“Listen my children and you shall hear
    Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, etc.”

Though my brother is a small man, I thought all other Princeton players must be 9 cubits and a half, or as a reporter once said of Symmes ’92, center rush in Princeton team of ’90 and ’91, “An animated whale, broad as the moral law and heavy as the hand of fate.”  I consider Alex Moffat the greatest goal kicker college football has produced.  One football in the Princeton Trophy room has on it, “Princeton 26, Harvard 7.”  In that game Moffat kicked five goals from the field, three with his right and two with his left foot, besides the goals from the touchdowns.

A Harvard guard made the remark after the third goal, “We came here to play football, not to play against phenomenal kicking.”

Princeton men cannot help feeling that Moffat should have been allowed a goal against Yale in his Post-graduate year of ’84, which was called before the full halves had been played and decided a draw, Yale being ahead, 6 to 4.  Princeton claimed it but the Referee said he didn’t see it, which caused Moffat to exclaim—­something.

An amusing story is told in connection with this decision.  Quite a number of years after Jim Robinson who was trainer of the Princeton team in ’84, went down to the dock to see his brother off for Europe.  Looking up he beheld on the deck above, the man who had refereed the ’84 game, and whom he had not seen since, “Smith,” he said, “I have a brother on this boat, but I hope she sinks.”

Tilly Lamar’s name is highly honored at Princeton, not only because he won the ’85 game against Yale by a run of about 90 yards, but because he died trying to save a girl from drowning.  Only a few months later, in the summer of ’91, Fred Brokaw ’92, was drowned at Elberon while trying to save two girls from the ocean.  Both Lamar and Brokaw’s pictures adorn the walls of the Varsity Club House.

The first game I ever saw the Princeton Team play was with Harvard in ’88, which the former won 18 to 6.  I was in my brother’s (’91) room about three hours and a half before the game, and Jere Black and Channing, the halfbacks, were there.  As Channing left he remarked, “Something will have happened before I get back to this room again,” referring to the game, which doubtless made him a bit nervous.

I believe he was no more nervous ten years after, when in the Rough Riders he waited for word to advance up that bullet swept hill before Santiago.

’81 was the year so many Divinity students played on the Varsity:  Hector Cowan the great tackle, Dick Hodge the strategist, Sam Hodge, Bob Speer, and I think Irvine; men all, who as McCready Sykes said, “Feared God and no one else.”  Hector Cowan is considered one of the best tackles that ever wore the Orange and Black jersey.  While rough, he was never a dirty player.

In a game with Wesleyan, his opponent cried out angrily, “Keep your hands for pounding on your Bible, don’t be sticking them in my face.”  One day in a game against the Scrub, Cowan had passed everyone except the fullback and was bearing down on him like a tornado, when within a few feet of the fullback the latter jumped aside and said politely, “Pass on, sir, pass on.”  Cowan played on two winning teams, ’85 and ’89.