“Yes, as players they may not—I say _may_ not—have been the equals of the football heroes of to-day; but your heroes of to-day will have to be something more than football players to match the work some of these little fellows are doing now.”
“What are they doing?” asked Wolcott, eagerly. Here was one of his father’s criticisms anticipated.
“Their part in the world,” Dr. Brayton answered. “Take the backfield of that Harvard team, for example. The full-back is head of an important city church; the right half-back is manager of one of the great Western copper mines; the other half is perhaps the cleverest surgeon of his age in Boston; one of the quarter-backs is professor at Columbia, and the substitute half is president of one of the largest publishing houses of the country. The team has been out of college considerably less than twenty years.”
“You don’t say anything about yourself,” said Wolcott, with complimentary naïveté.
Dr. Brayton laughed. “I belong to the second class—those who have been faithful in small things.”
“Have the Yale men done as well?” asked the young man.
“I don’t know so much about them. That man holding the ball is a full professor at Yale. The man at his left is governor of the Hawaiian Islands.”[2]
These records of Harvard and Yale ex-football players are taken from the teams of a certain year between 1885 and 1890—teams with which the author happens to be familiar. They are quoted not as remarkable, but as typical.
“I’m much obliged to you for telling me all this,” said Wolcott. “My father thinks football players are an inferior kind of men, who never will amount to anything, and I’m glad to know some facts that prove the contrary. I suppose I ought to introduce myself,” he added, his shyness suddenly recurring.
“You don’t need to do that,” replied the doctor, laughing pleasantly. “When I have an appointment with a young man who wants an examination for football, and I find a stalwart youth in my inner room so absorbed in studying old football pictures that he doesn’t hear me come in, it isn’t difficult to guess who he is. But now for business. What is it that you wish me to do?”
Wolcott explained his situation. He wanted Dr. Brayton to look him over and see what condition he was in, and then he hoped—he really had no hope—that the report to his father might in some way permit him to slip back into the game.