Training Heffelfinger

We have a couple of football history short stories in this double feature of gridiron lore. The connction of food to a football game and how the Yale team motivated one of their top players of all-time.

In a recent episode on the brief history of pro football in Western PA, we talked a bit about William Pudge Heffelfinger.  We mentioned that when he reached college age he was a pretty good-sized man of the time. The footballfoundation.org website bio describes Heffelfinger as being 6’-3” tall and weighing in at 195 pounds during his college-aged years. Originally Heff had planned further his education at the University of Minnesota, but in May of his senior year in high school, a local Yale alumnus who recognized his athletic talent convinced him to play for Yale instead. This Eli graduate tutored Pudge to the point where he could pass the challenging Yale entrance exam. On Heffelfinger's first day of freshman practice in 1888, the captain of the varsity team, "Pa" Corbin, spotted the menacing Frosh on the field and gave him a position on the varsity line. He was raw and his mid-western upbringing on the gridiron did not have him mean enough to thrive in the East’s bludgeoning style of play. 
I came across a piece in the 1939 Yale-Army Game program that Pa Corbin said about the “training” that he gave Heff. Corbin said that Freshman Hefflefinger was gentle, demure, and somewhat mild-mannered. Heff’s posture lacked self-confidence as his head was often drooped, his shoulders sagging and his eyes always looking down. 
Corbin assigned a graduate assistant coach, Howard Knapp, a prominent lawyer in New Haven to “do everything possible to arouse Heff, so that he would  give all he had for the Yale team.”

The young lawyer had tried everything he could to rile up old Heff, but nothing seemed to work. Seeing that he was almost empty of his tactics he tried one last-ditch effort of motivation. He would show Pudge Heffelfinger the sight of blood.

Knapp went to a local slaughterhouse and gathered some liquid animal blood. He then filled an ink pen with it and wrote Heff a letter  using “the sharpest, strongest kind of a letter, using every reasonable form of expression” to wake the young athlete from his lethargic attitude of team spirit and combativeness. 

Oh was the letter ever effective? Heffelfinger thinking the blood to be human and gained in some ill-gotten way was scared straight into the kind of ballplayer the Eli team needed. He played his best game that season shortly thereafter against Princeton, aiding the Yale team in a victory over their rival.

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from the following brilliant internet sites: On This Day Sports, the Sports Reference's family of website databases & Stathead.com.

Banner photo is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons of William Heffelfinger in his Yale university football photograph, 1888-1891., taken by an unknown.