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Show SPK VyERE the old timers in football " a bit tougher than the modern crowd when it comes to durability? It might be. On Yale's 1889 team. Pudge Heffelfinger was still playing good football at the age of 65. He "srfi starred in a pro t game for 58 min- : Jj utes at the age of 53. S A few nights ago R -la J Wayne Johnson gave . M a small dinner to ' another old timer Ji i by the name of Shep r Homans. Shep Ho- W mans was Snake ...JasSJ Ames' substitute at Grantland Rice Princeton in 1889. Shep never got to play a minute that year. In 1890 and 1891, Homans, weighing weigh-ing 165 pounds, never gave his substitute sub-stitute a chance to. get in any game. Shep played the full 90 minutes for two successive years as the Tigers' fullback. How good was Homans? Well, he made Walter Camp's All-America both seasons. At the age of 71, he is still just warming up as far as durability goes; although he has cut down his golfing pace to 36 holes a day. There was one big difference. In those days Yale, Harvard, and Princeton only had two hard games a year in their own circle. Today seven or eight tough games is a general average. Winning Sires The conversation among the horsemen at .Belmont switched to 1 the ages of winning sires recently. Some one brought up the point that The Porter, at the age of 28, still had a winning colt in Alorter who recently snipped off a rich stake. Also that The Porter had a grandson grand-son running by the name of Dart-away Dart-away who had worked out a mile in 1:34,45. There is Man o' War still producing produc-ing winning colts and Big Red is now 26 years old. Kingston at the age of 26 was the proud father of the star entry Novelty. By this time the autumn air at Belmont was replete with debates concerning the age where sires turned out their best colts. John Partridge, with more than 40 years experience to back him up in the training game, named the winning average between 8 and 15. Ben Jones and Maxie Hirsch disagreed dis-agreed slightly. "It might be from 6 to 24," Ben Jones said. "Nobody can tell. Man o' War, who is over 26, might yet give the racing game a son . or daughter who would be hard to beat." "Why don't they say something about the greatest dams?" John Partridge asked. "What about them?" I put in. "It's an entirely different proposi-. tion," Partridge said. "I'll tell you a story about that. I've always believed be-lieved that fast, winning mares seldom sel-dom produced a winning offspring. I'd rather have the strong, sturdy type that haven't run too much or too fast. "Now here's the story. Years ago I had to make a trip to the famous Mayo clinic at Rochester, Minn., for a check up. "Dr. Mayo kept me there for two months. All we talked about was horses. I gave him my idea about the best type of mares. He agreed with me. " 'It's just the same,' he said, 'on the human side. With few exceptions, excep-tions, athletic women seldom produce pro-duce champions in sport. It is a matter of being over-muscled and also the exhaustion Of energy in training and competition." The Check - Up The final checkup shows that John Partridge and Dr. Mayo are right. May Sutton Bundy's daughter was a good tennis player, but not a champion. At the moment I can't recall a woman star in sport who had cither a son or a daughter in the upper brackets of competition. There must be a few. But their names escape me. There was certainly no athletic ath-letic prominence attached to the mothers of Babe Ruth, Jim Thorpe, Ty Cobb, Bobby Jones, Helen Wills, Patty Berg, Babe Didrikson, Bronko Nagurski, Glenna Collett, Joe Louis, Gene Tunney and many others oth-ers known to headline fame. There have been a few exceptions on the male side but not many. Ty Cobb had no son interested in either baseball or football Practically Practi-cally none of the top stars of today had mothers or fathers who were even close to being champions. As a great competitor, Man o' War still has the record when it comes to producing winning progeny. To keep the argument moving along on the human side, I can't recall, re-call, outside of Jake Schacfcr Sr. and Jr. in billiards, where any combination com-bination of father and son, father and daughter, mother and son or mother and daughter were both chamoions. |