The ep51 Granddaddy Of The Blues And Some Football Memories

Hello there. This is Jimmy Powers coming your way with another story from the tumult and the shouting. Hi there. This is Jimmy Powers transcribed with another chapter from Grantland Rice's memorable life story, the tumult and the shouting. And so with a warm salute to the every young spirit of Granny Rice, I take up the narrative in first person.

As we look them over in the big corral, as the years march by, as they rise and fall, Here's to Big Pudge, my pick and my pal, the greatest bromon of them all. I witnessed my first football game in 1892 back in the sports Stone Age.

Pudge, Hefflefinger, was boyhood's idol. His feats of strength even then were legendary, when poets were moved to write such lines as linger, old linger, hefflefinger. The granddaddy of the old blues was unquestionably the most amazing football player I have ever known.

Edge was the only football player in history whose active playing career extended over a 50-year span. Think of it, football 50 years. When he was 48 years old, for example, he returned to New Haven to tutor the Yale line and handled the varsity linemen so vigorously in scrimmage that they had to order the old

man out of there before he wrecked the team. When he was 54 or thereabouts, Hefflefinger played 58 minutes of an all-star charity game in Columbus, Ohio. mostly between Minnesota and Ohio State graduates, the majority of them just out of college.

Even a sprained shoulder couldn't force him off the field. The late Bo McMillan played with Pudge that afternoon, and to his dying day, attested that the old Yale Immortal was the fastest man on the field.