“Yes, that’s the popular impression, but, like most popular impressions, it’s quite erroneous. It is ignorance that wins every time. Take your own case for example. You know no more of the game than you have learned from seeing it played on three occasions. You are free from prejudices; you do not insist that the ball must be handled in a certain way. It makes no difference to you whether the quarter holds it with a stiff hand or a loose one, whether he has the belly of the ball or the end. You haven’t played the game until you’ve got yourself into a rut hemmed in by customs and precedents. Consequently, if left to your own devices you will play the game naturally. If it comes easier to you to kick the ball with your heel than with your toe, you’ll do it. If you think you can obtain better results by tackling the referee instead of the runner, you’ll do that. Your mind, so far as the game of football is concerned, is virgin. You learn the game naturally, as a child learns to talk. You will not be restricted by rules, regulations or customs; and so who knows but that you’ll improve on the present methods?”
Phillip smiled doubtfully and shot a glance at the speaker’s face. But Guy was looking straight ahead, thoughtfully serious, as though enjoying a vision of a gridiron contest in which the players, emancipated from the iron heel of the despotic coach, were battling each as his natural impulse taught. Chester was grinning; but then he generally was grinning, thought Phillip.
“But there would always have to be rules, wouldn’t there?” he asked.
“Not at all,” answered Guy calmly. “Rules are laws; laws are unnatural mandates invented by man to govern the conduct of persons whose conscionable impulses have been so thwarted that they no longer have the power to influence.”
Chester gurgled rapturously.
“In football,” continued Guy, “there is a rule which prohibits a player from throttling his opponent or striking him with his fist. Now where is the advantage of that rule? It very often happens—I know that it has in my case, at all events—that a player can put his opponent out of the play more speedily and certainly by striking him forcibly between the eyes with the fist than by pushing him to one side. The natural impulse is to do so. Then why not do it?”
“But—but——” Phillip stuttered in his amazement. “But that would be brutal! You might—might injure the other fellow.”
“Certainly; I believe that if done scientifically and with sufficient force it would kill him. And there we are again. The natural impulse is to kill enough of the opposing team to enable you to win the game. The object of the game is to win. The surest way to win is to kill off the other team as fast as possible. But there the very persons who should do all in their power to advance the sport step in with a foolish, contradictory rule prohibiting you from slaying your man in any save one or two almost impossible methods. Any one who has played football at all knows that you can’t kill your opponent by throwing him or by pawing him on the chest with the open hand. It’s the dreariest nonsense! Consider the one or two real killings that football history shows. In each case the deed has been done either by stamping the fellow’s brains out or jumping onto his spinal column so as to break his neck, or in some way that the idiotic rules prohibit. Rules! Why, they’re the very things that are retarding the true development of the game.”
“Oh, shut up, Guy!” sputtered Chester. Phillip laughed uncertainly. Of course Bassett was only fooling, but he did it with such a straight face, thought Phillip, that any one might be deceived. They turned in at the Newell Gate and followed the path around the Locker Building. The field was already well dotted with fellows; it looked to Phillip as though every man who could beg, buy or borrow a pair of football trousers had turned out.
“Think over what I’ve said,” pleaded Guy, as they approached the group of waiting candidates for the freshman team. “You’ve got the making of a great football player, Ryerson; you start in with the most valuable asset of all, ignorance. Be true to your impulses and resist to the last drop of blood in your veins the coercion of narrow-minded, hide-bound, bigoted coaches and captains. You have a great future before you, my boy. Remain true to yourself, and Chester and I will look back to this day in which we were privileged to know you ere you were discovered to fame as the proudest day of our lives.”