Sport: Tsar

Professional football was once a joke. It is now a riddle. Last week in Manhattan met the various Tsars of this sport to debate on future plans, regulations. Their talk was backed by a history and menaced by a mountain.

The history is the history of professional football from its beginnings on various sandlots long ago to its sudden rise to eminence behind the weaving hips of Harold (“Red”) Grange. Men took money for playing football before there were any “professionals.” There were no professionals because there were no amateurs. One does not speak of a professional plumber. One does not point out as exceptional a boilermaker who accepts money for his labors. And the first professional football players were plumbers, boilermakers, who received wages simultaneously for their plumbing, their boiler-making, and their playing. Factories had their teams, mill towns and vinegar works were advertised as much by the efficiency of their elevens as the excellence of their wares. Sometimes these teams “bought” college players with big reputations to strengthen their lineups; sometimes they developed players who were afterwards “bought” by colleges. It was common practice for the big universities then, as it is for the smaller ones still, to entice able players to enroll as undergraduates, and spend six or seven years, to be graduated at length with a Bachelor’s degree awarded, presumably for prowess in Sacred Studies and Botany. But before the birth of the Twentieth Century the universities began to organize, to make treaties with one another; football, already moderately standardized, became a science as rigid as modern warfare, and paid players became professionals.

Now these professionals are combined into organizations analogous to those of baseball. Thus, there is a National League and an American League. The National League is the older, contains 24 Clubs, a number obviously unwieldy. This year is the first of the American League, which is composed of nine clubs only.

The League made rules. No college player could play professionally until his class had graduated from college. As for money, visiting teams are to receive some 32%, of gross receipts, the remainder to be apportioned between the home team owners and players with a sort of bonus for high ranking at the end of the season. The football League rules are identical with those of the respective baseball Leagues save that the word “football” is substituted for “baseball” throughout. And as its overlord, sits a man whose mountainous bulk overhung last week’s conference— William Hanford (“Big Bill”) Edwards, the Peter Pan of Princeton.

“I have taken this job … to help preserve high-class football as it is played in colleges . . . a clean, red-blooded sport . . . great character-builder. . . .”

Thus Mr. Edwards, his dewlap trembling with earnestness, announced to newspaper men on his assumption of the Presidency of the Professional Football League., His position obviously, is authoritative. His salary is $25,000 a year, his term of office three years; he is to football what Will H. Hays is to the cinema, Judge Landis to professional baseball. The reporters, in their stories, spoke of him as “spectacular.”

All his life that word has been applied to William Hanford Edwards. He weighs 300 pounds. He can get into a lower berth but not behind the wheel of an automobile. He always sits on the aisle at the theatre. He can use ready-made handerchiefs. He once saved the life of onetime (1910-13) Mayor William G. Gaynor of New York. He is said to have been the fastest big man that ever played football at Princeton.

When William Edwards was very young a physician, examining him, declared that he was “spectacular.”

“In what respect, Doctor?” inquired a relative gazing anxiously at the pink muddle on the bed.

“For his puniness,” answered the practitioner.

The doctor spoke sincerely. Mr. Edwards at that time had hollow flanks. The thinness of his arms was hardly compensated for by the unhappy protuberance of his abdomen. A course at the Manlius Military School, however, so far improved him that he weighed 217 pounds before he went away to school at Lawrenceville. He became the idol of his fellows. Second formers stuffed pillows under their coats in order to resemble him. He was bulky then, but hard, and quick afoot. He entered Princeton at 268. In his junior year (1898) he became the Princeton captain, and his fame boomed like a cheer over all the land. He was at this time 268.

When, at 291, he graduated from college, the Carnegie Steel Plant at Pittsburgh offered him a job. Officials of the plant felt that he would be a useful addition to the company football team, one of the paid sand-lot elevens that were then flourishing. Mr. Edwards, sensing that he had not been called on for his knowledge of the steel business, refused. He coached for two years at Princeton and Annapolis, and used a whistle at many famous football games; a friend suggested a political career and Mr. Edwards, acceding, secured a job in the New York City Department of Street Cleaning.

His rise was rapid. Studying street conditions, he made himself an expert on refuse removal, and became, at 304, the Street Cleaning Commissioner. All the newspapers characterized his work in the department as “spectacular.” And already he had won the Carnegie medal for bravery. He had been standing, that one afternoon beside Mayor Gaynor, as was his custom. It had become an old joke among those who did not like him that “Big Bill” Edwards always stood beside somebody. Whenever cameras clicked, he stood beside somebody, and in the following Sunday’s rotogravures you saw somebody’s picture and (in small type, reading left to right) “Big Bill” Edwards. People who called Edwards the Peter Pan of Princeton, who were bored by his after-dinner speeches, who declared that he was at heart a schoolboy who blustered his way through life seeking the loud worship of some irrecoverable football game, such people ate their words the day he stood next Mayor Gaynor. For a maniac, jerking out a pistol, emptied it at New York’s good Mayor. “Big Bill” Edwards, for one moment of splendor, got back the glory of the greatest game that he had ever played as with a mechanical impulse he leaped for the murderer. There were detectives in the group that day, men trained for just such moments. “Big Bill” Edwards acted quicker than any of them. Straight as a bullet he launched his enormous bulk forward in a flying tackle that had in it all that nerve and muscle remembered of wild times on ringing fields. The gunman, still firing, crumpled backward; powder burned the sleeve of “Big Bill” Edwards; a bullet seared his arm. For a while after that he was cheered wherever he went. And even now, at a football game, in the theatre, on the street, one man will nudge another:

“‘D’ye see that elephant?… Turn slowly, you can’t miss him. . . Well, that’s ‘Big Bill’ Edwards ” And “Big Bill” Edwards catching the glance, will chuckle within himself. He is fat now; he couldn’t run two hundred yards, but one thing he remains, and is content to remain, something that it is hard to find a name for, except an old one, and that is—well, —spectacular.

Booggrrr

For three years Walter Hagen has held the professional golf championship. Last week, at Garden City, he won it for the fourth time, beating Leo Diegel in the finals, 4 up and 3 to go. Diegel was always trying. Again and again he had an assured, an unassailable advantage on a hole— and lost. When an opponent challenges, Hagen rejoices. At the fifth hole in the morning Diegel sent a beautiful drive down the the middle of the fairway. Hagen was in a pit. Instead of resorting to an explosion shot he tried to flick the ball up to the green. His shot failed. Diegel, with a perfect approach, laid his ball hole-high and stymied Hagen who was 40 feet away. Like Von Elm at Baltusrol a week ago, Hagen took a machie cut round Diegel’s ball and halved the hole. All day he sent his approach putts right to the lip of the cup. He smiled for the cameras, he crouched dramatically to study his putts, he indulged in all his characteristic byplay of gesture and jauntiness. “Diegel played a gude game, I’ll noo say he dinna,” remarked a grey professional as he rinsed his mouth, “but if he’d played twa times as weel again Hagen woulda fleetched him—the auld booggrrr.”

Marine

A god’s iron larynx spoke to the multitudes of his people assembled on a hill outside their city in darkness and rain.

“. . . AND GENE TUNNEY, OF THE YEWNITED STATES MARINES, ONE HUNNERD EIGHTY-FIVE POUNDS.”

From the ranked tribes there burst an answering roar. The metal snarl of that huge voice sent shivers into their hearts. Yet it was not any god, but only Joseph Griffo, the announcer, his voice trumpeted from the loud speaker whose horns overhung the ring. Tunney, who still had a bathrobe on, smiled slightly and bowed his head. Across from him sat a scowling, unshaven man with a towel over his shoulder. And around them rose the crowd.

There is no simile big enough to give an idea of that crowd. To conceive of the cup of the stadium as the cup that holds a man’s brain; to conceive of the ranked heads as the cells of the brain, each alone, yet united in a common consciousness, each fiercely kinetic, yet keeping its place in a segment, an area at once cut off from and united to other areas by dark intersecting lanes, and every cell, every segment, every area of the vast filled hollow burning inward and downward upon the mysterious core of its life—a little white ring with four posts. To conceive of this is not to exaggerate. But you must add that every cell of this huge mind was itself a mind. And that one mind, one cell, included the whole.

All evening the crowd had come trickling in. You showed your ticket at a brass gate in the stucco wall of the Sesqui-Centennial, a mile from the stadium. Between the Centennial Gate and the Stadium long narrow buses with red lights, electric motors and canvas roofs plied to and fro, silent as lizards. They were crowded. Diplomats, politicians, millionaires, sailors, Negroes, sportsmen went by. Vincent Richards, the tennis player, and his wife, and a raincoat. A huge black preacherman in a woman’s straw hat. Mortimer Schiff. Mayor Walker.

It was still early. In the pale violet sky an airplane somersaulted, strung with lights.

The iron voice began its snarling; quick little men, clumsy big men, fought and went away again. Beside the ring sat eight frightened fellows in sweaters. They were referees. When a preliminary fight was to begin, a man sitting behind would lean over and tap one of them on the shoulder. Now he tapped Tommy Reilly. The crowd cheered.

Tunney got into the ring first. Dempsey was coming. You could see a swirl far back in the crowd that drew nearer and nearer as Dempsey moved down the aisle with his handlers and a corps of policemen. He climbed through the ropes—unshaven, hard-muscled, surprisingly thin—and crossed to Tunney’s corner. “How are you, boy?” he said. The iron voice announced the weights: “Jack Dempsey, who has defended his title for the last six years. . . .” Loud booing. You bent over to light a cigaret and when you looked up they were fighting.

Tunney stood up straight, Dempsey came in weaving, bobbing, prowling. He bent his head a little and Tunney’s lefts whizzed over. Three of them missed in succession. Incomparably better looking in the ring than Tunney, who was merely handsome, Dempsey leaped forward; he was inside Tunney’s guard, a panther striking. Then an amazing thing happened. Tunney held his terrible arms. The referee parted their shoulders and Tunney, with a right and left to the head, backed Dempsey against the ropes, pounded his face, made him shelter himself with wrapping elbows. The gong rang for the end of the first round. A gentleman who sat between Peggy Hopkins Joyce and Tex Rickard in an aisle by the ring put down his flask and stretched himself. “Tunney’s got it, . . .” he said.

And Tunney had it. Two gentlemen on the other side of the ring agreed to that as well. All through the fight they took turns talking, apparently to themselves; an inconspicuous microphone in front of them carried their gabble verbatim to many million people. They told how the rain, just a sprinkle as the fighters got into the ring, grew harder; how Dempsey kept weaving in, pawing at Tunney with fierce, ineffective blows; how people spread newspapers over their knees and passed bottles from hand to hand; how Tunney outboxed Dempsey, poked him off with wary blows, closed his left eye, cut his cheek, made his nose bleed. In the last round, with a tremendous effort, Dempsey fired his weariness into a rally and swung a right for Tunney’s jaw. If that blow had connected the Dempsey-Tunney fight would have been remembered as the most sensational ten-round bout ever fought. Tunney ducked. Thirty seconds later, as the new heavyweight champion of the world, he was making a brief martial* address into the microphone, while cameras snapped. It was several minutes before the photographers remembered that there had been another man in the ring. They looked over their shoulders at a wet corner, but Dempsey had gone.

*”I have realized all my ambition, and I will try to defend the title that I have worked so hard for for six years, and I am going to try to defend it as becomes a marine.”