What took place when the blond Prodigious Prodigy lumbered on Bannister
Field at the start of the last half of the Bannister-Latham game can be
imagined by the final score-board figures:
BANNISTER ......... 27
LATHAM ............. 3
It can best be described with the aid of Scoop Sawyer's account in the next
Bannister Weekly:
—At the start of the second half, however, the Latham cohorts were given
a shock when they beheld a colossal being almost as big as the entire Gold
and Blue eleven, go in at fullback for Bannister. And the Latham eleven
received a series of shocks when Thor began intruding that massive body
of his into their territory. Tennyson's saying, "The old order changeth,
yielding place to new" was aptly illustrated in the second half; for
Bannister's bugler quit sounding "Retreat!" and blew "Charge!" Four
touchdowns and three goals from touchdowns, in one half, is usually
considered a fair day's work for an entire team. Even Yale or Harvard; but
when one player corrals four touchdowns in a half—he is going some! Well,
Thor went some! Most of the half he furnished free transportation for
two-thirds of the Latham team, carrying them on his back, legs, and neck,
as he strode down the field; a writ of habeas corpus could not have stopped
the blond Colossus. Anyone would have stood more show to stop an Alpine
avalanche than to slow up Thor, and the stretcher was constantly in
evidence, for Latham knockouts.
The game turned into a Thor's Personally Conducted Tour. Thorwald, escorted
by the Gold and Green team, made four quick tours to the Latham goal-line.
It was simply a matter of giving the ball to the Prodigious Prodigy, then
waving the linesmen to move down twenty yards or more toward Latham's line.
Thor was simply unstoppable, and more beneficial even than his phenomenal
playing was his encouragement to the team. He kept urging them to action,
his foghorn growl of, "Come on, boys!" was a slogan of victory! Judging by
Thor's awakening, and his work of the Latham game, Bannister's hopes of The
State Intercollegiate Football Championship are as roseate as the blush on
a maiden's cheek at her first kiss, and—
That night, in the cozy room of T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., John Thorwald,
supremely happy yet withal as uncomfortable as a whale on the Sahara
Desert, overflowed an easy-chair. The room was filled, or what space Thor
left, with the Bannister eleven, second-team players, Coach Corridan, and
several students; on the campus a riotous crowd of Bannister youths "raised
merry Heck," as Hicks phrased it, and their cheer floated up to the
windows:
"Rah! Rah! Rah! Thor! Thor! Thor! He's—all—right!"
"Come, fellows," spoke T. Haviland Hicks, Jr.
"Let's sing to the captain, good old Butch! Let 'er go!"