Pretty soon Bixby came to. He asked for the score and we told him. We told him what had happened, and he lit into Joe pretty near as hard as I had.
Reporters generally miss the important details of a football game, but not a one of ’em missed Joe’s boner. There were whole columns about it. The Pelham papers went to it strongest, ’cause Joe’d been showin’ up their track team for two years and they loved him like a snake.
I’ll give you the windup in a few words. Nobody saw Joe from the time he left the Pelham dressin’ room till a week after the Marshall game, which wound up our season and my career as coach at Leighton. Marshall beat us by the narrow margin of 40 to 0.
Joe’d gone home, and he’d gone home intendin’ to stay; but his people felt so bad he couldn’t stand it. They got him to promise that he’d finish his senior year. So back he came to Leighton.
I ducked out right after the season was over, but I heard all about Joe. He didn’t even last through the semester. There were some fellas in college decent enough to treat him as though nothin’ had happened. There were others who couldn’t resist the temptation to get back at a boy who’d outshone ’em in athletics and scholarship and everything else. They kept pestering him and they finally had him so he was cuttin’ classes to keep away from ’em. He lost that smile of his. He also lost some of his good habits. And he lost the girl.
I’ve figured since that she wasn’t worth keepin’ if she’d quit under fire like that; but naturally Joe couldn’t see it that way. The worse your girl treats you, the better you like her. That’s how I’ve got it doped. Anyway, that’s how it worked on Joe. It was the finisher for him.
I’m keepin’ a line on him yet and the latest report is hopeful. He’s still mopin’ down in that burg in Iowa, but he’s showin’ occasional signs of life and smilin’ once in a great while. I won’t get a good night’s sleep, though, till he’s all over it. I’m afraid that won’t be for a year or two more. I wrote him a letter that I thought might cheer him up. He never paid any attention to it.
I wrote the girl a letter too. I told her it was my fault—that Joe had pulled the play under orders; but she didn’t fall for it. She wrote back that she was grateful for my interest and appreciated my motives in tellin’ her what wasn’t true. The break between her and Joe, she said, had nothin’ to do with football. She’d just decided that they weren’t suited to each other. Some bunk, eh? A hero was what she was after, and I hope she gets one that’ll make her wish she’d stuck to Joe—not wishin’ her any bad luck.
Don’t think I haven’t been punished for my part in it. I’ve told you that I couldn’t sleep, thinkin’ about the poor kid; but I haven’t told you about the pannin’ I got from Murphy, Leighton’s track coach.
I went back there the followin’ spring as a favor to Chandler, my successor. I went to give him the dope on his material. I was lookin’ for him in the athletic office when I bumped into Murph.
“Hello, Murph!” I said, but he didn’t even look at me. I stepped right in front of him. “You’re certainly cordial!” I said. “Can’t you say anything to a man you haven’t seen for six months?”
“I can say plenty,” he answered, “but I don’t b’lieve you’ll like to hear it.”
“Sure I will!” said I. “Go ahead and shoot.”
“All right,” said Murphy; and he sailed into me. I can’t remember his exact words, but they were somethin’ like this:
“I s’pose you’re proud of what you’ve done to my track team. I s’pose you’re glad you’ve broken it up. But I don’t care about that. What I do care about is your breakin’ up that boy’s life. You coaxed him into football and he made it possible for you to scare Pelham with a team that Pelham ought to have licked 50 to 0. You found out the boy was a star and you used his ability to the limit. If you’d trimmed Pelham he’d have got a little credit, maybe, and you’d have hogged most of it. And, without him, you’d have felt like forfeitin’ the game. Your team showed what he was worth to it when you played Marshall with him gone, and got licked 40 to 0.
“You gave him orders to drop kick on first down whenever he got within their forty-yard line. He carried out your orders and you called him a bonehead. You say that he ought to have used judgment, and yet you knew he was just a kid, twenty years old, and that he’d never played in a real game of football before.
“You wanted to make the world think you were a wizard. You saw a victory over Pelham right in your grasp, and you could almost hear the people sayin’ what a wonderful man you were to win with nothin’. Then you lost in the last minute of play and it drove you insane. I’m givin’ you the benefit of the doubt when I say you were insane. I certainly hope you weren’t in your right mind when you called Joe those names.
“The trouble with you football coaches is that you expect too much. You forget that your players are just boys, hardly out of their teens. You want a kid twenty years old to think as much football as you yourselves, and you’ve been studyin’ and teachin’ the game for fifteen years. And if the kid doesn’t learn in one short season all you’ve learned in fifteen years you call him a bonehead and ruin him. Do you call
