BOWS TO
Local Gridders
Hold
for Two
Periods,
Then Weaken to Lose, 13 to 0
Eleven members of Washington high school’s greatly tossed about football team, dug their cleats into the hard wrinkled turn of Lakeside stadium, Canton, Saturday afternoon and showed 7,500 fans how a never die spirit could hold Canton McKinley’s high vaunted grid machine to two touchdowns and a score of 13 to 0.
For 24 minutes those snarling Tigers from
But a defensive game is a hard strain on any team and with
the opening of the second half, things took a different turn. The orange and black, battered badly in its
efforts to stem the
Two forward passes tossed by Lab,
It was McKinley’s first touchdown. It took the red and black gridders 29 minutes
to do what they should have accomplished in five minutes if comparative scores
mean anything. McKinley scored one other
touchdown, that coming when only half a minute of the game was left to play and
was a direct result of a poor pass from the Massillon center which Leiber recovered on the orange and black’s 13-yard
line. Goss and Maurer plunged the
pigskin to the youthful Tigers one-yard line for a first down and Maurer went
across on the next play. McKinley had
one other opportunity to score, the ball being placed in position on the local
team’s 37-yard line as a result of a blocked punt recovered by the Canton
gridders, but after passes had carried the oval to within 12 yards of the goal,
the McKinley quarterback like President Coolidge, did not choose to carry the
ball, but elected to pass and the pigskin was grounded behind the orange and
black goal line. The way in which Reese Price
brought Hodnick to the earth after he had received a
pass placing the ball on the 13-yard line, probably had as much to do with
stopping the
While McKinley scored twice on three of its opportunities, the orange and black failed to even threaten the Canton goal line, The local lads got the ball once on the red and black’s 37-yard line after an exchange of punts, but there the Cantonians braced and forced the youthful Tigers to punt. Play during the greater part of the game was between the 35-yard markers and with the exception when McKinley scored its first touchdown; the ball was seldom advanced into enemy territory except through a poor punt or a break in the game.
The game Saturday was a case of a well oiled, fine functioning football machine pitted against an outfit with an unbeatable, defiant spirit. When the orange and black squad trotted out on the field it could be likened to that famous painting, “The Spirit of
Seventy-Six.” Several of the players had slight limps, others possessed injuries that they vainly tried to cover and only a great determination to hold Canton to a low score and preserve Massillon’s high score record, kept them in the game. One player, Dommer, a tackle, tossed away his crutches in order to play Saturday afternoon; another with a torn ear and a heavy bandage over the side of his face, went in and mixed it roughly with the Canton boys, while still another took a chance of being put on crutches for a week or more by playing his first game in five weeks, all because Massillon’s record on the gridiron had to be preserved and such it was. The McKinley team failed to do the thing that it most desired: to set a new high score for a Massillon-Canton game. When the two elevens met five years ago with Massillon being much the stronger team, the Washington high gridders set a record by beating the red and black 24 to 0 and that record still stands as a result of Canton being unable to score more than 13 points Saturday.
At that, granting that McKinley did play a better brand of
football than the orange and black Saturday, its game was in reality only one
touchdown better than the youthful Tigers.
While the teams shared evenly in the breaks, McKinley’s were far more
valuable for they came in
First downs also show that McKinley failed to outplay the
youthful Tigers by more than seven points.
The red and black made nine first downs to
The local eleven never managed to get a pass away until the final period because of the fast charging McKinley linemen. On several occasions Grant was smothered for a loss by a host of tacklers when he was attempting to find a man uncovered to receive a pass. Thus the youthful Tigers were unable to harness the air for gains until after the game was lost. McKinley completed three passes for a gain of 65 yards, while the local gridders made three passes, gaining 35 yards.
The Massillonians lost many yards on poor passes from center. Buttermore played a whale of a defensive game and was a regular bulwark in the center of the line, but after the first quarter he was badly used up by the McKinley players and was unable to bend over sufficiently to pass the ball accurately to the backfield receivers. He was taken from the game shortly after the start of the second half and soon after McKinley scored a touchdown. Whether McKinley would have scored had not Buttermore been injured and taken from the game will never be known but the fact remains that he made it miserable for Canton line smashes when he was playing.
The bad passes from center caused Foster plenty of trouble in
getting away his punts. In spite of the
fact that the ball was rolled back to him on the ground four times, he had only
one kick blocked. These grounders,
however, did cut many yards off his punts, as he had to boot the ball hurriedly
when surrounded by
His punting held the Cantonians in check during the first half but in the third quarter his kicks failed to travel as far and McKinley gained ground on nearly every exchange. To the fans it appeared at the end of the first half that 1926 history might be repeated and the game result in another scoreless tie. Up to that time, each team had scored but two first downs and neither was able to get anywhere in advancing the ball. Captain Laughlin and Grant had smashed the McKinley line twice for the required distance, while Hodnick, through a forward pass and off tackle dashes, had made McKinley’s yardage.
However, with the opening of the third period McKinley
showing greater recuperating power began to mix passes with its running
attack. The touchdown march started when
the
Briggs made a neat return of the kickoff, carrying the ball
back 25 yards to the 48-yard line before being downed. That was one of two runs that featured the
orange and black’s play during the afternoon.
The other was Captain Laughlin’s 15-yard dash on a triple pass. Following the touchdown,
the ball see-sawed back and forth, with neither team threatening to score until
the last minute of the game. Then
with the ball on the
A large number of
The roughness that was a common factor in Canton-Massillon
games 10 years back has disappeared.
Instead of the customary sight of flying fists between halves, the bands
of the two schools staged a drill on the field in front of their respective
student bleachers. Everything was
orderly Saturday. The sidelines were
well guarded and the crowd was kept back of a strong fence so that it could not
surge on to the field as it did two years ago.
It was as orderly a Canton-Massillon game as has ever been played and
credit should be given to the
The game ends the season for the two elevens. In point of victories it has been one of the
most successful for McKinley which dropped but one game, an early season 19 to
0 contest to
Lineup and summary:
Farrell LE Fox
Miller LT Dommer
Samuels LG
Rittersbaugh C Buttermore
Zeren RG Mauger
Esmont RT Price
Barrett RE Straughn
Kauffman QB Grant
Combs LHB Foster
Brinson RHB Briggs
Hodnick FB Laughlin
Score by periods:
Substitutions:
Massillon – Evans for Straugh, Shanabrook for Fox, Fox for Shanabrook, Shanabrook for Evans, Evans for Buttermore, Garland for Dommer, Schnierle for Shanabrook.
Canton – Lab for Combs, Jurekovic for Farrell, Farrell for Barrett, Leiber for Zeren, Maurer for Brinson, Goss for Lab, Lab for Kauffman, Beidler for Jurekovic, Fraunfelter for Samuels, Schubach for Esmont, Green for Hodnick, Harbert for Miller, Kelly for Farrell.
Touchdowns – Hodnick, Maurer.
Point after touchdown – Kauffman (placekick).
Officials:
Referee – Shafer (
Umpire – Morgan (
Head Linesman – Barrett (Sebring).