JAYHAWK A TRUE ACTOR

USUAL ROLE IS PLAYED WITH
HUSKERS, YE ED OBSERVES.

All That Is Classic About the En-
gagement Is the Regular At-
tendance by Fans Who Al-_
ready Know Ending,

By Ys Ep or RouNnpABOUT.
Ye Ed wishes to rush into the
burning building in the nick of time

_|and warn the sports writers, who are
even now sharpening their pencils—
or would be if they used pencils—
getting ready to write of the Kansas-
Missouri football game on Thanks-
giving day as a “classic.”

A classic, as Ye Ed has. pointed
out before, is something everybody
-lalready knows all about, including
the outcome, but still something one
likes and loves to read or goes to
see, For example, “Hamlet” is a
classic because whether you see it
played traditionally by John Barry-
more or in modern dress by Walter
Hampden, you know Ophelia is go-
ing to drown, and Polonius is going
to be punctured and Hamlet is go-
ing to be very unhappy about every-
thing, and in spite of that you enjoy
going back over the show every
chance you get.

WHY IT IS NO CLASSIC.

So “Hamlet” is a classic, and
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and “Blossom
Time,” and Secretary Ickes and the
Sixty. Families and Governor Leh-
man—they’re all classics, too. But
not the Kansas-Missouri -game..,
Sometimes it goes one way and some-
times another—generally the way it
isn’t supposed to go. For that rea-
son it is distinctly not a classic.

The only classic in the Big Six, in
Ye Ed’s opinion, is the Kansas-Ne-
braska game, for which some 15,000
antiquarians poured into the K. U.
Memorial stadium Saturday. The
statistics on this game show that
fortune has favored Nebraska, with
:|the trifling exception of ‘two or
three tie games, every year since
1916, and most of the time before
that. ;

But the fact that the outcome is
so uniformly monotonous isn’t the
main reason the game is a classic
—it’s the fact people insist on gath-
ering in large figures year after year,
many of them hoping to see the
Cornhuskers pushed around finally,
but knowing in their hearts that it
isn’t in the book that way.

TRADITION ALMOST SACRED,

They know that any radical in-
novation in the final score would be
a violence against a traditional work
of art, like introducing a Benny
Goodman’s swing solo into the finale
of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at
a Toscanini concert—an unthink-
able proceeding, but one it would be! -
a shame to miss oy eters it had
to happen. Se

Every student of the ehcaics. like
Ye Ed and Bert Beach and Alf Lan-
don and Tom Grant and ‘other an-|
tiquarians who were on hand at
Lawrence Saturday, knows the plot.
of the Tragickal Historie of the Jay-
hawk and the Cornhusker as well as
he knows the Boy Scout oath, or
better. It moves along a good deal
like the plot of “Hamlet,” except
that instead of the appearance of
the ghost in the first scene, it is a