"Everybody in on the jump," and you soon find yourself back in the dressing room.
It does not take you long to get your clothes off and ready for the bath. How well some of you will recall that after a hard practice you were content to sit and rest awhile on the bench in the dressing-room. It may be that, in removing your clothes, you favored an injured knee, looked at a sprained ankle, or helped some fellow off with his jersey.
What is finer, after a hard day's practice, than to stand beneath a warm shower and gradually let the water grow cold? Everything is lovely until some rascal in the bunch throws a cold sponge on you and slaps you across the back, or turns the cold water on, when you only want hot.
Then comes the dry-off and the rub-down, which seems to soothe all your bruises. This picture of Pete Balliet standing on the end of a bench, while Jack McMasters massages an injured knee may recall to many a football player the day when the trainer was his best friend. From his wonderful physique it is easy to believe that Balliet must have been the great center-rush whom the heroes of years ago tell about.
Harry Brown, that great Princeton end-rush, is on the other end of the bench, being taken care of by Bill Buss, a jovial old colored attendant, who was for so many years a rubber at Princeton.
I know men who never enthuse over football, but just play from a sense of college loyalty, and a fear of censure should they not play; who are sorry that they were ever big or showed any football ability. College sentiment will not allow a football man to remain idle.
I knew a man in college, who, on his way to the football field, said:
"Oh, how I hate to drag my body down to the Varsity field to-day to have it battered and bruised!"
One does not always enthuse over the hard drudgery of practice. Those that witness only the final games of the year, little realize the gruesome task of preparedness. Every football player will acknowledge that some day he has had these thoughts himself.