Jamestown Evening Journal

Parke H. Davis Football Expert Writes For The Herald

Parke H. Davis, once of this city, now practicing law in Pennsylvania, still retains an interest in sports, as will be seen from the following taken from the New York Herald:

The literary feature of the Harvard-Princeton football game, said football enthusiasts yesterday, unquestionably was the masterful review by Parke H. Davis, Princeton's football Nestor, which appeared exclusively in the pages of the Sunday Herald. Wherever football men came together throughout the city Mr. Davis' ingenious and comprehensive presentation of the gridiron contest not only was highly commended but it also served as an authoritative reference for those fighting the struggle over again. His remarkable detailed analysis everywhere was hailed as the solution at last of a long standing problem in football.

For years football coaches have sought to invent a chart which would record and present in compact, practical and tabulated array the facts and figures of a game in all of the depths of play so that it would be of reference value in the progress of an eleven's development.

Sporting writers also have wrestled with the problem in an endeavor to give to the football public a compilation of the details of play which would perform the same service for that sport as the box score invented years ago does for baseball.

The complexity of football play, however, has up to the present time defied solution. Mr. Davis, so the football men say, has now devised this system of tabulation. The statistical data are so arranged in his system that all of the minute but essential details of play appear at a glance properly collated in each quarter and also for the entire game. For the expert this tabulation is indispensable. For the inexpert it is interesting and instructive.

Football men in the city yesterday generally predicted that Mr. Davis' detailed analysis in The Herald would be copied at once by football teams as the best method of recording and preserving from week to week their progress and development. These football men also said that this Harvard-Princeton analysis with the three others yet to follow, would be preserved for years to come in the scrap books, of football enthusiasts. The three games to be recorded by Mr. Davis are the Princeton-Yale, Harvard-Yale and Army-Navy games, and these analyses will appear exclusively in The Herald. Mr. Davis' technical description of the game which accompanied his marvelous analysis also came in for wide and warm praise among the football men, the casual as well as the expert. Said one, in his time a celebrated coach: "I never read these reviews by Mr. Davis without being immensely entertained and always instructed in some new idea of advanced football.”

The school boy players of the city also are expressing their appreciation of these reviews. Mr. Davis has the knack, acquired by long years of experience, of detecting in the whirling intricacies of a game the choicest secrets of coaching methods, and he also possesses the art that years o experience as a lawyer have given him to express himself in clear, logical and compact English. As one of the school boy players put it: "We like Mr. Davis' articles because he tells us about the finest points in football in a way that we can understand."

Football followers high and low will watch for Mr. Davis' tabulated analysis and review of the Princeton-Yale game next Saturday with an expectancy equal only to seeing the game itself.


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