"Briggs?" answered Cooper. "He's a dub; that's all—just a dub."
That described him pretty well, I thought. By dub we didn't mean just a man who couldn't play the game; we meant a man who knew how to play and wouldn't; a chap who couldn't be made to understand. Bi was a dub of the first water.
We didn't have much trouble with Dartmouth that year. It was before she got sassy and rude. Then there were two weeks of hard practice before the Yale game. We had a new set of signals to learn and about half a dozen new plays. The weather got nice and cold and Hecker made the most of it. We didn't have time to feel chilly. One week went by, and then—it was a Sunday morning, I remember—it came out that Corson, the Varsity right guard, had been protested by Yale. It seemed that Corson had won a prize of two dollars and fifty cents about five years before for throwing the hammer at a picnic back in Pennsylvania. Well, there was a big shindy and the athletic committee got busy and considered his case. But Hecker didn't wait for the committee to get through considering. He just turned Corson out and put in Blake, the first sub. On Tuesday the committee declared Corson ineligible and Blake sprained his knee in practice! With Corson and Blake both out of it, Hecker was up against it. He tried shifting "Slugger" Bannen over to right and putting the full back at left. Jordan, the Yale left guard, was the best in the world, and we needed a man that could stand up against him. But "Slugger" was simply at sea on the right side of center and so had to be put back again. After that the only thing in sight that looked the least bit like a right guard was Bayard Newlyn Briggs.
They took Bi and put him on the Varsity, and forty-'leven coaches stood over his defenseless form and hammered football into him for eight solid hours on Wednesday and Thursday. And Bi took it all like a little woolly lamb, without a bleat. But it just made you sick to think what was going to happen to Bi when Jordan got to work on him!
We had our last practice Thursday, and that night we went to the Union and heard speeches and listened to the new songs. Pretty poor they were too; but that's got nothing to do with the story. Friday we mooned around until afternoon and then had a few minutes of signal practice indoors. Bi looked a little bit worried, I thought. Maybe it was just beginning to dawn on Me that it wasn't all a lark.
What happened next morning I learned afterwards from Bi. Hecker sent for him to come to his room, put him in a nice easy-chair, and then sat down in front of him. And he talked.
"I've sent for you, Mr. Briggs," began Hecker in his quiet way, "because it has occurred to me that you don't altogether understand what we are going to do this afternoon."
Bi looked surprised.
"Play Yale, sir?"
"Incidentally; yes. But we are going to do more than play her; we are going to beat her to a standstill; we are going to give her a drubbing that she will look back upon for several years with painful emotion. It isn't often that we have an opportunity to beat Yale, and I propose to make the best of this one. So kindly disabuse your mind of the idea that we are merely going out to play a nice, exhilarating game of football. We are going to simply wipe up the earth with Yale!"