The play that won

by Ralph Henry Barbour

Conners was so surprised that he forgot to get mad until it was too late. Tru said that having Joe butt in and take things out of his hands like that sort of flabbergasted him, but he was so tired and used up he was glad to have someone else do the bossing. Enwright only needed another yard to make her distance and she tried to shove her way past Conners for it. But Conners was insulted and mad clean through now, and he wouldn’t have it, and blamed if we didn’t take the ball away from them in the middle of the field, and for the first time that day!

After that Joe created his own atmosphere, as he had put it to me, and it was a brand new atmosphere for the rest of the bunch. He kept dinning it into them that they were going to win, that Enwright was a lot of quitters and all tired out, anyway, that they only needed a touchdown and that they were on their way to it. And blessed if they didn’t begin to believe it! And it wasn’t long before Enwright was thinking there might be something in it, too! Tru said you could notice the difference five minutes after the last quarter began. They eased up and didn’t round off their plays. Their quarter began to change signals, and once they went back and put their heads together. When they did that Joe gloated openly and began to show even more pep.

“Sure!” he cried, “Talk it over! Know you’re beaten, don’t you? If you’ve got anything left, show it! Time’s getting short!”

It was, too. There was only about seven minutes left. We had taken the ball back to their twenty-eight and had to punt, and they had run it back to the thirty-six and were shy four yards on the third down. They got two of the four on a delayed pass that fooled every one on our team except Joe, it seemed, and then had to punt. Of course, all they wanted now was to kill time, and they tried every means they knew. But White got away from our thirty-five with a run that landed the pigskin past the middle again and then Morgan sent Presson back into the line-up and Press ate up ten yards in three plunges. It looked like we had them going then, and we were cheering ourselves hoarse on the stand. Joe snarled and bullied, and praised, too, and in those last five minutes he had every fellow on the team working for him like dogs. And they all expected to win, too. That’s the funny part of it. Dobbs told me afterwards that if we’d been beaten he would have cried like a kid. But we weren’t. No, sir, we weren’t. Not that year. We ate them up from their thirty-eight yards right down to their ten. They stiffened then and at first it was like chipping concrete to make gains. There was hardly more than a minute left. We could hear Joe barking and yelping. Even when he sounded the maddest you felt sure that he was going to get what he was after.

And Enwright knew it, too. Yes, sir, Enwright showed it right then. She wasn’t cocky any longer. She was pegged out and nervous and discouraged. You could see it in the way the backs changed positions behind the forwards, not being sure where they’d better stay, and you could see it in the way the line started before the ball twice. We made a yard and a half on the first plunge and lost the half on the second, and it was nine to go on the third down.

We were all off the stand by that time, clustering along the side line and back of the goal, cheering and yelping at one moment and then being so still the quarter’s voice sounded like claps of thunder. Our right end scampered off, Joe passed to the quarter, quarter faked a forward and dropped the ball to Maynard and Maynard shot straight into the center. Joe was clearing the hole out for him, and he did it to the king’s taste. Right through and into the secondary defense plunged Joe, taking them with him as he went, while Maynard, head down, pigskin clutched to his tummy, followed after. They stopped them short of the last line, but not much short, and we still had another down.

The timekeeper was walking nearer and nearer with his eyes on his watch and we fellows looking on almost had heart failure. It seemed to us that our team had never taken longer to line up and that the quarter had never been so slow with his signals. But he got them out finally and—Oh, well, you know what happened. It was Joe again, and Maynard again, and Enwright went down like nine-pins and our whole team broke through her center and went tumbling, streaming over the goal line! And when the whistle blew Joe had to trot back from the other side of the end line, he had been going so hard!

That’s how we broke the hoodoo. Tru failed at goal, but we had won, thirteen to twelve, anyway. They elected Joe captain a week later, and he would have been a corker if the war hadn’t come along. He went over in the spring, and the next thing we heard he was top sergeant. I’m sorry for the Huns in front of Joe’s platoon if he used that psychology stuff!