# The Freshman (Holman)/Chapter 10

It was Dan Sheldon's picturesque description of Mike Cavendish, coach of the Tate University football team, that Mike was so tough that he shaved with a blow torch. But this was a trifle exaggerated, the distortion being possibly due to Sheldon's sad experience with the Tate football mentor back ia the fall of Freshman year.
Dan was for one short week a candidate for the 1928 gridiron team. The Freshman eleven was not coached directly by the redoubtable Cavendish. "Curly" Evans, only a few years out of Tate himself and a much milder man than Mike, was the overseer of the yearling squad. "Curly" was scrimmaging his first and second teams that fatal Autumn late afternoon when Cavendish, who was head of all Tate football and hence "Curly's" boss, wandered over from the varsity field. Dan Sheldon, with little hope of making the team, was playing an indifferent game at end on the second Freshman team.
The first team quarterback barked a signal. The ball was passed. The opposing forwards charged. The halfback with the ball shot into the line off tackle, bumped into a stone ​wall and, tackled sharply, dropped the ball. The loose spheroid oozed out from the wildly groping fingers and rolled lazily out upon the cinder running track bordering the football field. Dan Sheldon, never one to rush madly into rough mêlées, was free and not four feet from the ball. But the cinders of the track looked very sharp and menacing. Dan ran over and gingerly attempted to pick the ball up with his fingers. He missed, tried again, missed again. Then a heavy body came hurtling through the air. Mershon, center on the first Freshman team, had thrown his two hundred and ten pounds upon the ball, cinders notwithstanding, and had folded it lovingly to his capacious abdomen.
Hardly had Sheldon recovered from the shock of being knocked galley-west by Mershon when a more deadly menace descended upon him.
"What's the matter with you, Percy, eh?" came a deep, bulldoggy voice at his head. "Afraid to soil your lily white fingers, eh?"
Dan looked up into the red, unshaven, angry face of Mike Cavendish. Mastodonic in size, shaggy as a bear, Mike looked as if he was undecided whether to eat Dan whole or tear him apart with his clawlike fingers.
Dan stammered, "But—the ball was on the cinders. I—I thought I had time to pick it ​up and make some distance with it instead of falling on it." Then he made the mistake of adding, "It's only practice anyway."
"Practice, hey!" roared Cavendish. He turned and bellowed in another direction, "Evans! Evans!" And when the frail-looking Freshman coach came trotting up, "What kind of milksops are you nursing over here, eh! Give this baby his bottle and tell him to run home! Chase him off the field and shoot him if he comes back. Lettin' a fumble go because he didn't want to get the naughty cinders in his finger nails! What kind of tea drinkers are we gettin' here for football material anyway!"
Sheldon attempted a look of injured innocence, but it wouldn't come off. He was too scared Cavendish would bite him. So he turned obediently and trotted off the field. Later in Commons he told his dinner mates all the biting retorts he might have made to Cavendish, "the big bum," but for some reason hadn't.
Such was hard-boiled Mike Cavendish, head coach of the Tate University football teams. Tate had secured his services from a college in the Northwest, where he had won a nation-wide reputation by turning out football teams that had not suffered defeat for five years running. When Tate started its ​drive, with the inauguration of Dean Pennypacker, for a bigger and better college, it was recognized that one of the essentials was a consistently winning football team. No college can have a better advertisement than that, it was urged. Besides, did not Tate now have the largest athletic stadium in America? And could one expect to fill this concrete and marble amphitheater with sport-loving American spectators at three dollars per spectator if one could not produce A-1 football teams?
In the emergency, influential alumni insisted that the present coach, who had been producing indifferent teams, be fired and the the services of the famous Mike Cavendish be secured at any cost. Did not Union State, Tate's ancient rival, have a coach who contributed signed articles to a newspaper syndicate and had written a book on football? Could Tate do less? Obviously not. Without inquiring into the personality of the one and only Cavendish, the alumni athletic committee signed a five-year contract with him and he had come to Tate two years previously.
If Cavendish was a roughneck in appearance, he was even more so in action on the football field. Himself the product of a wild and woolly western university, he was accustomed to molding football teams out of brawny lumberjacks, thick-hided farmers' ​boys, stolid Scandinavians and other varieties of citizens who would be insulted if one were polite to them.
If Mike's tactics with his men brought protests from the more conservative Tatians, they also brought results on the field. Tate, with only fair material, had beaten Union State both years of the Cavendish régime. And while the unsuccessful candidates for Cavendish's team hated him cordially and called him a man-killer, the survivors worshiped the man like a god. A giant of hasty and gusty decisions, of vitriolic tongue and piercing eye, Cavendish knew football and human nature. He frequently worked his men until they collectively dropped in their tracks, but on the snappy November afternoon when Tate lined up against Union State he had thus far been able to trot out a splendidly conditioned, excellently coached machine that had bored through the rival university to glorious victory.
On the afternoon following Harold Lamb's fateful promise to Peggy to go out for football, Mike Cavendish was in a tantrum.
That Tate varsity football squad one and all had incurred their coach's deep displeasure. They could not tackle. With the opening game of the season only a few days away, they could not tackle. They grabbed around ​the neck. They hit below the shoe-strings. They struck the runners so lightly that the runners shook them off and ran right along. Only once in a while could Mike find a tackle that warmed his heart; a good old Cavendish sledgehammer tackle that swooped a man off his feet as if he had been cut down by a gigantic scythe and smashed him to earth as if he had fallen from the Woolworth Tower.
Mike watched the first and second varsity teams scrimmaging. His wrath was rising. It boiled over. He rushed in between the two rows of linemen and scooped up the ball. "Come over here, you bunch of butter fingers!" he yelled at his squad. They formed a half-circle around him, sheepish and with lowered heads. They knew the tackling had been rotten. They realized they were in for some Cavendish acid.
He started off very low and deliberate, "I didn't really think we were running a little petting party out here. I didn't really think it. The way you fellows toddle up to each other and gently hand out little slaps on the wrist and little love taps on the hips. It's pretty. It sure is. You ought, all of you, to be pouring tea somewhere this afternoon instead of getting your complexions all ruined out here in the open air." Suddenly he thrust out his jaw. He ran his sharp eyes all around ​the uneasy half-moon of men. His voice barked out like a Gatling gun. "You dubs are dead from the dandruff down! What this team needs is the fighting spirit! I've a good mind to fire every one of you off this field and use the whole Freshman team against Carver on Saturday. I told Captain Trask here that, and he said, 'Give 'em one more chance.' So listen. I'm a soft-hearted fool, but I'll give it to you. We'll stop the scrimmaging. We'll work out on the tackling dummy from now till every man on the squad has made five perfect tackles, whether we quit at six o'clock or at midnight! Understand?" And he turned and started yelling loudly for "Mulligan! Mulligan! Where's Mulligan?"
A squatty little Irishman with a ragged sweater on his chest and a dirty baseball cap on his head came trotting up.
"Mulligan, get out the tackling dummy and rig it," Cavendish snorted.
Mulligan looked uneasy. He passed the back of his hand over his peanut of a nose and sniffled. Mulligan was in charge of the equipment around the varsity practice field. He said in a very small voice, "Mr. Cavendish, sor, the tacklin' dummy was busted Tuesday, if you will remember, and it ain't been fixed."
"What!" roared Coach Cavendish and he ​made a gesture as if to tear his red hair. "What kind of a place is this? Hasn't anybody got any interest, any spirit!" The coach turned and pointed to Chester Trask, standing near him, and shouted, "Here's the only man on the whole field with the real Tate spirit!"
At that moment the football captain heard a banging noise in the direction of the near-by entrance gate to Tate Field and went over to ascertain the trouble. Before he could reach the gate, it was opened and a new and amazing football player stepped in.
Meantime, Cavendish was raving on. He waved his hand toward the spot where Chester Trask had stood and shouted, "There's the man to model yourselves after. He's worth more than the rest of you put together! He's a regular go-getter—a red-blooded fighter—the kind of a man that Tate is proud of."
Cavendish was pointing his finger violently at the supposed Trask. But Trask was there no longer. In his place was standing the new player who had just come in at the gate. And the new player was Harold Lamb!
Harold wore his Sanford High School uniform, complete with shin guards, headgear, nose guard and his inevitable tortoise-shelled glasses. They were probably the only pair ​of shin guards extant on a college gridiron that Fall. His shoulders were padded until he looked like a hunch-back. His trousers were ballooned with padding. Coach Harlow Gaines, of the Sanford High School eleven, who considered football a brutal game and coached it only because his contract demanded it, had insisted upon this safety-first uniform.
Coach Cavendish, still ignorant that the captain and the Freshman had exchanged places, went shouting on. "You're all afraid of getting hurt! I'd like some one to show me a real rough tackle!" he pleaded.
And his wish was gratified! For at that moment, Hughie Mulligan, smarting and sore from his bawling-out, saw that a player was standing on one of the team's blankets and jerked it out suddenly from under the offending man's feet. The man was Harold! The Freshman lost his balance, fell, clutched out for support and caught the legs of Mike Cavendish. Coach and novice went plunging to the ground together.
Then Mike noticed what his almost convulsed squad had been trying to signal him silently for the past five minutes. He noticed the strange apparition of Harold "Speedy" Lamb. He glared. He roared. He might have done bodily injury to the smiling Harold if Chester Trask had not interfered.
​When Harold and Cavendish were again on their feet, the Freshman approached the coach jauntily, did his Lester Laurel jig.
"I'd like to play on your football team," chirped the Freshman, "if you don't mind."
Cavendish stared at him in amazement. Then he elected to handle the situation with his well-known gift for sarcasm.
"Can you kick a football?" Cavendish asked.
When Harold nodded, the coach handed him a ball.
Cavendish turned to the squad gathered around for the fun. "Run down the field a ways and receive this young man's kick, Crawford."
A lithe youth loped down the field thirty or more yards. But Harold was not satisfied. He had done the punting for Sanford High School. He could punt. He motioned Crawford to go further back. Then, in his eagerness to give the ball a mighty boot, he nearly missed it entirely. His foot glanced off the pigskin. The ball flew up over his head and backwards over the fence clear out of the field!
Harold, blushing furiously, turned and fled out of the gate after the ball. He was gone so long that Cavendish, resuming his harangue to the squad, had almost forgotten the freak ​newcomer's existence. But Harold came back on the field again, the rescued ball in his hand, and innocently sidled up close to the coach.
Cavendish, seeing the joke football player return, swept his squad with fiery eyes. "What is this?" he demanded. "Something you cake eaters framed up on me?"
The players, sobering up, denied this vigorously.
He roared at Harold, "You a Freshman?"
"Why, yes, I—"
"You got sent in here by some of these smart Sophomores, hey? What is it—a fraternity initiation or something? Tell me the names of the guys that sent you and I'll break their necks. This football team is terrible enough without any of this joke business."
Harold spoke up. "Nobody sent me, sir. I came of my own accord. I entered college principally to play football. I'm sorry I was late in reporting for the team. I've been so busy with other things I—"
"Well, get busy on 'em again then! Get off this field and, if you value your life, DON'T COME BACK!" And Cavendish, who thought now that things had gone far enough, thrust his unshaven jaw pugnaciously into Harold's face.
"Speedy" Lamb paled. He shifted from one foot to the other. He was utterly misera​ble. He looked as if he might cry. He gulped and turned to walk away toward the gate that he had entered. His dream of being a second Chester Trask, of pleasing Peggy, was being shattered! He walked slowly and with head down.
At the gate the Freshman hesitated, half hopeful that somebody would call him back.
But there was no pity in the heart of Michael Joseph Cavendish. The coach continued to sputter after the retreating form. The Cavendish eyes shifted for a moment to that other object of his wrath, Hughie Mulligan, working feverishly on the tackling dummy. Between Hughie and "Speedy" and the team's terrible tackling, Mike's day was a total loss. In the instant that Harold was about to disappear through the gate and kiss the Tate football field good-by forever, a brilliant idea struck the brain of Cavendish. Why not? If this awful Freshman excuse for a football player had come, or been sent there as a joke, why not turn the joke the other way? If this freaky rookie was so set upon playing football, why not let him? What was his name?—Lamb?—was so heavily padded that he couldn't get hurt much.
"Hey, you!" Cavendish called after the chagrined form of Harold. "Hey, Freshman—come back here."
​Harold turned eagerly, hardly believing his ears. He rushed back to the side of Cavendish. The rookie was beaming from ear to ear.
"Now then, the first thing I'm going to teach you is tackling," explained Prof Mike. "The best way to learn how to tackle is to be tackled. I'll have a few of the boys line up and tackle you gentle-like. Stand here, Lamb. Go ahead, Trask, and line the squad up. Over there, by Mulligan. Right here, Lamb. Hurry up, you ladies' men. Snap into it! All right?"
He walked over to the players, out of earshot of Harold. He ripped out at them, "Now come on and show me whether you can tackle or whether I've got to can the whole bunch of you. One at a time, hit this kid with all you've got. You can't kill 'em when they're as green as he is. Besides, he's all padded up like a mattress." He rushed back and stood by Harold. He soothed, "Don't worry, kid. You won't feel it no more than a feather. Come on now, you love-tappers! Come on, Crawford—you're first."
A lithe, sweatered figure shot out of the single file of varsity players, streaked over the spiace between them and Harold, left the earth five feet from Harold in a neat diving ​parabola and struck the Freshman at the waist line with the force of a locomotive. Tackier and tackled hit the ground with a crash, with Crawford's head pillowed against Harold's side. The quarterback sprang to his feet. Harold pulled his shattered wits and bruised body together slowly and painfully in time to hear Cavendish roar, "Rotten, Crawford! Too high. Much too high. A good man could shake that tackle off as if you'd just slapped him on the back. Hit him here—here!" And Mike hit the back of Harold's legs a smart crack with his arms and Harold almost pitched to the ground again.
"Come on, Mershon—your turn," yelled the insatiable Cavendish.
The varsity center repeated Crawford's performance. Only this time the tackle weighed over two hundred pounds instead of a mere hundred and fifty.
"Not around the shoe strings!" boomed Cavendish.
Then Harold's ears began to sing, his head was half groggy, his body racked and twisted. The air seemed full of human bodies, all catapulting at him. Crash! Tough young flying flesh hit him. Bang! He hit the ground. And each time more laboriously he raised himself to his feet, while Cavendish's husky, complaining accents punctuated the din:
​"Never tackle a man that way. You might get hurt."
"Harder, Blythe! Don't kiss him—tackle him!"
"Jar him up. Make believe he's got the ball and make him fumble it!"
"That's better, Childers. Help the Freshman up, Mulligan."
After what seemed to be hours, Harold, through the haze, discerned a familiar face headed his way. Fast as the face was coming, he saw it was Chester Trask. Like an arrow speeding to its mark Trask ran, leaped, locked steel arms around Harold's knees, whirled him cleanly off his feet and, with a peculiar sidewise wrench, spun him around in a semi-circle. Harold felt that every ligament in his body had been suddenly jerked out of place. This was Trask's famous corkscrew tackle, as might be testified by many an opponent of Tate who had fumbled a ball when hit by Trask.
"That," enthused Cavendish at last, "is the way to tackle!"
But Trask did not hear the compliment He was looking down anxiously at the battered body of Harold. The Captain stooped swiftly and helped the human tackling dummy to his uncertain feet.
"Hurt?" he asked.
​Through bloody cut lips, Harold insisted breathlessly, "No—I—feel—fine."
"Good boy," smiled Trask with relief, and patted the dislocated pad on Harold's right shoulder.
"That was—a—dandy—tackle," Harold stammered.
"Thanks," said Trask.
The captain walked over to Coach Cavendish and engaged him in a whispered conversation, nodding over toward Harold a couple of times. Mike for a time disagreed. But finally he shrugged his shoulders, as if to say that it was Trask's funeral after all.
Cavendish turned toward the players. "That's all for to-day," he growled. "Report to-morrow as usual at two." He blew his whistle. Then he turned to Harold. A grudging smile of admiration for the Freshman's grit flickered across Mike's rugged face for an instant.
The coach bent over to pick up the damaged tackling dummy and carry it into the field house. But worn out as Harold was, the Freshman was still alert enough to realize that a mighty man like Mike Cavendish shouldn't be forced to perform menial tasks like toting tackling dummies. Harold reached down as quickly as his aching back permitted and took the piece of apparatus ​under his arm before the coach could reach it. Cavendish, after a stare at the zealous candidate, shrugged his shoulders and walked over toward the field house. There he engaged in conversation with Captain Chester Trask.
Harold, his tired body struggling under the weight of the tackling dummy and a pair of empty water pails, passed by the two mighty ones.
With an effort he straightened his faltering body. He forced a smile into his scratched and bruised face. Looking up into Mike Cavendish's face, Harold said cheerfully through bloody lips to the coach, "We had a dandy workout, didn't we, Coach?"
That was why, a few moments later. Cavendish remarked to Captain Chester Trask, "That kid's got a great spirit. I hate to tell him he can't make the team."
Trask, who had been thinking of the same thing and had arrived at a conclusion, replied, "Why not keep him on the squad as a water boy or something—and let him think he's one of the substitutes?"
"A good idea," Cavendish replied.
"All right," said Trask. "I'll warn the other boys not to disillusion the kid. It won't do any harm."
Trask walked over to where the weary ​Harold waited and said as matter-of-factly as possible, "Report here with the others to-morrow at two o'clock."
Harold's battered face was suddenly wreathed in smiles.
"Then—I've made the team!" cried the overjoyed Freshman almost in a voice of awe.
Chester Trask nodded. He didn't have the heart to tell him different.