Imperial Valley Press

—By HENRY MCLEMORE—
LOS ANGELES, Dec. 30 (UP)—It was at the big kickoff luncheon that is given each year in Pasadena just before the Rose Bowl game.

An audience of more than 1500 listened to some of the best coaches in the country—Lou Little, Pop Warner, Alonzo Stagg, Bo McMillan, Babe Horrell and Harry Stuhldreher—discuss the chances of Southern California and Tennessee on New Year's day.

There was talk of the Trojans' great power, generated by a squad of sixty young giants, and of the importance of such manpower in football as it is played today. There was talk of Tennessee's comparatively small force of only 35, and whether it would be sufficient for such an undertaking as the Rose Bowl.

The effects of climate, travel, change in water and food, injuries, psychology, condition of the playing field, the direction of the wind, and heaven knows what else, were discussed, and earnestly, too.

A listener could not help but feel that readying a football team for a Rose Bowl victory was almost too Herculean for mortal man.

There was a tap on my elbow and the man seated next to me pulled a faded photograph from his pocket and handed it to me.

'Wonder what they'd think of this as a Rose Bowl squad?' he asked.

It was a picture of fifteen boys, in turtle-neck sweaters, perched all over an old surrey, which was sparsely decorated with flowers.

'That's the first Rose Bowl team, my Rose Bowl team,' said Fielding H. Yost. 'Fifteen boys from the University of Michigan, and the picture was taken the morning after the game which we spent as part of the parade. There was a good deal of talk when we brought a squad of that size. Some people thought it was extravagance. It was, too as far as the Rose Bowl game was concerned, because we used only eleven men. Those that started finished.'

That first Rose Bowl game, 37 years ago. It was leading 49 to 0 when the Stanford team quit with 14 minutes still left to be played. The boys from Palo Alto said they had used up all their men and left the field.

That was the Michigan 'point-a-minute' team, led by bulldog-jawed Willie Heston, who got three touchdowns against Stanford in the game that started the intersectional series which Southern Cal and Tennessee will continue on Monday.

Mr. Yost, who still is actively engaged in the business of football after all these years, has no patience with the brittleness of modern day players.

'Any boy in the proper condition can play a full game of football,' he told me. 'They speak of a sixty minute player as if he were an iron man. There isn't any such thing as a sixty minute player. A man who plays through an entire game is a fourteen-minute player, because that is the average time during the game that the ball is in play. Anyone in shape should be able to play that long, especially when he has two hours and a half or so to spread it over.'

Mr. Yost hadn't any explanation for the inability of the modern player to 'take it,' or for his being subject to so many injuries.

'All I know,' he said 'is that in the old days we didn't have the ten thousand and one injuries that we have today. If we had had, we simply couldn't have played football, because we didn't have so many substitutes.'

The Michigan veteran doesn't believe that the changes in the game are responsible.

'Football was just as bruising and just as rugged in 1902 as it is today. Moreover, equipment then wasn't as good as it is now. But the boys didn't seem to mind it.'

I asked him how he thought the team of 1902 would do if it were playing Tennessee or Southern California next Monday.

Any team with Heston