanced development, and to continue as tactician and strategist the work he left behind him as a player. The fascination is still there, but he realizes that under the new order of things he cannot hope in his own person to cope with the younger element.

Racquets, tennis, handball, golf and other sports built on individualism provide him with all that is necessary in the way of exercise and competitive fun, and I do not believe he would come out and play football even if the rules were so arranged as to fit the game to a man past his thirtieth year. The real health of American football lies in our schools and universities, while the saving grace of English football is to be found in the great clubs, like Blackheath and the Harlequins, and the international fifteens of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, combinations that no imiversity team could hope to meet with anything like an equal chance for victory.

Englishmen have the game they want,.;while we have, in the main, the game we want; the Laglish game is built around a Plan, and woe betide him who takes too many liberties with it, while the American game is a mass of plans and stratagems. There are, of course, basic principles, as . will be shown in these pages, but they are not the principles of immutable rule and of tradition, but rather the principles that grow out of the sum of many experiences.

We have played the English game with such patience as was at our command, and found it wanting. We went through, years ago, the game that English fifteens play every year, with occasional simple variations, and in the end discarded it. The English game for the Englishmen, the American for the Americans. Even in Canada English influence was not strong enough to prevent radical progress, and the fertile-minded Welshman has done what he could, in vain for the most part, in the face of stolidity, to work out English Rugby along novel, albeit simple lines.

It may be objected that in California English Rugby has prospered. The argument will hardly hold, for the game supplanted the American style there at the conmiand of the heads of two universities, and the students were compelled to accept such crumbs of football as were dropped from the faculty tables. Climatic conditions, too, lent themselves readily to the growth of this sporting exotic, and yet players at the University of California and at Leland Stanford Jr. University, cling to the sharp, decisive tackling that marks the American game. Through the medium of drastic measures culminating in faculty ukase.

the English game has obtained a foothold in the United States, but not the boldest of its adherents will maintain, I think, that it has found a home. In the Middle West, an extremely progressive football center, and in the conservative East, I believe that the majority of players would rather give up^ the game altogether than return to English Rugby. It ceii^ainly could not remain English, for the same remorseless advance! ^ttefc took place years ago would again seize the game and re-mould it once more nearer to the heart's desire of the American schoolboy and collegian.

Our autunm fields are hard, especially trying by comparison with the great mternational field at Twickenham in Surrey, England, and the type of game that brings men scatheless through a hard match on these velvety English fields where great sections of turf may be rolled up like carpets, would prove a bone-breaker on the majority of our gridirons. Yet even with a much "softer" game than ours there frequently have been serious injuries, and occasionally death on the fields of the British Isles. On the score of injuries there would be no reason for a return to the parent game, and there are plenty of other reasons why it would be a distinct step backward.

Again the temperamental. The American athlete who is not out for individual honors on track and field, who loves team play, could hardly stomach the idea that there are moments in which he, on the field, in playing togs, need have nothing to do. It is so in nearly all games in which physical contact is an element. The American player will invent something to do. It may be unorthodox, it may be against tradition and even come close to an evasion of the rules, but it will be an expression of the American spirit that will stir his team mates to greater effort, will add to the efficiency of his team, and will arouse the spectator, be he partisan or non-partisan, to a pitch of excitement, interest and appreciation not to be attained in any other way.

This quality of individual initiative, I believe, appeals to every American. It is not lightly to be cast aside, but to be measured, to a certain extent harnessed, and used, in sport as in other activities of later life. The American game gives every player something to do all the time, permitting him at the same time to add such excess efficiency as lies withm his power. What one man has done well of his own initiative, becomes in time what all men should do, and the coaches of the big elevens constantly raise the standard, until, taking the sum of the initiative of many men, they set before us their conception of the ideal player. This is a feature not to be found in English Rugby. Indeed, so rare is initiative in that game, that a tablet at Rugby school records the sensational feat of William Webb Ellis, who founded the running game, in picking up the ball and running with it, a performance alike against rule and tradition

Succeeding innovators in England have not fared so well. Given a man of ideas in English Rugby, and at the first outcropping of individual or team novelty there is a hurried meeting of the referees and it is decided that the play is against the law. There is nothing the matter with it save that it must not be done. There has been in recent years in the English game a maneuver known as the "loose head," a maneuver comparable in a mild degree to our own shift, and it has been assailed bitterly. There were a few progressives who worked out a way to meet it and check it on the field, but the two sets of theorists were as a rule not allowed to continue their warfare of brains, and the game promptly relapsed into its former settled condition.

Colonial teams, notably those from Australia and South

Africa, landed in England with new ideas built on the old

foundations, and made so thorough a sweep of the important

^ matches that the old-timers paused once more to take stock,

only to decide in the end that these innovations were what is customarily known in England as "tricky" and hence outside the spirit of the rules. In our own country these novelties would have met with favor, and the man who devised them would have been hailed as the greatest coach of his time. Had Lorin F. Deland, of Harvard, inventor of the famous flying wedge, undertaken any such revolution in the English game, I am inclined to believe that he would have been roundly condemned for his temerity and his system of play checked at once and on the field by the referee. It is possible that some day an innovation as startling will be tried in English Rugby, but certain it is that the temperament of the English player, and above all the referee, is not yet ripe for it.

Our game, because of the continued possession of the ball, is far more sharply divided into attack and defense, and for that reason the two branches of play are vastly dissimilar. Yet the one is no more attractive to the player than the other, and there are specialists in both. There is nothing in the English game and never has been that puts the player quite so thoroughly on his mettle as play on the defense as it is understood in the American game. Again, there is not a Plan, as in the English game, but many plans, and although there are, as in attack, certain well-understood basic principles, there is again the versatility and the initiative, both team and individual, that the English game lacks.

In a game under American rules between two well-matched teams, the players of each eleven are often on the attack, often on the defense, knowing in advance which r61e they are to assume. This makes for the all-round development of the player, mentally, physically and morally. Again and again he faces new situations, in which he is compelled to exercise a high order of physical and mental courage, instantaneous judgment, and initiative of the first quality. The sudden shift and shuttle of the fortunes of the game, apparently helter-skelter, but in reality orderly to the last degree, call for perhaps no quicker action than does the English game, but undoubtedly for quicker thinking.

It is this chance for diagnosis of an opponent's purpose and method that so appeals to the American temperament, and so well fits the player for the battle of life, wherein the study of character plays so large a part. One instance of such diagnosis — many come to mind — will serve to give point to my contention. It happened some years ago at the Polo Grounds in New York City, where Princeton and Cornell met in their, at that period, annual game. Glenn S. Warner brought down from Ithaca an eleven beautifully drilled in attack under rules that had been adopted the previous winter in the hope of opening up the game. The forward pass was in use for the first time in many years. It was practically an unknown quantity. Other maneuvers foreign to the old-style game had been worked out to a high state of efficiency.

With this new and bewildering attack — the Cornellians were extremely faulty in defense — Warner's pupils began a rapid assault on the Princeton line that swept them across the last chalk mark for a touchdown. The Princeton tackles of that year were Cooney and Stannard, the former on the right, the latter on the left side of the line. Stannard was smothered by the interference, but it soon became impossible to gain ground through Cooney. Cooney began his diagnosis of the new play the moment it was tried. He counted the men in the interference; traced them when they went back to their positions. He found by this process that the two Cornell guards were in the interference on every tackle run, and he was prompt to act. Under almost any other system it would have been dangerous in the extreme for the Princeton guard next to Cooney to have swung out of his position, leaving his opponent uncared for. Yet Cooney explained the situation hurriedly to his guard, carried this man wide with him on every play, and with

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I the extra assistance managed to spoil every Cornell smash at his side of the line. In the heat of the first few moments of the first half he had no time to pass his diagnosis and his remedy on to the other side of the line, and it was not until the lull after the first touchdown that he was able to get into touch with Stannard on the other wing. Cooney's judgment was correct, and his action perfectly applied, so that when both sides of the Tiger line knew the method of the Ithacans, Princeton won the game with something to spare and was able to rejoice in the knowledge that one of her men had faced, diagnosed under fire, and checked the first brilliant attack of the season under the new rules.

There is nothing in English football that puts a premiimi on this sort of thinking. The Englishmen tell us that this is specialization. Admitting that that is exactly what it is, the answer is that it is just what we want. It makes the kind of game we want and develops the kind of men we need.

It may be difficult at first for the average man to reconcile this specialization with a game, but game it is nevertheless; for those who do not so recognize it and who subordinate the individual to a machine, attempting to make of the whole matter nothing more nor less than an exact science must inevitably come to grief. No amoimt of progress, no amount of advancement in the art of football — and I say "art" advisedly — will ever spoil football as a game, for it is rooted in individual excellence after all, and given two elevens equally well coached the better men will win.

Were the men moulded entirely to suit an inexorable system of play, unbending, hard, exacting, there would be a different story to tell. As a matter of fact, long years of study and experience have taught the students of tactics and strategy, the masters of generalship, that they must consider their available material before settling upon a plan of campaign. The foundation principles remain — ^the Yale system, the Harvard system, the Princeton, Pennsylvania, Dartmouth and Michigan systems — but the immediate plan of campaign must be sufl&ciently elastic to be altered again and again in the course of a season as well as from season to season, if it is to produce results.

But if football is a game, after all, and not so serious a business as many of its opponents believe, it is, nevertheless, the most important game we haye, the sport that makes the heaviest demand upon every fine quality of the best possible type of athlete. It is the crucible in which character is moulded at an age when character is in the process of formation — it is, to change the simile, the white light that beats upon a young man's actions and ideals. Time was when it was customary to believe that the player could be little above an educated prize-fighter. That time has passed, for the player has lived down in after life this false reputation, and lived up to the reputation he enjoyed among those who really knew. At Harvard there is a memorial gate to one of the sweetest characters I ever knew — Marshall Newell, master of football, and at the same time guide, counsellor and friend.

In public life the percentage of successful men who are graduates of the gridiron is high. In the fall of 1912 "Bum" McClimg — to give him his undergraduate title — Treasurer of the United States under President Taft, gave a dinner to the famous Yale eleven of '91, the team of which he was captain; and the men who gathered around the board compared more than favorably in the matter of character, reputation and attainment, with practically another picked dinner party of non-football men from the same class.

The true charaicter of the football player has come to light only in recent years, for as a rule he talks football in after life only to his fellow veterans, from any institution whatsoever*, and many a man has worked alongside of one of these gridiron stars for years knowing nothing from his comrade's lips, and frequently learning from no other source either, of the worker's reputation on the gridiron. Indeed, many a man who comes before the public eye would prefer that nothing be said about his football career, a career that belongs entirely to himself and his friends — to them and the great host of gridiron veterans among whom it is really in the nature of a bond.

In recent years both faculty and undergraduate have come to look upon their football players as more and more expressive of the collegiate ideal — have come to feel that with all the achievement of the scholastically perfect, the merely public measure of the institution must be taken to a large extent from the performances and the bearing in the arena of the athletes, the most important of whom are the football. men«

There have been from time to time important movements looking toward the purification of football — commendably when the game was in dire straits. Not the least of these newer imdertakings was the formation of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and to its everlasting credit be it said that it began without ostentation or assumption of power, believing that "influence" and nothing else would justify its existence and the existence of the game it sought to some extent to guide but not control.

Since the beginning of the game there have been several elements interested in it, not the least of which have been the fraternity of players, never more solid and tolerant than now; the faculty influence, never more inclined to discern in the game its lasting value; the influence of the coaches, never more nearly on the high plane to which it has been sought again and again to establish that influence; and imdergraduate support, never more inclined to sanity, despite the organized cheering to which so many object, than in these early days of the Twentieth Century. If I believed that any or all of these influences would fail of serious improvement in the course of the next twenty-five years, or if I believed that there was anything fundamentally ephemeral connected with American intercollegiate football, these lines never would have been written.

Opinion against football and opinion in its favor have both reached the stage where each is willing to inquire of the other, and where the "highbrow" of opposition is removed not more than a parasang or two from the "low brow" of what has been too often overenthusiastic support.

Not the least of the goodly football influences have been such men as Dean Briggs of Harvard, elected in 1912 president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and men like Dr. A. L. Sharpe, of Yale, who took upon himself the recrudescence of Cornell football in more ways than one, not to mention other semi-athletes, semi-faculty men, whose word is accepted alike by the athletic element and the gentlemen of the university staff. It was not so many years ago that public and scholar alike felt that he who taught athletics, and especially football, was a little lower than the rubber with whom they had been accustomed to associate track athletics.

Since those days gymnasiums have sprung up mushroomlike all over this broad land, and it remained for the University of Wisconsin to solemnly inculcate in its curriculum, counting therefor certain university hours, the "Technique of Football." In recent years men whose goal in life lay far beyond the cross-barred field, have been willing to sacrifice a large part of their time each fall to tuition in the technique of football.

Perhaps the foremost proponent of this ideal was Professor Raymond G. Gettell, of Trinity, who for some time astonished the football world by turning out a series of victorious elevens even though it was well understood that he was the author of several scientific text-books, and that his aim in life was somewhat beyond — I shall not say above — the perpetuation of football technique, and of football generalship. Instances of this sort of thing might well be multiplied, and doubtless the average small college and preparatory school will be able to cite cases to the heart's desire of him who does not find instruction in mathematics or the classics and football irreconcilable; but enough has been said, I think, to prove the seriousness, the need, andjbe natural urge for the game.

^^^o those already enamored of the most fascinating fall pastime to be found in any coimtry, nothing can be added to the charm of the big game — the journey to the field (not the least of its attractions) ; the spontaneous if from the undergraduate point of view, organized enthusiasm; the exuberant or otherwise return; and the never-ending "post-mortem" when all is over for the season. Those of us who have looked upon football of the Varsity caliber from the outside in these years of specialism have been much maligned in the public prints. It is said of us that we get nothing out of the game. It has been said of us that we only stand and wait, without serving, and that too often imintelligently, when we ourselves well might be afield. Yet how many of us attend when something less worthy is before us! How many of us attend upon pageants less innocent; less expressive of the things that are nearest to our native innocence as Americans!

I would absolve the spectator at the great football games of the crime charged against him; I would absolve the players of the charges against them — ^that they butcher one another to make an American holiday; and I would absolve the college, the university and the schociJ^ from the charge that they pervert the character-building of the class room to the primordial strife of the football field. It is no longer primordial, this pigskin battle, for the old order with its premium on individual like and mislike in sport has given way to the new order of organized effort, and the end is not yet. Only, at least so far as football is concerned,