The Secret Play

by Ralph Henry Barbour

Dick’s ability to connect player and position was in a way remarkable. His sleight-of-hand trick in making Guy Felker, who had been playing fullback for two years, into a competent end was still marveled at, and his elevation of Partridge from the Scrub to the First Squad had been equally successful. And now the school was watching with almost breathless interest his experiment of molding a finished quarterback from the raw material. In fact, the school found a good deal to wonder at that Fall with regard to Dick. The Norrisville game had proved pretty conclusively, fellows considered, that they had made no mistake in their choice of a coach. Those who had openly scoffed were now either silent or frankly admiring, while those who had hailed Dick’s advent from the first were now noisily triumphant. The question one heard on every hand was “How does Lovering know so much football when he has never played it and never had anything to do with it?”

Dick could have told them had he chosen to. All his life he had been forced to sit by and watch other boys do things; play baseball and football and tennis, run races, leap hurdles, skate and enjoy all the other sports from which he was debarred by reason of a weak spine. But Dick had not been content to merely look on and envy. He had studied while he watched, often, for his own amusement, imagining himself in the place of some more fortunate youth and telling himself just what he would do in such a case. To that end Dick read up on all the sports until, theoretically at least, he knew more about them by half than most of the fellows who participated. No one followed the baseball and football and track teams more closely than Dick. He seldom missed a contest. And, while others were content to observe results, Dick had to know the reasons for them. Many were the football problems he had worked out at home with a checkerboard and checkers, or with matches on a table-top, and many the imaginary games he had captained. Dick, in short, was a self-taught athlete, a book-learning one. But that book-learning and self-instruction may produce results had already been proved in the Summer, when he had piloted the baseball nine to many victories, and was now in a fair way to being proved again.

Dick didn’t know it all, however. No fellow who has never actually played as well as studied can possess an all-around knowledge of the game. Dick was ignorant, for instance, of certain niceties of line-play, tricks that are second nature to a seasoned guard or tackle or center, but, realizing his ignorance, he didn’t pretend knowledge. Quite frankly he asked information, solicited advice, even from the boys he was coaching. When he made a mistake he acknowledged the fact. One day when he was watching Squad A practice against Squad B, and Chester Cottrell had sent a split-tandem play at the opposing line for a loss of several yards, Dick found fault.

“You were wrong, Tupper,” he said. “You should have put out your man and let Captain White clear up the hole. Try that again, Cottrell.”

Cottrell, on the impulse, started to answer sharply. “No, he shouldn’t, Coach! That play—” Then he stopped as quickly, clapped his hands and cried, “A Formation! Signals!” The others, returning to their places, were silent, Lanny casting a doubtful look at Dick as he fell in behind George Tupper again. Dick, however, had read the signs.

“One moment,” he said. “Am I wrong, Captain White?”

“I think you are,” replied Lanny frankly. “That play sends fullback against tackle, with the ball. Tupper’s play is to engage the center and fake an attack on that position. If he goes in too hard and puts his man out too quick he doesn’t give Beaton time to get through tackle. Same way with me, Coach. I’m supposed to draw guard in away from the play. If I smash in too hard and fast——”

“You’re right,” agreed Dick. “That was my mistake. We’ll try that again later when they’re not looking for it and see why it doesn’t go. All right, Cottrell!”

One or two of the linemen started to grin, but almost instantly changed their minds. A coach who could make a mistake and own up to it as frankly as that wasn’t a subject for ridicule! Farrell wouldn’t have done it, they reflected. When Farrell made an error, and he sometimes did, for all his experience, he bullied them into a sort of half-belief that he had been right!