The Oldtimer

At 75, Yale's William Walter Heffel-finger, '91, was still rawboned, erect, and thoroughly convinced that football was not what it used to be. He scoffed at modern football as a sissy game played by "pawers and taggers" instead of blockers and tacklers. Unlike most old diehards, "Pudge" could prove his point, and he did, at an age when most men shrink from strong exercise. In 1916, when he was 48, Pudge went back to Yale to help toughen up a later generation for the big games with Princeton and Harvard. In three scrimmage plays he laid out five varsity linemen, sent one to the hospital with three broken ribs.

At 55, Pudge was still fast and explosive enough to play 58 minutes against the Ohio State alumni all-stars and lead his teammates to a 66-0 victory. "I'd have done better," said he, "if I hadn't dislocated my shoulder at the start of the game." At 65, he gave up playing.

In Pudge's days at Yale, he was a lean, powerful (6 ft. 2 in., 190 Ibs.) youngster who made the team as a freshman after a vicious scrimmage initiation: the Yale captain deliberately rasped his canvas sleeves back and forth across Pudge's nose until it was raw and bleeding, ordered opposing linemen to step on his knuckles, kick him in the shins. Pudge passed the test, became a fleet-footed guard* on the Yale team of 1888 that scored 698 points against the likes of Penn, Rutgers and Princeton, and was never scored on itself.

Those were the days of the "flying wedge," a V-shaped offense (now long outlawed) that cut through defenses like a bulldozer. Pudge devised the classic counter-maneuver: "As the wedge formed, I backed away to get a running start, put on full steam ahead, took off like a broad jumper, knees doubled up, and soared." When soaring Pudge crashed headlong into the man leading the V, the wedge disintegrated.

This particular strategy was invented by Freshman Heffelfinger in his first Princeton game (score: Yale 10, Princeton 0), which was reported thus by the New Haven Register: "Both teams got in some quite respectable slugging, and the man who did not have a bloody nose and mouth was considered a little out of fashion."

Cat-quick, Pudge was the first guard in football history to run offensive interference; on defense, Pudge favored an almost upright stance, disdaining to crouch. "Take it from me," he maintained, "a man is no good on his knees." Pudge made Walter Camp's first All-America team in 1889, made it again the next two years. At Yale, Pudge's teams, playing a 13-to 16-game schedule, won 53 and lost two (to Princeton and Harvard). The two defeats rankled in the heart of Pudge Heffelfinger until the day he died, at his home in Blessing, Texas last week, at the age of 86.

* Last of his long-lived teammates: Amos Alonzo Stagg, now 91, who retired from head coaching (College of the Pacific) at 84, now coaches part time at Stockton (Calif.) Junior College.

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