Fumble

Dusk is coming on apace. The ball is on the 6-yard line. Victory for the powerful Heliotrope eleven is five minutes away. The almost equally powerful Chocolate team is grim, desperate.

The players crouch. There is a hush. The ball is snapped. It strikes waiting hands and bobs away. An alert Chocolate figure seizes it. There he goes--toward two white posts 94 yards away. On and on and on--40 yards, 60 yards, 80-- touchdown! The Chocolate wins.

It is the story of many a football game but it will happen no more. The National Football Rules Committee, meeting in wintry seclusion at Absecon, N. J., last week, voted a new provision which makes a fumbled ball recovered by the defensive side "dead" at the point of recovery. The new rule "will not apply in case of forward passing, nor to backward passes which are intercepted before striking the ground, nor to blocked kicks, which will be played as heretofore." The committee justified its change with the explanation that a fumble is the error of but one player, not the team, and the loss of the ball by fumble itself is equivalent to about 40 yards, figuring five yards for the fumble loss and 35 yards for a no-longer-possible punt.

Immediately, ayes and nays were heard throughout the land. Said Walter Eckersall, former great quarterback: "One of the worst things ever done to the game." Said Dr. Forrest C. Allen, Kansas University athletic director: "It is a good rule." The pros listed among their number Dr. Clarence Wiley Spears (Minnesota), Ossie Solem (Drake), Tad Jones (Yale), Cleo O'Donnell (Holy Cross), Ira Rodgers (West Virginia), Bob Zuppke (Illinois). The cons included Amos Alonzo Stagg (Chicago), Dick Hanley (Northwestern), Glenn Thistlethwaite (Wisconsin), Dr. Frank W. Cavanaugh (Fordham).

Said Sanford B. White, assistant secretary of the International Harvester Co., Chicago: "Personally, I cannot help but feel that the new rule takes away from the game more than it can possibly add."

Why should Sanford B. White comment? Because 17 years ago he was Princeton's "Sammy" White and for 17 years he has been a prototype of the Hero Who Picked Up the Fumble.

The best newspaper account of the Yale-Princeton game of 1911 reads as follows: "A sensational, spectacular run of 65 yards by 'Sammy' White, Princeton's hero end, who picked up a fumbled ball out of the quagmire gridiron, won the football game for the Tigers against Yale this afternoon. It was the first time Princeton has beaten Yale since 1903. The score was 6 to 3. . . .

"A wretched pass from Ketchum to Dunn went wild and the alert end, ever watchful for a loose ball, snatched it and tore down the field with the whole Yale team scrambling for him like a pack of angry wolves. White outraced them all, but Yale's captain, Howe, was after him and after 60 yards of White's dash, Howe, in a final desperate jump, tackled the Tiger on the five-yard line and the terrific impact sent them both into the mud. White slid over the goal line on his face."

A week before, "Sam" White had recovered a blocked kick (a play still legal under the new rule) and raced 95 yards to beat Harvard for the first time since 1893.

Today "Sam" White keeps in trim by playing golf, a game in which he is not required to slide in the mud on his face. An important executive in a great corporation, he was most circumspect in commenting further on the new fumble rule. Said he: "Admittedly it will help to establish more clearly the superiority of the stronger team insofar as it removes the possibility of scoring through flukes or breaks of that kind. True enough, such cases are rare but important games and even championships have been decided in that way."