“DeWitt’s team beat Cornell 44-0.  For years there hung on the walls of the Osborn Club at Princeton a splendid action picture of Dana Kafer making one of the touchdowns in that game.  It was a mass on tackle play, and Jim Cooney was getting his Cornell opponent out of the way for Kafer to go over the line.  The picture gave Jim dead away.  He had a firm grip of the Cornell man’s jersey and arm.  Ten years or more afterward, a group, including Cooney, was sitting in the Osborn Club.  In a spirit of fun one man said, ’Jim, we know now how you got your reputation as a tackle.  We can see it right up there on the wall.’  The next day the picture was gone.

“After I was graduated from Princeton in 1907 I went to Merton College, Oxford.  There are twenty-two different colleges in Oxford and eighteen in Cambridge.  Each one has its own teams and crews and plays a regular schedule.  From the best of these college teams the university teams are drawn.  Each college team has a captain and a secretary, who acts as manager.  At the beginning of the college year (early October) the captain and secretary of each team go around among the freshmen of the college and try to get as many of them as possible to play their particular sport; mine Rugby football.  After a few days the captain posts on the college bulletin board, which is always placed at the Porter’s Lodge, a notice that a squash will be held on the college field.  A squash is what we would call practice.

[Illustration:  “The next day the picture was gone”

Jim Cooney Making a Hole for Dana Kafer.]

“Sometimes for a few days before the game an Old Blue may come down to Oxford and give a little coaching to the team.  Here often the captain does all the coaching.  The Cambridge match is for blood, and, while friendly enough, is likely to be much more savage than any other.  In the match I played in, which Oxford won 35-3, the record score in the whole series, which started in 1872, we had three men severely injured.  In the first three minutes of the game one of our star backs was carried off the field with a broken shoulder, while our captain was kicked 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.’”