g a man that a
dill pickle would make a better guard than he is, and of making that man
so jealous of the pickle that he will perform perfectly unreasonable
feats for a week to beat it out for the place. He has a way of saying
"Hurry up," with a few descriptive adjectives tacked on, that makes a
man rub himself in the stung place for an hour; and oh, how mad he can
make you while he is telling you pleasantly that while the little fellow
playing against you is only a prep and has sloping shoulders and weighs
one hundred and eleven stripped, he is making you look like a bale of
hay that has been dumped by mistake on an athletic field. And when he
gets a team in the gymnasium between halves, with the game going wrong,
and stands up before them and sizes up their insect nerve and rubber
backbone and hereditary awkwardness and incredible talent in doing the
wrong thing, to say nothing of describing each individual blunder in
that queer nasal clack of his--well, I'd rather be tied up in a great
big frying-pan over a good hot stove for the same length of time, any
day in the week. The reason Bost is a great coach is because his men
don't dare play poorly. When they do he talks to them. If he would only
hit them, or skin them by inches, or shoot at them, they wouldn't mind
it so much; but when you get on the field with him and realize that if
you miss a tackle he is going to get you out before the whole gang and
tell you what a great mistake the Creator made when He put joints in
your arms instead of letting them stick out stiff as they do any other
signpost, you're not going to miss that tackle, that's all.

When Bost came to Siwash he succeeded a line of coaches who had been
telling the fellows to get down low and hit the line hard, and had been
showing them how to do it very patiently. Nice fellows, those coaches.
Perfect gentlemen. Make you proud to associate with them. They could
take a herd of green farmer boys, with wrists like mules' ankles, and by
Thanksgiving they would have them familiar with all the rudiments of the
game. By that time the season would be over and all the schools in the
vicinity would have beaten us by big scores. The next year the last
year's crop of big farmer boys would stay at home to husk corn, and the
coach would begin all over on a new crop. The result was, we were a dub
school at football. Any school that could scare up a good rangy halfback
and a line that could hold sheep could get up an add