Damon Runyon

Lancaster New Era/October 16, 1930

NEW YORK, Oct. 19.—I note in the public prints that today, Saturday, is to be given over to deception, and fraud, and cunning by many of our college footballers. For example, there’s Harvard and the Army.

It is related from Cambridge that the Harvard team, somewhat crippled in the vicinity of the backfield and the line, too, will depend upon divers and sundry forms of football legerdemain to lick the soldiers from up the Hudson.

From West Point comes stories that gridiron black magic, designed to keep the football hidden as much as possible, is to be employed against fair Harvard. And from other points of the compass we have tales to the same general effect that this and that team is going in strong today for mystery and sleight-o’-hand.

What I say is we ought to have more of that old fashioned public football, in which the pill is on view at all times except perhaps when the boys are piled on top of it. It seems to me that this skullduggery that is being planned for today on all sides is a bad example to the college youth. It may sow the seed of larceny in other forms. The first thing you know some of these footballers may turn out to be judges.

Ball in Full View

Personally, I like the old time football they used to have at Harvard, when no attempt was made to be surreptitious with the old leather pumpkin. In fact, they made a great public display of it in those times. They would bring it out on the field in full view of all hands, and lay it right down on the ground, where, in the haze of a pleasant fall afternoon, it would stand out like a tombstone in a wheatfield.

It was as if Harvard was saying to the enemy:

“Well, here she is, boys! Here’s the football!”

 And then all Harvard would do would be to wheel up some fellow like Charley Brickley, and scare the stuffin’ out of the boys the other side. But they didn’t hide the football–no, siree Bob! They wanted everybody to see when Charley was approaching, football in hand.

Indian Strategy

I imagine that Harvard got sick and tired of that hidden football business ‘way back yonder in the early football, football times when under his Carlisle Injun poked a football under his sweater and ran from here to Cape Cod for a touchdown in the cool o’ the evening when running was good.

In fact, as I recall hearing of the circumstances, Harvard let out an awful yip about the redskin biting the dust behind their goal posts with the football sight unseen. The Harvardian squawk became so loathsome to the football authorities that they hauled off and changed the rules, so that never again could an Injun, or anyone else, hide a football under his sweater, back of his bridgework, or in the slack of his trouserloons.

Possibly it was the Injun artfulness that nauseated Harvard with concealed football, and made open-board dealing more fashionable at Cambridge for a long spell. I am really surprised to hear that Harvard is going back to taking ’em off the bottom, and using a gimmick in its football play.

I hear talk of fake laterals, and other forms of the old phonus-ballonus around Cambridge that gives me quite a turn. ‘Tis sad to think that the shell game has reached the campus where once Eddie Mahan used to take the football, hold it aloft like Liberty’s upthrust torch, and scoodle about to touchdowns.

Mahan Was Supreme

Now, there’s a chap that always appealed to me—Eddie Mahan. I loved the publicity of his method. You didn’t have to beat about the bush with the football when Eddie was around, or sneak through the back way, or tiptoe up the alley. You just handed the football to Eddie, like a sheriff serving a subpoena, and away he went, advertising the fact that he had the football every jump. And what good did it do the opposition to know that Edward had the football, my little rah-ra’s? What good did it do ’em, I repeat?

Not a lick?

In fact, so far from doing them any good, it was more apt to do them harm. It was calculated to increase blood pressure.

Sometimes the quarterback wouldn’t even bother to call the numbers when he wanted Eddie to have the ball. He would merely announce, in the languid Harvard accent common to Harvard quarterbacks:

“Let Mr. Mahan have it.”

Football was public property in those days. You didn’t have to be clairvoyant to know what the Harvard lads are going to do with the football. To tell you the truth, it was generally known in the Summer that Mahan would be in charge of the football for the Harvards most of the Autumn.

Game Very Mysterious

Now they’ve got fake laterals, bogus formations, undercover passes and one thing and another, all tending to make the game very mysterious, indeed. I wish we could get another Mahan at Harvard (chorus from Harvard “so do we!”) that we might try a little experiment to show up the foolishness of concealed football. We would put a red lantern on the football and a siren, too, and let Eddie run with it with the horn going full blast. The clients would see that markers wouldn’t make any difference.

It ought to be a mighty mysterious pastime one way and another at Cambridge this Saturday with both Harvard and the Army going in for the now-you-see-it-and-now-you-don’t stuff. There is grave danger that they will both be hiding the football so much that they will lose it entirely. You can’t play a football. you know.

Still, come to think of it, I have seen some Harvard football teams do that, too. Of course they were not teams that included Eddie Mahan. They were teams before and after his time. I have seen these  Harvard teams play entire football games without a football.

The reason they did not have a football during these games was because the other team had it all the time.