chew somebody up and spit him into the gutter. You
learn to control your temper when it is on the high speed, with the
throttle jerked wide open and buzzing like a hornet convention. You
learn, by having it told you, just how small and foolish and
insignificant you are, and how well this earth could stagger along
without you if some one were to take a fly-killer and mash you with it.
And you learn all this at the time of life when your head is swelling up
until you mistake it for a planet, and regard whatever you say as a
volcanic disturbance.

I suppose you think, like the rest of the chaps who never came out to
practice but observed the game from the dollar-and-a-half seats, that
being coached in football is like being instructed in German or
calculus. You are told what to do and how to do it, and then you
recite. Far from it, my boy! They don't bother telling you what to do
and how to do it on a big football field. Mostly they tell you what to
do and how you do it. And they do it artistically, too. They use plenty
of language. A football coach is picked out for his ready tongue. He
must be a conversationalist. He must be able to talk to a greenhorn,
with fine shoulders and a needle-shaped head, until that greenhorn would
pick up the ball and take it through a Sioux war dance to get away from
the conversation. You can't reason with football men. They're not
logical, most of them. They are selected for their heels and shoulders
and their leg muscles, and not for their ability to look at you with
luminous eyes and say: "Yes, Professor, I think I understand." The way
to make 'em understand is to talk about them. Any man can understand you
while you are telling him that if he were just a little bit slower he
would have to be tied to the earth to keep up with it. That hurts his
pride. And when you hurt his pride he takes it out on whatever is in
front of him--which is the other team. Never get in front of a football
player when you are coaching him.

But this brings me to the subject of Bost again. Bost is still coaching
Siwash. This makes his 'steenth year. I guess he can stay there forever.
He's coached all these years and has never used the same adjective to
the same man twice. There's a record for you! He's a little man, Bost
is. He played end on some Western team when he only weighed one hundred
and forty. Got his football knowledge there. But where he got his
vocabulary is still a mystery. He has a way of convincin