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Show SPORTUGHT . Football Is Hard to Officiate By GRANTLAND RICE Lefty James, the very able coach at Cornell, let out a lusty squawk about football officials and the penalties imposed against r imii tf r . his Cornell team in ' the Harvard game. Lefty James is a I first class coach j and a first class j sportsman. He was ' merely giving pub-1 pub-1 i c utterance to what so many other coaches said before in private officials to handle. Baseball is a holiday In comparison. compari-son. The umpire today or four of them knows where to be and there can only be two men involved right under his nose the runner and the fielder. But with 22 men scattered all over the field from 50 to 100 yards apart all with a little honest hon-est larceny In their hearts no set of officials could cover this ground. But the main fault is with the structure of football itself, not with the officials.. No set of officials In any game works harder, trains harder, or tries harder to handle an impossible job. It is an impossible job on many occasions where the human hu-man eye falls down completely. In sitting up in a press box above the field, you frequently see plays clearly that officials on the field must miss with ' their visions shut off by intervening in-tervening players. The worst place to see a football game is from the bench. The level view is impossible. That is why scouts, helping to direct the play, move to some elevated spot and use their phones from above the field. Football officials, however, work on this level range. One official, working above the field, could see twice as much on many occasions as those working on the ground. Coaches should understand the fault isn't with the officials. It is with the game itself. And the coaches could do a better job in training their men to play the game by the rules, which so few coaches do. Off side, holding, starting start-ing too quickly in the backfield are rule infractions, that right coaching coach-ing could reduce. Jinx in Sports Stan Musial, recently voted the second most valuable player in the National League for 1950, can hit between .300 and .400 in any park in the majors except Forbes Field, which is next door to his home town of Donora, Pa. Most years the finest batsman in the National Na-tional League is happy if he can top .200 at Pittsburgh, his absolute, three-ring, gold-plated jinx. The following fol-lowing afternoon at Ebbets Field, Musial may be on base everytime. Harry Breechen has won thirty times in his forty games with the Chicago Cubs. All he has to do is throw his glove on the field and the Cubs are down. Same was true of Art Nehf, the left-hander who could always beat the Pirates. Through four seasons Nehf defeated de-feated Pittsburgh thirteen times in a row before they broke the spell in 1922. Nehf was the main factor in depriving the Pirates of the pennant pen-nant in 1921. They had a lead of seven and a half games going into New York in mid-August, but the Giants took therr five straight. Grantland Rice conversation. What they all overlook in this football is not a game that lends itself to the operation of officials. You have 22 men on the field, widely scattered, all over the lot, any . one of them quite willing to face the chance of any penalty that might help win the game. As Hurry-up Yost once said to me "There are at least one or two penalties, incurred on every play in football There are off sides. There is holding, secret or otherwise. other-wise. There is always some form of rule breaking. All the officials can do is watch for penalties that affect the play directly. In the course of one season after another, I have seen penalties that changed the course of four or five games a year. I have seen many penalties that were not called but that directly affected the turn of the game. These were shown in motion pictures later. Some of them were glaring infractions but unseen un-seen by the officials. It so happened that I worked as an official in the south for many years as referee, umpire and field Judge. It was then I made up my mind that football foot-ball was not a game that could be handled efficiently on the field. I have never changed my mind since. No pair of eyes doubled and redoubled re-doubled can follow all that takes place. Pass interference alone could drive any set of officials stark raving mad. I have shown slow motion pictures of such plays to many officials whose rulings in the game were at variance with the camera portrayal. They were, of course, guessing. "Backfield in motion" is another problem that keeps coaches and officials in a frantic state of mind. It is a split-second decision and the human eye isn't equipped for split seconds. The hand arid the foot are both quicker than the human eye. Which is never too fast. Otherwise Other-wise magicians would starve to death. Yet the official must work with his eyes, which are not capable capa-ble of handling the job. Football the Toughest Football is by all odds the toughest tough-est of all games for any set of |