The Girl and the Game and Other College Stories/Talks with a Kid Brother/Trying for the Team
TRYING FOR THE TEAM
What of it—what if you couldn't make the team? What's that got to do with it? That isn't the reason I wanted you to go in for athletics. Why didn't you fight it out! The chief benefit of athletics is to teach you to quit being a quitter. Last fall when you left off trying for the Freshman eleven I felt sorry, but you put it on the ground of your studies and said you'd come out when the call for baseball candidates was issued in the early spring. But your name isn't in the list published in the paper. You haven't the face to blame it on your studies this time, Dick; I have seen your reports! You are afraid of being laughed at; that's what's the matter.
Did you ever hear about the case of big, fatty Simon? He was laughed at. They called him Simple Simon. He was here in the early days of football, before the Rugby game had spread all over the country. He weighed, about two hundred and eighty pounds, mostly fat, and I don't suppose he had ever seen a canvas jacket until the day he entered college and waddled down to the field along with a lot of other green Freshmen to look at the football practice. It interested him. He was so much interested that he paid no attention to the Sophomores who were guying him about his fat and his simplicity. "I should think that game would be fun," he said in a high, squeaky voice. "I think I'll play," he announced to his classmates.
"That's right," said they, chuckling at Simple Simon; "just your game, old man."
"Yes. You see I can't play many games," smiled Simon simply, trying to peep at his boots.
"Tell the captain you are a candidate," said they, chuckling.
"Think I stand a chance?"
"A chance? It's a dead cinch."
"All right," said Simple. "I will." And he did.
The captain looked him over and smiled. "I don't believe we have any suit to fit you," he said kindly, "but you come down to-morrow. That's the right spirit."
The college along the side lines smiled audibly the next day when Simple Simon trotted out with the other men, or tried to, puffing and blowing, in a much-stretched sweater and a pair of breeches that had been opened in the rear to admit him. But he was accustomed to being a cause of amusement and did not mind. They laughed louder still when in the first scrimmage he was toppled over like a huge nine-pin. "Did you feel the earth shake?" asked a humorist.
The business-like captain yelled, "Line up, fellows!" The crowd roared; they saw Simon lying there on his back, flapping his arms and legs like an overturned turtle. He was not hurt—simply too fat. The next scrimmage the same thing happened. After that they reached over to pull him up as a matter of course. But with three or four more scrimmages Simple Simon had to retire, winded. A group of Sophomores guyed him as he waddled past to the field house.
"It's a good game, though," he piped up to the trainer as soon as he got breath enough.
"Are you coming out to-morrow?" he was asked when he came out of the shower bath.
"You bet!" said he.
Simple Simon kept it up. After the trainer had taken about thirty pounds off him he could last a full half, and could keep his feet for several minutes at a time. By and by he learned to get up alone. That was a proud day. The laughing crowds along the side lines cheered him.
"You're a perfect corker, Simple," his chaffing classmates told him.
"A regular Hector Cowan," said another. "You'll make the team yet."
"Aw! come off—you're trying to guy me, I believe," said Simple. He thought himself quite sophisticated by this time. But he grinned and kept on trying. "It's good sport, anyway," he said as he wiped the blood away from his torn ear.
The coaches smiled at his cheerfulness. "That big, fat Freshman can give some of you fellows points in the way of spirit," they said to the 'Varsity eleven. Besides, it was good practice for the guards, wielding such a great weight—like a medicine-ball.
After two years of this, most of Simon's fat was worn off by the trampling, shoving and butting the 'Varsity gave him; the rest was turned into solid muscle by the trampling, shoving and butting he gave the 'Varsity. Also, he was studying the game. The crowd had stopped laughing at him. "That's all right," they said, wagging their heads, "he's got the right spirit, even if he hasn't got the right shape for making the team." In his Junior year he was taken to New York on Thanksgiving Day as a substitute—with a huge sweater pulled down over his hips. And in his Senior year he was on the team, the champion football team of America. The fearless way he used to charge down the field like a fighting elephant and smash those old-fashioned flying wedges—by flopping down in front of them—is now a matter of football history.
He is the stout gentleman I pointed out to you one day at the club with the two gold football emblems on his watch-chain. No, they don't laugh at him now, and his voice isn't high and squeaky. But it wasn't because he had the honor, merely, of being a member of the team that he became a man of force and self-reliance, but because he was willing to accept the bumps and thumps and discouragement that seem the incidental parts but are really the most important features of the game—and of all athletic sports, so far as concerns the actual benefit to those who are playing. But if he had let the jeers and gibes, which, after all, were good-natured gibes, drive him off the football field he might have remained something of a big, fat booby to this day.
Hearing a little laughter won't hurt you a bit, but fearing it will harm you greatly. To so many people laughter in this sense suggests an attitude of superiority over the one laughed at. As a matter of fact, jeers and sneers are more frequently prompted by a jealous sense of inferiority.
I take no stock in this drivelling cant about "daring to do right, despite the laughter and ridicule of the world," and all that long-faced tommy-rot, promulgated mostly by emasculated individuals who know very little about the world and don't dare do wrong. The world is not so bad—in its admirations, I mean, whatever may be said of its practices.
It so happens that I have had to run up against a good many different kinds of people since I landed on this much-maligned and very interesting world, but I have yet to find any of them setting a higher value on a man for selling himself out cheap. I have yet to meet the Sunday-school-book kind who like a man better for not "daring to say No." The difficulty is not in saying No, but in doing it. Nobody will object to your saying it unless you whine it with a timid, shame-faced bleat, or else bray it out with blatant self-righteousness. In either of these cases you will deserve to be laughed at because you will be funny.
When I said "nobody" just now I meant no man. This does not apply to downy kids and nincompoops—"paper sports," I believe you call them. In my day there was a little Southerner named Reddy Armstrong, and he was the real thing—whew! you would hardly have called him a "paper sport!" For two years he kept up a thrilling pace. He marked out a vivid red career. He was the sort who can stay up all night doing things he was not sent to college for—"extra-curriculum work"; and then after a cold plunge in the morning he'd seem as fresh and cool and clear-eyed as an athlete in training. Some of the fellows used to call him the Parson, not only on account of the aforementioned reasons, but because, fond as he was of poker, when twelve o'clock struck on Saturday night he always threw down his hand, no matter how promising it looked, and said in his broad, delightful manner: "Gentlemen, it is Sunday morning. I bid you good-night."
In Junior-year, it seems, Reddy became very well acquainted with his roommate's sister and—he came back to college a new man. He felt benignantly sorry for all the others who were not also new men—but did not tell them so unless he knew them well enough. One night at a house-party in the Christmas holidays a very young New Yorker, of the would-be-wicked-variety—yes, he was a "paper sport"—tried to get the Parson to join with him in a game in the smoking-room with some of the older men of the party. The Parson thanked them for the honor, bowed politely and begged to be excused.
"What, and you a Kentuckian!" exclaimed one of the older men, who was shocked.
"It certainly does sound very incongruous," said the Parson, smiling urbanely, "but you'll have to manage without me, I reckon."
"Oh, come on, old man," said the paper sport.
"If I were playing," thought Reddy, "you would be an easy mark." But he only said, "Thank you, no." The older men had, of course, stopped urging him.
The paper sport exhaled a lungful of cigarette smoke cynically. "'Fraid, are you?" he said.
Reddy looked up. "Exactly," he replied quickly. "I'm afraid to get in, and you're afraid to keep out." Somehow the laugh was on the paper sport, and he wondered why it was, throughout the rest of the visit, that they treated him like an infant and little Reddy like a man they respected.
Long-legged Frank Berkhart, the famous old catcher, was the most respected man on the team, not because he was the best player—as a matter of fact, he wasn't—but because he seemed absolutely independent of popular opinion, and hence got the best of it. The manager of the team that year was one of the most profane young men I ever knew. But he adored Frank. On the Easter trip one night, after one of the games, the team were frolicking and making a great racket in Frank's room in the hotel. Presently they heard some one hammer a table with a baseball bat; then the authoritative voice of the manager growled out in the sudden silence:
"You fellows have got to stop your dd swearing; Frank is saying his prayers."
So he was. It was bedtime for men in training, and he had undressed. The hint was followed.
Frank never neglected to read the Bible either. On a similar occasion when a couple of the fellows were playing horse—they are always behaving like infants on these trips—one of them let fly a sofa-cushion which accidentally landed in Frank's lap. He clapped the cushion under his arm before any one else could grab it, then muttered earnestly, "Wait till I finish this chapter and I'll hammer your face with it." And he did.
You understand, of course, that I'm not preaching at you. I'm only telling you kid stories, for you are still a good deal of a kid, though a pseudo-college man. You can draw morals from them or not as best meets your requirements. You know your requirements better than I do. You aren't so bad—in fact, you have behaved yourself pretty well—for a Freshman—better than I anticipated in some respects. But you still have a lot to learn about being a college man. So I am just telling you about college men and college kids I have known. I wouldn't preach at you for the world! Go on and finish your translation. I'm going to call on a classmate of mine in the faculty.