from blowing it to
pieces with non-eligibility notices. There was something diabolical
about that Faculty when it was wrestling with the athletic problem. It
wasn't human. It was like Mount Etna. You never could tell just when it
would stop being lovely and quiet, and scatter ruin all over the
vicinity.

Its idea of regulating athletics at Siwash was to think up excuses for
flunking every man who weighed over one hundred and fifty-five and could
have his toes stepped on without saying "Ouch!" And it never got the
excuses thought up until the night before the most important games. The
Faculty pretended to be as bland and innocent as Mary's lamb, but no one
can ever tell me it didn't know what it was about. Men have to have real
genius to think up the things it did. You couldn't do it accidentally.
When a Siwash Faculty could moon along happily all fall until
twenty-four hours before the Kiowa game and then discover with regret
that our two-hundred-and-twenty-pound center had misspelled three words
in an examination paper the year before; that our two-hundred-pound
backs didn't put enough rear-end collisions into their words when they
read French; and that Ole Skjarsen read Latin with a Norwegian accent
and was therefore too big an ignoramus to play football, I decline to be
fooled. I never was fooled. Neither was Keg Rearick. But that is
hurdling about three chapters.

Honestly, we used to spend one day out of six building up our football
team and the other five defending it from the Faculty. It positively
hungered for a bite out of the line-up. It had us helpless. If we didn't
like the way it ran things we could take our happy young college life up
by the roots and transplant it to some other school, where the football
team moved around the field like a parade. Theoretically the Faculty
could sit around and take our best players off the team, as fast as we
developed them, for non-attention to studies. But, as a matter of fact,
it wasn't an easy matter. It beats all how early in the morning you have
to get up to get ahead of college lads who have got it into their heads
that the world will gum up on its axle and stop dead still if their
innocent little pleasures are interfered with.

I remember the fall that the Faculty decided Miller couldn't play
because he hadn't attended chapel quite persistently enough the spring
before. Miller was our center and as important to the team that year as
the mainspring of a watch. T