He may have earned his college letter or received a championship gold football.  And now that he is out in the world he longs for the college degree that he has forfeited.

His regrets are the deeper when he realizes that if he had given his best and been square with his college and himself, his presence might have meant further victories for his team.  This is not confined to any one college.  It is true of all of them and probably always will be true, although it is encouraging to note that there is a higher standard of scholarship attained on the average by college athletes to-day than a decade or so ago.

I wish I could impress this lesson indelibly upon the mind of every young football enthusiast—­that athletics should go hand in hand with college duties.  After all it is the same spirit of team work instilled into him on the football field that should inspire him in the classroom, where his teacher becomes virtually his coach.

When I was at Princeton, we beat Yale three years out of the four, but the defeat of 1897 at New Haven stands out most vividly of all in my memory.  And it is not so much what Yale did as what Princeton did not do that haunts me.

One day in practice in 1897, Sport Armstrong, conceded to be one of the greatest guards playing, was severely injured in a scrimmage.  It was found that his neck and head had become twisted and for days he lay at death’s door on his bed in the Varsity Club House.  After a long serious illness he got well, but never strong enough to play again.  I took his place.

[Illustration: 

Benjamin Brown McBride Cadwalader Corwin
Hazen Hall Rodgers Chamberlin Chadwick Dudley
De Saulles

Jim Rodgers’ team]

Nearly all of the star players of the ’96 Princeton championship team were in the lineup.  It was Cochran’s last year and my first year on the Varsity.  Our team was heralded as a three-to-one winner.  We had beaten Dartmouth 30 to 0 and won a great 57 to 0 victory over Lafayette.  Yale had a good, strong team that had not yet found itself.  But there were several of us Princeton players who knew from old association in prep. school the calibre of some of the men we were facing.

Cochran and I have often recalled together that silent reunion with our old team-mates of Lawrenceville.  There in front of us on the Yale team were Charlie de Saulles, George Cadwalader and Charlie Dudley.  We had not seen them since we all left prep. school, they to go to New Haven and we to Princeton.

When the teams lined up for combat there were no greetings of one old schoolmate to another.  It was not the time nor place for exchange of amenities.  As some one has since remarked, “The town was full of strangers.”

The fact that Dudley was wearing one Lawrenceville stocking only urged us on to play harder.