“A word about the Princeton men who were playing during my four years at college.

“Irvine was a fine steady player and his success at Mercersburg is in keeping with the promise shown in his football days.

“Hector Cowan played against me three years at guard and he fully deserved the great reputation he had at that time in every particular of the game, including running with the ball.

“George was one of the very best center rushes I have ever seen and probably would have made a great player elsewhere along the line if he had been relieved from the obscuring effect of playing center at the time a center had no particular opportunity to show his ability.

“Snake Ames for some reason was never able to do anything against the Yale team during the time I was playing, but his work in some later games that I saw and in which I officiated, convinced me that he was worthy of his nickname, because there are only a few men who are able to wind their way through an entire field of opponents with as much celerity and effect as Ames would display time after time.

“In the fall of ’86 Yale beat Harvard 29 to 4, with great ease, and if it had not been for injuries to Yale players, could probably have made it 50 or 60 to 0.  Most of the Yale players came out of the game with very disgraceful marks of the roughness of the Harvard men.  I had a badly broken nose from an intentional blow.  George Carter had a cut requiring eight stitches above his eye.  The tackle next to me had a face which was pounded black and blue all over.  To the credit of the Harvard men I will say that they came to the box at the theater that night occupied by the Yale team and apologized for what they had done, stating that they had been coached to play in that way and that they would never again allow anybody to coach who would try to have the Harvard players use intentionally unfair roughness.

“When I entered Pennsylvania I found a more or less happy-go-lucky brilliant man, Arthur Knipe, who was not considered fully worthy of being on even the Pennsylvania teams of those days, namely:  teams that were being beaten 60 or 70 to 0 by Yale, Harvard and Princeton.  I succeeded in arousing the interest of Knipe, and although in my mind he never, during his active membership of the Pennsylvania team, came up to 75 per cent. of his true playing value, he was, even so, undoubtedly the peer of any man that ever played football.  Knipe was brilliant but careless, and was at once the joy and despair of any coach who took an interest in his men.  He captained the 1894 Pennsylvania team with which I sprung the ‘guards back’ and ‘short end defense.’

“Jack Minds I remember seeing, in 1893, standing around on the field as a member of the second or third scrub teams.  I suppose he would not have been invited to preliminary training except for his own courage and pertinacity which caused him to demand to be taken.  With no thought that he could possibly make the team I gradually found myself using him in 1894, until he was a fixture at tackle, although he dodged the scales throughout the entire fall in order that I might not know that he only weighed 162 pounds.