Open Letter to a Pair of Football Boots
(With acknowledgments to Mr. C. B. Fry in the “Daily Express”)
Dear old Pals,—I want to speak to you seriously and as man to man, because you’re not mere dead hide, are you? No, no, you are intelligent, sentient soles, and to be treated as such by every player.
Ah! booties, booties, you little beauties, what a lot you mean to us, don’t you? and how hardly we use you.
I’ve known men to take you off after a game, hurl you—as Jove hurled his thunderbolts—into a corner of the pav. and there leave you till you are next required.
Ah! old men, that’s not right, is it? How would we great machines of bone, muscle, and nerve-centre (ah! those nerve-centres, what tricky things they are!), how would we be for the next match if we were treated like that? Pretty stiff and stale, eh, old booties?
Now, look here, when we come in after a hard, slogging game, our bodies and the grey matter in our brains thoroughly exhausted, immediately we’ve had our bath, our rub-down, and our cup of steaming hot Hercubos (I find Hercubos the finest thing to keep fit on during a hard season) we must turn our attention to you, booties.
First, out from our little bag must come our piece of clean, sweet selvyt. With it all that nasty black slime that gets into your pores and makes you crack must be wiped off. Now, before a good blazing fire of coal—not coke, mind, the fumes of a coke fire pale and de-oxygenate the red corpuscles of our blood, you know—we must carefully warm you till you are ripe to receive a real good dousing of our Porpo (I find Porpo the finest thing for keeping boots soft and pliable).
Finally, with a white silk handkerchief we must give you a soft polishing, and there you are, sweet and trim against our next match. Every morning you may be sure we will, like Boreas, drive away the clouds of dust that collect on you.
And then there are the laces to attend to. Oh, yes, your laces are like our nerve-fibres, the little threads that keep the whole big body taut and sound. They, too, must have a good rubbing of Porpo and a rest if they need it.
Ah! and won’t you repay our trouble, booties, when next we slip you on? How tightly you will clasp us just above the tubercles of our tibiæ, how firmly you will grip our pliant toes, how you will help us to send the ball swishing—low and swift—into the well-tarred net!
Good-night, booties.
The “Ball of the Season.”—Foot-ball.
Appropriate Football Fixture for the Fifth of November.—A match against Guy’s.
“Socker” on the Brain.
Harry. “Smart sort that on the right—forward.”
Tom (a devoted “footer”). “Right forward? Oh! no good forward; but looks like making a fair ‘half-back’!”