"Through some technicality in the last rush the officials, instead of allowing the touchdown, took the ball away from us and gave it to Yale. They were right, probably quite right, but how could we think so? Yale at once kicked the ball to the middle of the field well out of danger. The teams lined up.
"On the very next play, with every man of that splendidly trained Eleven doing his allotted work, Harold Weekes swept around the end, aided by the magnificent interference of Jack Wright, which gave him his start. He ran half the length of the field, through the entire Yale team, and planted the ball squarely behind the goal posts for the touchdown which won the game. If we had ever had any doubt that cruel wrong is righted, that truth and justice must prevail, it was swept away that moment in a great wave of thanksgiving.
"I shall never forget it—Columbia had beaten Yale! Tears running down my cheeks, shaken by emotion, I couldn't speak, let alone cheer. My best girl was with me. She gave one quick half-frightened glance and I believe almost realized all I felt. She was all gold. I feel now the timid little pressure on my arm as she tried to help me regain control of myself. God! why has life so few such moments!"
BEHIND THE SCENES
Let us go into the dressing room of a victorious team, which defeated Yale at Manhattan Field a good many years ago and let us read with that great lover of football, the late Richard Harding Davis, as he describes so wonderfully well some of the unique things that happened in the celebration of victory.
"People who live far away from New York and who cannot understand from the faint echoes they receive how great is the enthusiasm that this contest arouses, may possibly get some idea of what it means to the contestants themselves through the story of a remarkable incident, that occurred after the game in the Princeton dressing room. The team were being rubbed down for the last time and after their three months of self-denial and anxiety and the hardest and roughest sort of work that young men are called upon to do, and outside in the semi-darkness thousands of Princeton followers were jumping up and down and hugging each other and shrieking themselves hoarse. One of the Princeton coaches came into the room out of this mob, and holding up his arm for silence said,
"'Boys, I want you to sing the doxology.'"
"Standing as they were, naked and covered with mud, blood and perspiration, the eleven men that had won the championship sang the Doxology from the beginning to the end as solemnly and as seriously, and I am sure, as sincerely, as they ever did in their lives, while outside the no less thankful fellow-students yelled and cheered and beat at the doors and windows and howled for them to come out and show themselves. This may strike some people as a very sacrilegious performance and as a most improper one, but the spirit in which it was done has a great deal to do with the question, and any one who has seen a defeated team lying on the benches of their dressing room, sobbing like hysterical school girls, can understand how great and how serious is the joy of victory to the men that conquer."
Introducing Vic Kennard, opportunist extraordinary. Where is the Harvard man, Yale man, or indeed any football man who will not be stirred by the recollection of his remarkable goal from the field at New Haven that provided the winning points for the eleven Percy Haughton turned out in the first year of his régime. To Kennard himself the memory is still vivid, and there are side lights on that performance and indeed on all his football days at Cambridge, of which he alone can tell. I'll not make a conversation of this, but simply say as one does over the 'phone, "Kennard talking":—
