In smaller cities, where only a few are gathered together to hear the results, things are not done on such an elaborate scale. The dummy gridiron and the dummy announcer are done away with and the ten or a dozen rooters cluster about the news ticker, most of them with the intention of watching for just a few minutes and then going home or back to the office. And they always wait for just one more play, shifting from one foot to the other, until the game is over.
About the ticker only the three or four lucky ones can see the tape. The rest have to stand on tie-toe and peer over the shoulders of the man in front. They don't care. Some one will always read the results aloud, just as a woman will read aloud the cut-ins at the movies. The one who is doing the reading usually throws in little advance predictions of his own when the news is slow in coming, with the result that those in the back get the impression that the team has at least a "varied attack," effecting at times a field goal and a forward pass in the same play.
A critical period in the game, as it comes dribbling in over the ticker, looks something like this:
YALE . PRINCTON . GAME . . . . . CHEKFMKL . . . . . . KLUNG . GOES . AROUND . LEFT . . . . END . FOR . GAIN . OF . YDS . . . . . . A . FORWARD . PASS . TWEEDY . TO . KLUNG . NETS . . . . . . . (Ticker stops ticking).
Murmurs of "Come on, there, whasser matter?"
Some one suggests that the pass was illegal and that the whole team has been arrested.
The ticker clears its throat. Br-rr-r-r-r-rr-r-r-r-r-r.
And just then some one comes in from the outside, all fresh and disagreeably cheery, and wants to know what the score is and if there have been many forward passes tried and who is playing quarter for Yale, and if any one has got a cigarette.
It is really just the same sort of program as obtains in the big college club, only on a small scale. They are all watching the same game and they are all wishing the same thing and before their respective minds' eyes is the picture of the same stadium, with the swarm of queen bees and drones clinging to its sides. And every time that you, who are one of the cold and lucky ones with a real ticket, see a back break loose for a long run and hear the explosion of hoarse shouts that follows, you may count sixty and then listen to hear the echo from every big city in the country where the old boys have just got the news.