Evening Star Newspaper, December 8, 1929, Page 111

THE SUNDAY : STAR, Manutacturing Foot Ball Gossip Yarn: WASHINGTON, D. C. DF.("F.MRI;‘.RWS. 1?29 ;3 Some of the Publicity Stunis of the Past Scason Have Made It Appear That the Main Function of Big Colleges, From Labor Day to Thanksgiving, Is the Production of Bull and Bear Ballyhoo About Back ficlds, Bruisers, Kickers and Coaches, Making Gridiron Sport the Most Press-Agented of All. BY WILLIAM BRAUCHER. OW AND AGAIN some college president, after working 36 1-2 vears on a nifty chemical formula, discovers that it clicks. He achieves all the notoriety that he can get out of a one-column cut and three paragraphs concerning the grand thing he has just done for humanity. But just | L Howard Jones or Knute Rockne frown when the second team smears an off- tackle varsity play all over the county. There is always a lurking reporter to see that ominous frown. Say it is Jones who frowns, and that the memorable frown comes just four days before the big intersectional game with Carnégie Tech The next day the customers pick -up their papers and read: JONES FEARS CARNEGIE . Coach Gloomy as Trojan Warriors Fail to Show Offensive Strength Needed to Beat Scotsmen Maybe there is a picture of the Jones frown with the story. In the picture Mr. Jones wears a face as devoid of hope as the map of a full- back_trying to scoop up a fumbled verb. Tech players and coaches read the story and see the picture of Mr. Jones in agony. So they rush right over to the gym and mark up a vic- tory for dear old Carnegie! Yes? You think they do? They don't. It happens that Coach Wally Steffen has seen a picture and a story like that somewhere before. He caills together his athletes. “This is the funniest thing I've ever read, ha, ha,” ha ha's Wally. “This, my dear young men, is a bear story of the most ancient sort. And don’t be fooled by it. This means that Jones thinks he has the Indian sign on us ‘Easterners.” He'll send his team out with a rush, trying to take us off our feet and beat us before the game has started. Boys, ypu'll have to play ycur best.” 3 It's the old ballyhoo. it. Howard Jones knows it. Wally Steffen knows Full well does e wl W Robert Zuppke know it, too. And Knute Rockne knows it almost as well as he knows how to coach. KNUTE ROCKNE can give you any kind of a story you want. After years of dealing out strictly the bearish variety, the South Bend ccach gave everybody a shock just before the season started this year by announcing that coaches had been overdoing this thing of pes:imism, and it was time for one and all to be a little more optimistic. So he told all who asked that he was going to have a very nice team this year, thank you. As the season went on and Notre Dame kept bruising tougher and tougher opponents with astonishing regularity, the other coaches who had read Mr. Rockne’s plea for Pollyanaism began to understand that perhaps Knute wasn't so far wrong about optimism after all —at least as far as he was concerned. The Toot ball ballyhoo, like the game, has grown to giant proportions. Much of it is cleverly done—so well done, in fact, that it is hard to tell where the real McCoy leaves off and the ballyhoo begins. « This much is be- coming more and more evident; the colleges now know a good story when they've got it. Sports writers don’t have to coax stories out of the dear old school any more. They ask for one and get six. The ballyhoo starts with the early round-ups of sectional teams, with early practice pictures. Late in the Summer the foot ball boys stole the beaches right away from the bathing beau- ties, and pictures of them playing in the sand were widely broadcast and used. New York was alarmed by a report that Chick Meehan, just to get a quiet place where his boys could practice without publicity, plan- ned to have the athletes tackle the dummy and fall on the ball on one of the catwalks of the Graf Zepp:lin. Mr. Meehan denied this base canard, and admitted that he was not at all averse to a little story for his team once in a while. The coaches look over their line-up and dis- Besides helping the team to fight. Knute Roclne’s loi:g distance phone call from a sick bed didn’t malke a bas little spoirts page feature. cover they have lost a lot of valuable mate- rial. This would be a foot ball team if “Air- mail” Hennessey was back. Still the men com- ing up from the freshman team look fairly good.. Fullback Bull Usykx may be just what the Irish need to rcund out that great eleven. EFORE the first game, the style of play to be used must be analyzed by all the former All-America backfield men. The spinner play isn't going so well at old Siwash. Yale has dropped the old-style game. Cclumbia is go- ing to wear pretty pink uniforms. The South is full of charging demons killing one another for backfield jobs. Out on the coast you can always pick out the foot ball players in a crowd because they must stoop and squeeze to get through doors and have to stand up in rumble seats. Once in a while it leaks out that there are other activities at college besides foot ' ball. “Mopey” Simpkins is declared ineligible be- cause of his grades. Grades? Oh, yes! And only then does the realization dawn that the college semester begins in September, instead of December. Perhaps some way can be de- visd to put off the cpening of the study period next fall. Big circuses have always sent their press agents in advance of the show, paving the way, leaving pictures and advertising with the news- papers. Now the foot ball show is using much the same approach Weeks before the coming of a big Western team into Eastern territory this year, university publicity directors. their satchels full of pic- tures and stories, trekked through the regions to be invaded by their team. Scouts preceded or came along with them. The scouts were armed with huge charts and binoculars. They watched the prospective opponents play and rushed by airmail the charts of the plays back to their coaches to ponder over at great length. The long distance telephone was part of the ballyhoo this year. Scouts often have to work No college president can get news hounds steamed up about a discovery that might revolutionize industry. But let the coach so much as frown on the eve of an intersectional game, and the line forms at the right. fact and tolls are less expensive to a big school than the losing of the game. Knute Rockne, from his sick bed in South Bend, called up his team in Baltimore before the Navy game. One by one the foot ba}l warriors were called to the phone to hear their coach’s admonitions and enc_uragements. Besides helping the team to fight, Rockne's call didn't make such a bad little spo:ts pag> feature. I;VEN airplanes were dragged into the show “ on at least on: occasion this year. Penn- sylvania sent Pat Duncan to scout the Golden Bears in action. What did he us2?. An afre plane. And flew back to Philadelphia with graphs of the Westerners' pet plays so the var- sity could have a chance to work on them before the battle. An Eastern team goes West. Will the climate affect their play? The same when one of tha coast teams com:ts East. The speculation as to possible influence wind and moisture may have in deciding the game is the subject of frenzied speculation. A cubstitute fullback gats into the game and runs 85 yards with the winning tcuchdown. Here is the occasion for a spread. It seems that Dynamite Joe spent the Summer hauling ice. chopping wood or as the viiloge smithy. Outside of that, somewhere back in his family was an aunt who fainted at a cricket match. When a small boy he used to pick ch:rries over in Tocmey's orchard and one day fell on his head. He had been a football player ever since that time. Coaches cften perpetrate the same brand of ballyhoo. Perhaps it has to ‘be done, in self- defense. One of the cases in point: After Major Cavanaugh's Foréham team stepped out of their bailiwick and handed a pasting to the vaunted hosts of New York University, Coach Chick Meehan of the Violets wasn't decidedly enraptured about the way the team performed. He had given them orders to limit their forward passes, or something like that, and they had thrown that ball somewhere whenever it came to hand. So Coach Meehan benched, among others, the very captain of the team, Mr. Grant himself. THIS was shortly before the Penn State game, Hugo Bezdek is coach at Penn State. It may have been only a coincidence, of course, but Mr. Bezdek announced almost at the same time that he had benched Captain Jack Mar- tin. It was indicated Martin might not start against New York University, and that Captain Grant might not start against Penn State. Somewhat the same situation would have occurred in base ball if Joe McCarthy of th» Cubs had benched Charley Grimm for the du- ration of the world series and Connie Mack had relegated Mickey Cochrane to the wooden sofa. - A great opportunity was missed here, how- ever. The Penn State-N. Y. U. game should have been advertised as “the battle of the cafi- tainless killers,” That might not have meant much, but it would have been good reading, anyway. An interesting bit of ballyhoo that came near upsetting Ohio State in their important game with Iowa was perpetrated by Coach Burt Ingwersen of Iowa. Coach Ingwersen had in the person of Dancing Master Glassgow one of the best backs in the Big Ten conference. Before the Ohio game, however, Glassgow was injured. Some Monmouth player decided to alter Glassgow's facial contour. It is pre=- sumed he used a couple of cleats in doing it, but the fact is that Glassgow's nose was breken and his face put out of plumb in a couple of other respects. Glassgow’s injury was kept a dark secret. Rumors leaked here and there, as rumors will, that he was hurt and would be out of the Ohio game. But every time scouts looked over the Tewa squad at work, there was Glassgow, big as life, leaping about with all the abandon of a Follies dancer. Maybe he was hurt. May- be he wasn't. AT any rate, Ohio was waiting for him It was not known definitely whether or not he would play. The Ohio players felt that way about it. The game started without Glassgow, but there was a feeling of suspense that he would dash in any minute with a play that would upset the works. He never did. But the well known old “psychological effect” whs there. Ohio waited so long for Glassgow to appear that they almost forgot to win the foot ball game. The final score was Ohio 7, Iowa 6. Coach Ingwersen must have felt that Glasse gow was too valuable a threat to lose, for he had the boy fitted up with an iron mask to protect ‘the crippled bugle and sent him in against Illinois. Glassgow played havoc with the Illinois crowd. Maybe it was the mask that earned a 7 to 7 tie with the touted Illini. Anyhow, Mr. Ingwersen brought no ignominy Continued on Nineteenth Page