The fruits of failure are not so allur-
ing. In the rough-and-ready jamboree
of Pacific Coast athletics, character-
building and ivy-covered traditions do
not compensate for 21-0 pastings. The
coach who loses soon finds himself
with walking papers stuffed into his re-
luctant hands. No jobs as movie grid-
iron heroes await players over whose
prostrate forms touchdowns are scored.
Unsuccessful teams stock no college
treasuries, and neither do they build sta-
diums, basketball pavilions or tennis
courts.

So the pressure to win is terrific. That
means plenty of pressure and competi-
tion in the gentle practice of inducing
young men with broad shoulders and
sinewy muscles to matriculate at Dear
Old This-’n’-That.

The New Wild West

In the past five or six years, the
scramble among the conference colleges
for star prep-school athletes has been
about as grim and savage as were the old
wars on the coast between cavalry dra-
goons and hostile Indians. From their
cloistered classrooms, the professors
have watched in horror as rival coaches,
athletic directors and alumni have
fought over ace halfbacks like starved
wolves at a caribou feast.

This melee over prize football mate-
rial is not necessarily confined to such
near-by colleges as Oregon and Wash-
ington. Frequently it extends vast dis-
tances into the Far West.

The greatest high-school athlete in
Portland’s history was Bobby Grayson.
He was heralded as the boy who would
make Oregon State the conference
champion, for surely he would go to the
campus where his brother had been be-
fore him.

But Stanford, 700 miles away, was
not unmindful of the unstoppable qual-
ity of Bobby’s line smashes. Stanford

Collier's for November 19, 1938

ried about busily. Oregon State saw its
dream of football conquest fade. Pretty
soon Bobby turned up at Palo Alto—
and his family, too! Needless to re-
mark, when he came back to Portland as
an All-America and rammed Oregon
State around like a locomotive nudging
empty boxcars, boos and hisses were
plentifully mingled with the other noises
of the trouncing.

In 1933 the University of Oregon had
a hard-driving team that tied for the
conference championship. Then some
prying professor noticed that of the
eleven varsity performers, both tackles,
both halfbacks and a guard were from
California, a guard and the fullback
were from Minnesota and an end was
from South Dakota. This left three
players from the state of Oregon. And
the beards of several scholarly profes-
sors trembled perceptibly when it was
discovered that the football players
from afar had been spared the out-of-
state tuition fees required of other
students.

Eligibility squabbles rock every foot-
ball circuit, but those in the Pacific
Coast Conference have been especially
volcanic. They have had all the tumult
of the frontier West and none of the re-
straint of the genteel East.

Not so long ago a line-pulverizing
fullback for U. C. L. A. was found to
have played football elsewhere under
two different names before he began
performing in the Pacific Coast Con-
ference. The other nine colleges raised
a din of protest that sounded from the
Mexican border to British Columbia,
and the professors ruled ineligible one
Ted Key, alias William Gelhausen, alias
Tex Maness. The affair assumed a
bizarre and garish tinge when Professor
J. Earle Miller of U. C. L. A. established
identification by scars on Key’s back
from knife wounds suffered when he
was a deputy sheriff in Texas. With Key

rolling majestically through opposing |.
alumni in the Portland area scur- forwards, U. C. L. A. had gone through | _

 

 

 

"Okay, here's the setup: Finger and Louis watch out front; Manny,
Lips and Frank bring the cars around back; Stink and Rossi lug down
the bags and the arsenal; Joe comes out with me and the dough, and
Nino leaves a note the milkman shouldn't leave no more milk”

G. MILLIGAN

 

 

 

77

 

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