HOW TO SUCCEED AT TOUCH FOOTBALL.
By Frederic A. Birmingham '33.New York: Macmillan, 1962. 156 pp.$2.95.
The sport or game of touch football recently has blossomed into one of the "in" or "up" sports, thanks largely to the vigah of the New Frontier and the elan with which the Kennedy clan has rattled the pigskin off the sides of the White House or skimmed it across the surf of Nantucket Sound.
Never one to disregard a trend (he's written and edited books on cooking, drinking, creative writing, Harlem, the Ivy League, fashions, sports, and women), Frederic Birmingham '33 has now come up with the definitive work on this important American pastime in his latest opus, How toSucceed at Touch Football.
Lest you be misled by the numerous and very humorous illustrations by Robert Osborne into thinking that this work is all touch and no football, be advised that some thirty of its 156 pages are given over to the rules of the game as practiced at such hallowed institutions as Yale, Michigan State, the United States Naval Academy, and the First United States Army.
The dust jacket reports that the author went out for seven varsity sports at Dartmouth, but "the only letters he obtained were those emblazoned on a sweat shirt pilfered from the Field House which say" "Property of the Dartmouth College Athletic Association." Be that as it may, Mr. Birmingham pays proper homage to his Alma Mater by detailing the exigencies of playing behind the Sigma Phi Epsilon house, "bounded on one side by a stone wall, on the opposite by the discouraged building shrubbery and an open flight of cellar stairs."
Laced into almost every page are pithy observations on "gamesmanship" and "sportsmanship" which would do credit to a Stephen Potter.
"Good sportsmanship," says the writer, "is the lowest form of cowardice. The gracious winner actually expects to lose the next time, and is already putting in a bid for lenient treatment."
In an innocuous paragraph on playing touch football with your boss, the reader suddenly discovers that "the executive psyche is sinewy and simplified, it is concerned with directions rather than details. Therefore, .. . the executive mind is quite capable of relating that raise you were hoping for with the forward pass you just dropped."
Right now, with a couple of feet of snow on campus and that monstrosity of a snow statue blocking the way, there's not much chance for touch football. But come spring (if we can get the Softball players out of the way), we're most anxious to test some of the stratagems which Birmingham reveals. You will be too!
