FOOTBALL DAYS.

Putaruru Press, Volume VII, Issue 314, 14 November 1929, Page 3

FOOTBALL DAYS.

STRENUOUS U.S.A. GAME. Hard Knocks for College Boys. (Contributed) The hazardous nature of American football is emphasised every year by alarming reports of football casualties that come from the land of the Stars and Stripes about this time of the year. For instance, in November; 1927, a cable message from New York announced that 17 young men were killed and 100 suffered major injuries during the college football season just ended. “ This game, which is avowedly one of the roughest, claims annually a large number of casualties,” said the cable man. “ Eight were killed and 280 injured in 1926; and 20 were killed and 100 injured in 1925.”

Figures like those speak for themselves. Perhaps other national games take their toll of athletes, but no one seems to have calculated how many Rugby enthusiasts expire in New Zealand, or how many golfers die of astonishment after holing out. in one. The figures would be worth cabling over to America to advertise this Dominion.

Recent motion pictures of strenuous college life have made all the rest of the world more or less familiar with the American version—or travesty—of football. The college hero who wins the game in the last second is a role in which many wellgroomed leading men have won fame and admiration. In real life American football is a game for redblooded men, who have not omitted to insure their lives. A Short and Merry Season. The season lasts only through Oc-

I tober and November, with an occa- | ional game in December. One of the chief manoeuvres of the game is shoulder to shoulder charging by players, one side carrying the ball to the other’s goal. This is not a manoeuvre that calls for any beg-par-dons. To tackle a man who has got the ball is the height of unsportsmanship in British codes of football, but it is a legitimate move in the American game. Obstruction of the sort that brings a harvest of free kicks and penalty tries in New Zealand is all in the game over there.

“ The dead this year ranged between 15 and 22 years in age,” said the cable message of two years ago. This was no doubt due to the fact that American football is played chiefly in colleges and high schools, the rest of Americans apparently being too busy looking on from the sidelines. It has always been emphasised that the percentage of casualties is low in view of the gigantic scale on which the game is played throughout the country. It must never be forgotten that there are over 100,000,000 people in the United States, and so accidents and tragedies must total much more than in smaller countries. After all, American football with its score or so of victims looks like a drop in the ocean compared with the tens of thousands of victims of American automobiles, or the equally impressive list of victims of murder. Nevertheless the annual announcement of football casualties has resulted in public protests, and it is claimed that .here has been a beneficial modification of the rules, principally. , for the purpose of eliminating injuries. Rough Play in Verse.

Visions of footballers en route to the hospitals must have coloured the imagination of the author of the following verses which were published in a Chicago paper:—

The football days have come again, the gladdest of the year; One side of Willie’s nose is gone, and Tom has lost an ear; Heaped on the field, the players jab, and punch and claw and tear, They knock the breath from those beneath, and gouge without a care; They break each other’s , arms and legs, and pull joints out of place, And here and there is one who gets his teeth kicked from his face. The freshman and the sophomore, besmeared with grime and mud, . Go gallantly to get the ball, and quit all bathed in blood; The senior knocks the junior down, i and kicks him in the chest, ! The high school boy is carried home j and gently laid at rest, While here and there a crowded I stand collapses ’neath its weight, And forty people get more than they I paid for at the gate. I O brave, O happy, careless days ! How deen the mother’s joy What time she thinks of all the

things they’re doing to her hoy ! [ How proud she is to know that he is on the team; how sweet His face appears to her since it is only blood-stained meat! With honest pride she lays away his amputated ear And puts his eye in alcohol, to be a souvenir. Freshmen, sophomore, junior and senior are the terms given to fifst, j second, third and fourth year stud- . ents at American colleges. [ So much for football as played lin America. Needless to say, the series of newspaper poets do not quench the enthusiasm of American | players. Big universities may get as I much as a million dollars as gate reI ceipts from their well-patronised I matches. Some New Zealanders will 1 think the description penned by the Chicago poet might be applied to football in other lands, but hard , knocks do not seem to reduce the ' numbers or ardour of would be All Blacks.