"What did little Theophilus say? What was it Shakespeare wrote? Oh, I have
it:
"'This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong—
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.'"
THOR'S AWAKENING
"There's a hole in the bottom of the sea,
And we'll put Bannister in that hole!
In that hole—in—that—hole—
Oh, we'll put Bannister in that hole!"
"In the famous words of the late Mike Murphy," said T. Haviland Hicks, Jr.,
"the celebrated Yale and Penn track trainer, 'you can beat a team that
can't be beat, but—you can't beat a team that won't be beat!' Latham must
be in the latter class."
It was the Bannister-Latham game, and the first half had just ended.
Captain Butch Brewster's followers had trailed dejectedly from Bannister
Field to the Gym, where Head Coach Corridan was flaying them with a tongue
as keen as the two-edged sword that drove Adam and Eve from the Garden of
Eden. A cold, bleak November afternoon, a leaden sky lowered overhead, and
a chill wind swept athwart the field; in the concrete stands, the loyal
"rooters" of the Gold and Green, or of the Gold and Blue, shivered,
stamped, and swung their arms, waiting for the excitement of the scrimmage
again to warm them. Yet, the Bannister cohorts seemed silent and
discouraged, while the Latham supporters went wild, singing, cheering,
howling. A look at the score-board explained this:
END OF FIRST HALF: SCORE:
Bannister ........ 0
Latham ........... 3
The statement of T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., swathed in a gold and green
blanket and humped on the Bannister bench, to shivering little Theophilus
Opperdyke, the Phillyloo Bird, Shad Weatherby, and several more collegians
who had joined him when the half ended, was singularly appropriate. In
Latham's light, fast eleven, trained to the minute, coached to a shifty,
tricky style of play with numberless deceptive fakes from which they worked
the forward pass successfully, Bannister seemed to have encountered, as
Mike Murphy phrased it, "A team that won't be beat!" According to the
advance dope of the sporting writers, who, in football, are usually as good
prophets as the Weather Bureau, Bannister was booked to come out the winner
by at least five touchdowns to none. But here a half was gone, and Latham
led by three points, scored on a rather lucky field-goal!
The psychology of football is inexplicable. Yale, beaten by Virginia,
Brown, and Wash-Jeff, with the Blue's best gridiron star ineligible to
play, a team that seemed at odds with itself and the 'Varsity, mismanaged,
poorly coached, journeys to Princeton to battle with old Nassau; the Tiger,
Its tail as yet untwisted, presents its best eleven for several seasons, a
great favorite in the odds, and yet the final score is Yale, 14; Princeton,
7! A strange fear of the Bulldog, bred of many bitter defeats, of similar
occasions when a feeble Yale team aroused itself and trampled an invincible
Orange and Black eleven, when the Blue fought old Nassau with a team that
"wouldn't" be beat, gave victory to the poorer aggregation. So many things
unforeseen often enter into a football contest, shifting the balance of
power from the stronger to the weaker team. One eleven gets the jump on the
other, the favorite weirdly goes to pieces—team dissension may exist, a
dozen other causes—but, boiled down, Mike Murphy's statement was most
appropriate now.