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Show WE ARE now moving into a rather strange, weird and complicated com-plicated sporting world. Many of the stronger college football foot-ball teams of October are onlv rem- nants in November. Star after star, sin- F gly and in groups, P is heading now for Parris Island, a m big marine base, or some other service W- center. t You could recruit a -football team at j Parris Island that would be unbeat- : able, given just a - : little time. Grantland Rice At the same time the draft is moving in on big league baseball. Consider the Yankees alone. Spud Chandler, their star pitcher, is on his way out, unless he is 4-F, which Sriud isn't. Under the rules, Spud is 1-A. Charlie ("King Kong") Keller, their home run hitter, Is waiting his 1- A test. Keller is no 4-F. Nor a 2- A. Joe Gordon, their feature second baseman, has had over 100 hours in the air and he can't miss. If Chandler, Keller and Gordon are not fit for service work we must have the super-army of all time. They happen to be three of the finest all-around athletes I've ever known on one ball club. I happen to know that Bill Dickey, their veteran catcher, a first class flier, too old for any combat flying at 36, would like to get an instructor's Hying job. This same condition must apply to other teams. If the war remains tough or gets tougher, the call on sport will be even louder than it has been so far. And the call has been heavy. Shifting Tides In many cases football stars, playing play-ing at one college in October, are playing with rivals now. Tides are shifting back and forth faster than the human eye can follow. fol-low. Is a team to be rated on its September Sep-tember and October form before the blast arrived, or is it to be rated on its November showing down the stretch? In the past few weeks hundreds of good football players have been called away from teams scattered all over the national terrain. There are some good teams left. In any event the balance of power is more evenly distributed. Army and Navy are able to complete com-plete their season without any deficits def-icits in material. We are not yet certain whether there will be further shifts from time to time, extending through December. De-cember. This, of course, would throw the various bowl situations into something some-thing approaching a tangle, if not a turmoil. But there are still many rougher things happening in this war. All-Star Selections Those attempting to pick All-Star . or All-American combinations also find themselves wading into the quicksands. How many games would a star have to play before he could be properly named? It is certainly not the player's fault that he can't finish his football work. To help complicate matters, the waning season has been loaded with stars such backs as Daley, Bertelli, Davis, Hamburg, Steuber, Kane, Odell, Graham, McCardle, Podesto, Dark, Miller, Hirsch, Prokop, Field and others, from Duke, North Carolina, Caro-lina, Purdue, Ohio State, Dartmouth, Washington, etc. There will be no lack of fine material ma-terial from which to make selections, selec-tions, but some of these who might belong have only played in one or two big games. At least all this will help to keep the debaters busy when "the ways are heavy with mire and rut." The Old Grad has been a trifle dazed all season. Events have had him trying to face three or four directions di-rections in the same split second. For example, we have Minnesota rooters pulling hard for Daley, who helped Michigan wreck Minnesota. Under such conditions you can't very well blame the Old Grad from feeling just a bit curious in the cupola. For all of these expected and justified jus-tified handicaps it has been an interesting in-teresting season and there are still some good games on the docket before be-fore the season ends. About Bob Odell Miller, Bertelli, Davis and Daley, among others, are all great backs. Bertelli and Miller have been the most valuable pair of the year. But Bob Odell, younger brother of the Yale coach, is my pick. Odell, on the offensive side, is a fine, fast ruuner and a fine pass receiver. re-ceiver. But in addition, he is the best, or one of the best, blocking backs in the country and one of the hardest, surest sur-est tacklcrs one of the best defensive defen-sive men I've seen. |
