Fight, Men!

The football player is not permitted to take any big game casually. Emotionalizing his men is accepted by the coach as a necessary part of his functions.

I've always wanted to get an exact transcript of the parting words of a head coach to his men or his subsequent speech between the halves. I do know one but it was delivered to the squad of a comparatively small college. Just before the North Carolina eleven took the gridiron against Harvard their coach said to his players, "I want you boys to remember that every man on the Harvard team is a Republican."

But in this case oratory failed. The game was a conventional Republican landslide.

More effective was an address delivered to another Southern team which invaded the North. On this occasion the coach relinquished his privilege of providing the last words and called an old gentleman into the locker room. And the voice of the veteran rang out like a trumpet call. He spoke of the Civil War and of how the South had held the Yankees back four years. There was a line not to be split by any Yankee plunger. And the sons of Rebs could do it again. The old man called on the excited youngsters to remember Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. They remembered and played gloriously but later there was hard feeling, for the discovery was made that the old man had never served with any of the great commanders whom he mentioned but had actually marched with Sherman from Atlanta to the Sea. Heywood Brown.   June Harper's Monthly.