Sport: Midwestern Front

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Thirty-five years ago last week the football team of West Virginia University met the Michigan team of Fielding H. ("Hurry Up") Yost at Ann Arbor. When the West Virginians returned home the Daily New Dominion of Morgantown interviewed them and reported:

"It was declared that every player on Yost's team weighed eight tons and had an average speed of 96 miles an hour. . . . One player said he was plucked up in the air and thrown over the head of a creature which was at least 100 feet high and had eight pairs of arms. ..."

The score of that game was Michigan 130, West Virginia 0.

Last week all that was left of Yost's famed point-a-minute football teams—the early-century Wolverines who during five years (1901-05) lost one game out of 57 and rolled up 2,821 points to their opponents' 42—were invited to Ann Arbor for a Grand Homecoming with grizzled 68-year-old Fielding Yost, still the grand mogul of Michigan football (although he stopped coaching twelve years ago to devote all his time to directing athletics).

From East & West they came, 55 of them, fattish and full of memories. They had read about this year's Wolverine Express. In three games it had scored 138 points, better than any other major college team in the U. S. And in the Big Ten (Western Conference)—where year in & year out there is more Grade A football played than in any other conference in the country—Michigan, in its second year under onetime Princeton Coach Fritz Crisler, was whizzing toward another championship after five chug-chugging years.

Fortnight ago, against Chicago, Coach Crisler's boys had chalked up a score of 85-to-0 (even with second and third string substitutes). It was the largest score recorded by a Michigan team since the canvas-jacket days of the point-a-minute monsters. Small wonder Yost wanted his old boys to see this modern machine and had selected its meeting with Yale in which to show it off.

Like most Big Ten teams, it had a line that averaged 200 Ibs., had reserves three deep. Among its backs were two streaks who could run 100 in 10 flat. And the prize Host Yost wanted most to show off was its 194-lb. halfback, Tom Harmon, who at 20 and only half way through his second year in a Varsity jersey, has been hailed as the No. 1 footballer of the year.

There have always been big boys in the Big Ten: Chicago's Walter Eckersall, Illinois' Red Grange, Minnesota's Bronko Nagurski and Herbert Joesting, Michigan's Willie Heston, Harry Kipke, Benny Friedman. But Tom Harmon can run like Grange, buck like Joesting—and pass and kick besides. Although he may not be a point-a-minute man he could almost qualify as a half-a-point-a-minute man. In the first three games of the season (in which he played a total of 124 minutes), he scored 52 points: seven touchdowns, seven points-after-touchdown and one field goal —the season's best record among U. S. college footballers.