in the
head and did not come out of his daze until about seven o'clock that
evening. He played throughout the game, however. Our secretary was off
the field with a knee cap out of place for more than half the game. A
game of Rugby, by the way, consists of two 45-minute halves, with a
three minute intermission. There are no substitutes, and if a man is
injured, his team plays one man short. We beat Cambridge that year with
thirteen men the greater part of the game, twelve for some time against
their full team of fifteen. Their only try (touchdown in plain American)
was scored when we had twelve men on the field. We were champions of
England that year, and did not lose a match through the fall season,
though we tied one game with the great Harlequins Club of London, whom
we afterward beat in the return game. Of the fine fellows who made up
that great Oxford team, six are dead, five of them 'somewhere in
France.'"
Carl Flanders was a big factor in the Yale rush line. Foster Sanford
considers him one of the greatest offensive centers that ever played. He
was six feet three and one-fourth inches tall and weighed 202 pounds.
In 1906 Flanders coached the Indian team at Carlisle. Let us see some of
the interesting things that characterize the Indian players, through
Flanders' experience.
The nicknames with which the Indians labelled each other were mostly
those of animals or a weapon of defense. Mount Pleasant and Libby always
called each other Knife. Bill Gardner was crowned Chicken Legs, Charles,
one of the halfbacks, and a regular little tiger, was called Bird Legs.
Other names fastened to the different players were Whale Bone, Shoe
String, Tommyhawk and Wolf.
The Indians always played cleanly as long as their opponents played that
way. Dillon, an old Sioux Indian, and one of the fastest guards I ever
saw, was a good example of this. If anybody started rough play, Dillon
would say:
"Stop that, boys!" and the chap who was guilty always stopped. But if
an opponent continually played dirty football, Dillon would say grimly:
"I'll get you!" On the next play or two, you'd never know how, the rough
player would be taken out. Dillon had "got" his man.
"Wallace Denny and Bemus Pierce got up a code of signals, using an
Indian word which designated a single play. Among the Indian words which
designated these signals were Water-bucket, Watehnee, Coocoohee. I never
could find out what it all meant, and following the Indian
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