It is a rare thing when anyone can get Dick Harlow to discuss the merits and demerits of his football teams, but finally after years of waiting the Alumni Bulletin has convinced the professor of gridiron science and tactics to tell the inside story of this fall's eleven. The result is an intimate critique "My Football Team" in the issue of the Bulletin out today.
When Harlow writes that "the 1937 and 1941 Harvard teams are the best I've coached at Harvard" and that this team "had more personality than most football teams" he is relating conclusions everyone has made, but had never before been said by the man who ought to know best.
Into the individual tales of the team's Seniors of whom "eight members started the Yale game in their Sophomore year, and for three years they carried the football load for their University," Harlow delves with detail and humor.
Laughing Team
He calls it a "laughing team" and relates that "they liked physical contact for the mere sake of batting and getting batted. The coaches found it hard to give them enough work, and any time you turned your back, Miller, Gardiner, Peabody, and Pfister would start smacking each other around. Peabody has told me that Miller, Gardiner, and Pfister were the toughest linemen he faced all year."
Something new has finally been written about Chub Peabody after the newspapers completely whitewashed his personality and record. Harlow writes of the unanimous. All-American, "There was something about his eyes that I'll never forget. If you looked into Peabody's eyes off the field they were open and friendly and, set in that boyish face of his, reminded you a little of a baby's. But once the whistle has sounded, those eyes contracted into slits, a sort of green flame seemed to burn in them and you knew you were up against a man who wasn't fooling. I hope I never find myself in a trench with fellows coming at me with bayonets. But if I ever do, I want to have a guy like Peabody with me!"
Pfister Wanted Education
Incidents throughout this lone confession of Harlow's bring out the innermost secrets of the team. Dick Pfister, Harlow tells, "came to Harvard because a woman teacher had convinced him that there wasn't anything more important than a good education and that he couldn't get a better one anywhere than at Harvard."
Loren MacKinney, he admits, was "one of the best all-around football players I've ever coached," but although "his kicking was great, we really hurt ourselves and detracted from his fame by using him as a kicker because he was simply marvelous down-the-field under punts when he wasn't kicking."
Harlow confides that he still does not "know whether Forte or Morgan is the better right end," and compares Don McNicol to Vernon Struck "the Magnificent Faker" of the 1937 team. Generalities are kept to a minimum by Harlow, but he does deviate enough to suggest that "I have found through many bitter lessons that there is no substitute for experience, and that Sophomores are a bad risk, particularly in the backfield."
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