! Why didn't you say you'd tried it? Ain't so easy, is it?
Especially after the tenth time!

Can you imagine what sort of an end a guy with a powerful grip could
make? Can you figure what would happen to a football if "Butter
Fingers" ever laid his grapplers on it? And can you picture a runner
trying to get away from a tackle by a bird like "Rus"? A fly might as
well try to pull its feet off a sheet of sticky fly paper as a runner
to jerk loose from "Butter Fingers" once he's got him.

Would you like to hear how "Butter Fingers" won his undying fame? Have
I got the time? No, but I'll take time. This story's worth it!

Just make yourself as comfortable as possible. You'd better sit on the
edge of your chair, though, because that's where you'll be before very
long anyway. And I'll start right in at the beginning so you won't
miss any of the picture.

First, you got to get a close-up of this fellow, "Rus" Lindley. He's
the kind they describe in the movies as "Oliver, who takes everything
seriously--including football." Before any of the guys nicknamed him
"Butter Fingers," "Rus" was just an ordinary, awkward candidate for the
team ... but while he was picking up bumps in practice he was likewise
putting on bumps of knowledge. "Rus" had one of them scientific slants
of mind and he always had to figure why he was supposed to do a certain
thing a certain way. Once he'd found out the reason he was satisfied.
Professor Tweedy, our "math" teacher, used to say that "Rus" was a
"natural born thinker." But geometry and trigonometry weren't the only
subjects that "Rus" approached from all angles. He used his bean at
all times and places.

That's why, when "Rus" went out for football, he felt called upon to
exercise his gray matter. It was perfectly obvious to him, for
instance, after a careful study of the rudiments of the game, that the
weather might seriously alter one's style of play.

"Take the difference between a dry field and a wet field," he says to
me, one afternoon, "I'm surprised the coach doesn't make us practice
with a wet ball and the field soaked down. The almanac indicates rain
three Saturdays this fall and the signs couldn't be any worse for
torrential precipitation on the Saturday we play Edgewood. What's that
going to mean? Simply that the luckiest team wins! But if the coach
used the little mechanism inside his bean it might mean that the
_smartest team_ would win. What made Napoleon g