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Show I BY J. B. SHERLDAX. ' ""Si 7" AR r no "n'ar American boys f? arc kicking that football ) " around. A largo nuniDcr I. of footballs sent to tho boys In Frcnce i will give tbe coddled American soldier something to kick about For football Is the great fall game. Having played all sorts of football, Gaelic, soccer, English and American rugby, and some denatured games ' framed for tender kids in private ; schools, I have always loved football. Not that I keep well posted on the ; game nowadays and know the merits i i of the individual players or Individual 1 coaches or systom. Yet I daresay I can choose .an all-Amcrican team as well as the next man who has not seen, ', and cannot possibly see, all the good ' ! players in the United States. I know ! who wins tho big games and I have i ' seen a lot of them, ana In &" general I1 way I keep posted on the games, though far-from being a "bug on dope" or figures on any kind of sport But I have rubbed against athletes ana studied them for almost forty years and I should know a littlo about what Ifl constitutes a good man at any game, 'I a good horse, a good dog of any sort and a good game. Having played about seven varie-i varie-i ties of football from 18S1 to 1896. ) among them American rugby, I can 1 ! say that I would profer to play Amer-; Amer-; i lean rugby when at my best, In best 1 physloal condition, and that I deem H soccer by far tho best game from the I j m point of developing tho Individual and ' "fj producing tho sort of a man America H wants for any lino of business. English Ifi rugby is to my mind a better game to H watch and produces a better type of ! athlete than American rugby. As a H spectacle English rugby seems to be best of all, with soccer second. Ameri-IdJ Ameri-IdJ can rugby is not, I think, a good game ill to watch, but is a dandy game for a III! young, strong man, good and fit, to jjjl play. It is about the closest thing to til trench fighting we know or anyone I II else knows. The personal contact III which some boys love is strong in Ijj American rugby. j The Earliest Gome. H ' Football was, I believe, originally a Hi game wherein the ball was kicked, not carried, though there were no set rules " ml governing the sport. "Wo go back to the days of James I. of England for I ' llll our football history. Entire parishes ' till opposed each other, hundreds of men nil to a side, and, If we get it straight, the Hlj ball was kicked several miles between nil goals in the fashion of some of these fill I cross-country golf matches. That is fljj football tradition. l James I. did not like the sport and ill I Issued orders against playing it be-; be-; ill cause, he said, it kept the young men ' llll from pursuing archery, a sport which 'ajjf was useful in the way of training men wll t0 other men. Just as Gen, Bern-' Bern-' 01 1 hardi. in his famous book, "Germany jiHI and the Next War," adjures the youth Tilt' of Gcrmany not t0 imitate their" blood j rjjf relations, the Anglo-Saxons in pursuit 111 o outdoor 3Prt "lest it should wean X I 81 them away from the true science of ; Of .manslaughter, so James r., a Gael, or-X. or-X. U dcred young men to not play football : I llj lest it should wean them away rrom learning the gentle art of man-killing nil' with a bow and arrow. Which snows A ! 115 that Proper study of kings is 2 1 III killing men. I f Somehow football flourished in Eng- 3 III land, but the next wc hear of it is a ."J I . great boost (written no doubt by some "nil football enthusiast) by the Duke of -" I Wellington about Waterloo having 1 1 j been won on the football fields of Eton. c Jill It Is most improbable that the great j soldier said any such thing. Great eol-' eol-' 1 1 diers and statesmen are happy in hav-sjj hav-sjj fl II lS famous sayings put into their h'H 12 mouths. If Napoleon could have said ji II halt the brilliant things attributed to ;y j blm he would have delivered a death less epigram every minute of tho twenty-four hours, sleeping or waking. It woujd be ridiculous to say that tho field of Waterloo was won on tho football foot-ball fields of Eton, for the Germans under Bluchor holpcdvin that field, and the Germans of that day know not football. Then, not one In every 1,000 of the English who fought at Waterloo ever saw Eton. The French and Germans and Russians Rus-sians did not know football, and they won some famous fields. The Japanese Jap-anese never saw a football. Yet they have been great soldiers. The chief merit of the oplgram manufactured man-ufactured and put in the mouth of the great duke Is valuablo in that it "dates" football for us. It was played in the great English schools about 1800. That game was then, as now, what we know as English rugby. Camo lo U. S. by Way of Canada. "Tom Brown's School Days" dates it properly for us, about the 40s. From "Tom Brown" we know just what football foot-ball was at Rugby in tho middle of the nineteenth century. That brings it down to the United States. Tho game camo to Canada before it camo to tho United States. Yale car rlcd It across tho lino as recently as 1872 or 1873. It was still the plain, unadulterated game known as "English "Eng-lish rugby," tho chief rule of which was that "offside" was a mortal sin. They played this sort or game In the New England colleges for some time. Then tho American desire to win interjected in-terjected itself and, to my mind, spoiled rugby football. The cardinal crime of the men who worked out the machine play of the game was making "offside" plays, tnat is, permitting members of tho team that possessed the ball to run ahead of the man carrying tho leather and to push would-bo tacklers out of the way. When Walter Camp and his associates associ-ates permitted interference to become legal or quasi-legal, they hurt a very splendid game for these reasons: 1. Made It impossible for play by any but highly trained and thoroughly thorough-ly organized teams. Spoiled it for the use of the average young man of business. busi-ness. 2. Removing it from the sphere of International competition by making It a special game, full of tactical plays, such as are not practiced by players in any other cduntry. By specializing tho game chances for matches Avlth British, Canadian, South African and Australian teams have been lost 3. Making the game instead of a healthy all-winter exerciso, for all sorts of young men, a mere six weeks' college spaBm for specially trained gladiators. 4. Forcing competition which brought about tho recruiting scandals which were a moral blot on tho records of great American colleges and which are prevented today only by ironclad rules, which cry aloud that the athletic ath-letic departments of American colleges col-leges are without honor and can bo kept in lfno only by law. Poor Game for Spectator. I freely admit that I round American Rugby a pleasant gamo to play. There is, or was twenty-five years ago, enough personal contact in it to please tho fighting instinct of tho strong young man whoso body cried for action. I have always deemed it a poor game for tho spectator and a poor sort of game all around, for it is really not a game so much as a spasm like a canrush, something which has long been out of fashion in colleges. But American Rugby is not a game of football. It has for yeas merely been a product of the study, designed as pos-slblevto pos-slblevto enable the best team, which then was Yale, to win. Ed Cochems, a very great football man, (a great player at Wisconsin, four years an all-Western end and afterward aft-erward a really great coach in the first years of that foo.tball monstrosity, the forward pass which ho developed beyond be-yond all reason was wont to hold that football was a special gamo made for beef, for tho big man who was not fast enough to excel in other games, iz sloth of foot needs a game to develop it, I have no word to say. American Rugby, with its heavy men and its pads and guards and harness, Is a slow game, indeed. 4 I have always held Its sloth against American Rugby. I cannot sec the sense in handicapping speed by loading load-ing it down with armor. Yet speed has no choice. If a fast man of 1G0 poundB, the ideal football player, must armor himself to oppose "tanks" of 260, therefore the entire speed of tho game Is taken away from it. Fielding Yost, tho great coach of Michigan, anc Glenn Warner of Pittsburg have taken this position. Itacc Horse to n Dump Cart. To my mind, English Rugby and soccer soc-cer are more useful games than American Amer-ican Rugby, for tho reason that they can be played all the winter round by tho average young clerk, mechanic and student, and because they offer opportunity oppor-tunity for great speed of foot Tho uniform worn by the soccer and Rugby player Is that of a sprinter, the shoes being somewhat heavier, the knees bare. A man can movo In clothes of that kind. The American Rugby calls ' for helmets, shoulder guards, thigh guards, knee guards, shin guards and nose guards, with very heavy shoes, weight over all being 40 pounds. I played American Rugby before tho days of tho helmets, shoulder pieces, etc., without even a nose guard, and took some fun out of It A man couia speed in canvas knickerbockers and light shoes. T had knickerbockers made without padding. I found those supplied by tho big sporting outfitters mmmm' Ik to bo too heavy, too clumsy, too cumbersome cum-bersome for speed. Fitting a fast man to play a game of American Rugby Is like hitching a' thoroughbred horse to a dump cart and then putting him in a race. English Rugby is a pretty game, tho samo light running knickers as in soccer, soc-cer, a light Jersey and light shoes, and thero you are. Men of speed can move in the English games. Men of speed are reduced to that of "tanks" in the American gamo. They are harnessed until they lose all speed and then merely "caterpillar" their way over weaker opponents. I shall always beliovo that Walter Camp, the "Father of College Rugby," twice destroyed tho original gamo: first when ho took "offside" out of the list of forbidden plays, second when he tried to rectify his initial mistake by Introducing another offside play, the forward pass, which is destructive destruc-tive of all true football. "Offside," which obliges the players of the possessive side not to precede the man carrying the ball, is the very soul of football. If you have no rule against offside, which American Rugby has not got, what happens? The men of the sido possessing the ball precede tho man carrying it, thus forming the famous illegal, illogical and ill-looking interference, the bane of American Rugby. If you observo the offside rule as the English and all other peoples save American college boys do, what happens? hap-pens? You must advanco the ball, not by rushing over the top of opponents by sheer strength, but by passing the ball from hand to hand, dodging, kicking, speed all the pretty parts of football. The effect of Mr. Camp's hand on Rugby football has been to largely eliminate all these desirable things, to slow up the game, to spoil it for tho spectator, and what is much worse, to make it impossible for the average healthy young man to play it as he plays baseball, once a week, as thousands thou-sands of young men play soccer and English Rugby.' Soccer is Growing. Of course it may be said that English rugby or Boccer can and should flourish flour-ish outside of the colleges. It is true that soccer has taken a hold and Is growing, but the attention given American Amer-ican Rugby is onablcd to choke tho growth of pure rugby and of soccer. It is from tho colleges that most of our American sports spring. Baseball sprang from the colleges. That Is natural, that it should so spring. Colleges Col-leges are or should' be fountains of thought, new ideas, development of ideas. Golf was originally a game played by the lonely shepherd to pass' time.. Yet It was developed and made famous by St Andrews University. So I think that rugby might very well have been let alone instead of being be-ing improved until It was almost de- i stroyed by Mr. Camp. Had Mr. Camp i not been so eager to have Yalo win that he destroyed the offside and for- ward pass rules wc might be playing international matches with tho world Instead of being obliged to confine oatf 1 big football games to college campi. K That Camp's destruction of tho off- 1 side rule almost destroyed football 13 V mado plain by tho reformation of tho V game In 1906, oddly enough by the very Jj man who had brought it into such a Wf condition that even tho president of ljBs3r the United States, Theodore Roosevolt, led the demand for its reform. Camp W was chosen to fetch it out of the woods M into which ho had led it Perhaps the 1 1 choice was a wis one. Camp had got 5 a football into a sad mess. Who better than tho man who got it into the woodB to get it out of tho woods? I So Camp, who had "jammed" tho game with his abolition of "offside," I which created "interference" which I caused injuries and brought up all tho w row, re-reformed it by destroying the rule which for ages had properly pro- I vlded that the ball should not be H passed forward. OB The forward pass is an anachronism V i as fearful a thing as interference. It v makes basket ball of football, but it 'has opened up the gamo which waa J ,V' jammed by Mr. Camp's original de- structlon of the offside rule. The for- I ward pass and the rulo which forbade j more than a certain number of men Vaaf to go behind tho lino of scrimmage re- jjj duccd the beef of the players and, speeded up the game. , Forward Passing Hideous. American Rugby had become more j! sightly, better for the spectators' point J of view, but in tho eye of the true lov- '"'I or of football It was far from being J the unspoiled game it was before Camp W undertook to make Yale annual cham pion of American colleges, first gerry- M manderlng the rules so that the best I team, in weight and training, was sura 1 to win and then seeing to It that Yale; 1 had the most beef and tho best drill. But forward passing will always Doi 1 - .j to my mind a hideous thing, though I f 1 & saw the greatest forward pass ever f made, 'by Cochems' teams in St Louis ( & kjfc in 1906-07, when a 50-yard throw was 1 jj common as clay on tho gridiron, and I have seen thoso masters, Yost and Warner, work the play beautifully. Ai Mr. Camp's game of football set '-y.. jpffi greatest store on possession of the ball. So long as you had the ball you I could advanco slowly, it is true, and 1 the old Yale grind was for 1 yaraa 1 to the down. Any system that guaran- I teed Yale 1 1-3 yards to the down waa J perfect, even though spectators never m saw the ball or knew which player was carrying it, or who stopped the play. I Ajncrlcan Rugby 'in those days, the 1 "T- middle 90s, was mostly camouflage, 1 liiding the ball, and your motion from I jvcryone, including the spectators. Jj 1 H i ifi a P |