THE officers of the Grand Central Fishing Club, of Cincinnati, O., for the year are: President, Herman H. Rotherl; secretary, Henry H. Muller; treasurer, Peter Bonte; commissary and quartermaster-general, Henry Stueve; adjutant and assistant to commissary and quartermaster-general, Adam Lotz; chaplain, Edward A. Shiele; assistant chaplain, Carl Lesber, and surgeon, Henry Morning.
FOOTBALL.
THE Boston Herald, in a dispatch from New Haven, gives the following changes in the football rules, adopted by the Intercollegiate Football Association:
1. To allow tackling above the knees.
2. To permit the snapper back to rush the ball.
3. To prohibit the rush line from using their hands or arms in blocking.
4. In putting the ball in play from touch, it “can be either bounded in or touched in with both hands at right angles to the touch line.”
(1.) In tackling, the line has always been drawn at the hips. In actual play, however, the tackler cared very little if his hands slipped below the hips so long as he checked his man, and the umpires, when called upon to declare it intentional, hesitated, and seldom disqualified. The new rule permits a dangerous tackle, and is not an improvement.
(2.) This was the disputed point in the Yale-Harvard game last year. The rule (29) was ambiguously worded, and Yale, by a little headwork, easily overcame it, and the referee could not very well decide against them. Last year the snapper-back could not rush the ball until it had touched a third man.
(3.) The new rule reads: “No player can lay his hands upon or interfere with, by use of hands or arms, an opponent, unless he has the ball.” And interference is defined “as using the hands or arms in any way to obstruct or hold a player who has not the ball.”