Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader® (41 page)

Mrs. J. F. Meehan,
Shawnee Ladies Invitational

When she got to the 16th hole (126 yards, par 3), Meehan teed up, swung…and hit her ball into the water. The ball was floating on the surface of the water, but rather than use another ball, Meehan got her husband to find a boat and row her out to the ball. She leaned over the front of the boat and took her swing… and
another…and another. It took her more than 40 strokes just to hit the ball onto land; then she had to play through a thickly wooded area to get back to the green. Final score for the hole: 161 strokes.

For her 40th birthday, Sophia Loren’s husband gave her a 14-karat gold toilet seat.

Real
champagne, in a scene of the first (and last) performance of
“Ecarte”
at the Old Globe Theatre

Playwright Lord Newry was a stickler for authenticity, so when his play called for a picnic, he used a real picnic basket filled with roast chicken, pies, truffles…and several bottles of champagne, which the actors drank to the last drop. Leading lady Nita Nicotina was soon too drunk to remember her lines; her leading man kept track of his by shouting them out at the top of his lungs. That tired him out, so he laid down in the middle of the stage and fell fast asleep as the other actors worked around him, tripping over props and leaning against scenery that was not designed to support their weight.

By now the audience had lost its composure; when Nicotina walked out onstage at the beginning of the next scene wearing one red and one green boot, the audience lost itself in howling waves of laughter. That made her mad—“What are you laughing at, you beastly fools?” she screamed. “When you have done making idiots of yourselves, I will go on with this—
hiccup
—beastly play.” She never got the chance—the audience laughed and booed the entire cast off the stage. (Except for the leading man, who was still asleep.)

IncrEdibles Breakaway Foods

Remember those “push-up” ice cream and frozen yogurt pops? IncrEdibles, introduced in 1999, were scrambled egg push-up breakfast pops designed for eaters on the go. They came in three flavors: cheese, sausage and cheese, and bacon and cheese. The concept may seem disgusting, but what really killed IncrEdibles was the fact that when you heated them up in the microwave, the eggs became so soft, it was almost impossible to eat them without the whole superheated mess spilling onto your lap. Ouch!

Passive-aggressive? In 1879, while on his honeymoon. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote
Travels with a Donkey.

In this part of our football saga, we contemplate the mysteries of safeties, offensive interference, and tackling below the waist.

In the early days of football, games often ended in a tie, and the referee decided the winner. Yale coach Walter Camp thought that instituting a
point
system, something more sophisticated than just counting touchdowns and field goals, would solve the problem by making tied games less likely. He pushed his proposal through the Rules Committee in 1883.

Beginning that year, a touchdown counted for two points, a goal kicked following a touchdown was worth four points, and a field goal was worth five points. Then there was the “safety.” Whenever the ball came within 25 yards of the offensive team’s own goal line, it was common practice for them to touch the ball down behind their own goal line “for safety,” because this meant that the ball would be brought back out to the 25-yard line for a free kick. Henceforth, if a team was forced to resort to a safety, one point was awarded to the other team.

The new point system lasted only a year—by 1884 it was obvious that touchdowns were harder to score than field goals, so their value was raised to four points. The goal after touchdown was lowered to two points, the safety was raised to two points, and the field goal remained unchanged at five points.

Technically, “interference,” or protecting the ball carrier from incoming tacklers, was illegal, just as it was in rugby. But because the introduction of the system of downs was thought to have weakened the offense, enforcement of the rules against interference began to decline.

As early as 1879, Princeton protected the ball carrier by running two players alongside him, one on either side. These shielders didn’t actually block the incoming tacklers—that was still against
the rules—but they were an intimidating presence. Rather than complain, other teams adopted the tactic themselves.

They also began testing the limits of what else they could get away with—and quickly discovered they could get away with a lot. “A few years later,” Stephen Fox writes in
Big Leagues,
“the shielders had moved out ahead of the runner, using their arms and hands to shed tacklers. The old offside rule was no longer enforced. Barely a decade old, football had lost this final vestige of rugby.”

The gradual acceptance of offensive interference served to strengthen the offense, so in 1888 Walter Camp pushed through two new rules that helped strengthen the defense in response: The first banned blocking “with extended arms,” a tacit acknowledgment that other forms of blocking had become legal; the second legalized tackling below the waist, as far down as the knees. The new rules shifted the balance so firmly over to the defense that the offense had to completely rethink its game.

The low tackle proved to be much harder to defend against than tackles above the waist, so forwards had little choice but to move in closer around the center, until they were literally standing shoulder to shoulder, as they do today. The backfield (halfbacks and fullbacks) moved further up to provide additional protection. Now, instead of being spread out all over the field, players were clumped together in the middle. It was also about this time that centers started using their
hands
instead of their feet to snap the ball back to the quarterback.

With so many players crowded together, it was probably just a matter of time before someone hit upon the offensive tactic of everybody locking arms and slamming into the defense in one single, devastating mass.

One of the earliest examples of such a “mass play,” as it came to be known, was the V-trick, which Princeton invented on the spur of the moment in 1884, during the second half of a game against the University of Pennsylvania. (Lehigh University claims to have invented a similar version at about the same time.)

Princeton wasn’t having any luck advancing the ball with its
usual strategy of having a halfback carry the ball down the field behind seven other players. Then it occurred to quarterback Richard Hodge that the seven interferers might be more effective if they locked arms together and formed a V, with the point of the V pointing downfield and the ball carrier running safely inside the formation. It worked: Princeton scored a touchdown, and went on to win the game, 31–0.

In a 1936 ping pong tournament, the players volleyed for over 2 hours on the opening serve.

It wasn’t until 1888 that Princeton used the V-trick again. This time they sprang it on Yale at the start of the second half. But it was not nearly as effective has it had been four years before, because one of the Yale guards instantly figured out a way to counter it. Author Parke Davis described the scene in his 1911 book
Football: The American Intercollegiate Game:

The Princeton players formed themselves into a mass of the shape of the letter V.…The ball went into play and away went the wedge of men, legs churning in unison like the wheels of a locomotive.

But on the Yale team was a young giant by the name of Walter “Pudge” Heffelfinger. He rushed at the mighty human engine, leaped high in the air, completely clearing its forward ramparts, and came down on top of the men inside the wedge, whom he flattened to the ground, among them the ball-carrier.

Yale won the game, 10–0, and went on to win every game of its 1888 season, racking up 694 points to 0 for its opponents. Nevertheless, the V-trick was so effective that other teams quickly adopted it and began inventing other mass plays. Likewise, they adopted the defensive tactics of Pudge Heffelfinger, perfecting the art of cannonballing knees-first into chest of the lead man in the wedge. The best players were able to vault the wedge entirely to slam full force into the ball carrier.

Tactics like these led to an increase in the number of serious injuries and even deaths in the game, which led to a general increase in brutality and foul play. “We were past masters at tackling around the neck,” Georgia Tech’s John Heisman recalled of the period. “There was a rule against it, but that rule was broken often.…Fact is, you didn’t stand much of a chance making the
line in those days unless you were a good wrestler and fair boxer.”

How many leaf-cutter ants does it take to lift a 10-pound picnic basket? 60,133.

In 1890 a Boston lawyer and chess expert named Lorin F. Deland happened to see a Harvard football game. He’d never played football, but had became a fan of the sport, in large part because the strategy seemed to have a lot of parallels with battlefield tactics. His interest in the sport prompted him to read books on Napoléon Bonaparte.

One of the little emperor’s favorite tricks was massing the full strength of his troops at the enemy’s weakest points; Deland thought this would also work well in football. He pitched his idea for what became known as the “flying wedge” to Harvard in 1892. The flying wedge applied the principles of speed and momentum to the Princeton V-trick; Deland proposed using it during kickoffs, which would allow the wedge to get a 20-yard running head start before slamming full-speed into the opposing team.

Harvard agreed to try it against Yale in the fall and spent much of the summer secretly practicing the move. On game day they introduced it at the start of the second half, when Harvard had the kickoff. The beefiest players gathered on the right side of the field 20 yards away from the ball; the smaller players gathered 15 yards further back on the left side. When the signal was given, both groups converged in front of the ball at full speed and locked arms to form the wedge as the kicker, Bernie Trafford, tapped the ball with his foot (still legal in those days), then picked it up and passed it to teammate Charlie Brewer running alongside him.

Running from inside the safety of the flying wedge as it plowed into Yale’s defensive line, Brewer managed to advance as much as 30 yards and might even have gone all the way for a touchdown, had he not tripped over a teammate on Yale’s 25-yard line. Harvard never did score a touchdown—Yale won, 6–0, but the effectiveness of the flying wedge was obvious to everyone. By 1893 almost every college football team in the country had adopted “mass momentum” plays. The golden age of football violence had arrived.

Halftime: After the
BRI
Marching band performs, turn to
page 331
for Part IV of our History of Football.

Dallas was named after George Mifflin Dallas. Who was he? U.S. vice president 1845–1849.

Some “deep” thoughts from George W. Bush. Frankly, we don’t understand them, either.

“Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”

“I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family.”

“What I am against is quotas. I am against hard quotas, quotas they basically delineate based upon whatever. However they delineate, quotas, I think vulcanize society.”

“I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.”

“I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy.”

“I would have to ask the questioner. I haven’t had a chance to ask the questioners the question they’ve been questioning.”

“I am mindful of the difference between the executive branch and the legislative branch. I assured all four of these leaders that I know the difference, and that difference is they pass the laws and I execute them.”

“They want the federal government controlling Social Security like it’s some kind of federal program.”

“One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected.”

“The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants.”

“The senator has got to understand—he can’t have it both ways. He can’t take the high horse and then claim the low road.”

“I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well.”

“How do you know if you don’t measure if you have a system that simply suckles kids through?”

“They misunderestimated me.”

President Busch: In a survey, U.S. children 8–12 could name more brands of beer than presidents.

George W. Bush’s verbal blunders are well-known. But is he the only Texas politician who has a flair for the English language? Nope. Read on for more fun from the Lone Star state.