Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 January 1913 — RUFFIANS AT DELPHI BEAT UP MILITIAMEN [ARTICLE]

RUFFIANS AT DELPHI BEAT UP MILITIAMEN

Turned Basketball. Game into Bull Pen and Sportsmanship and Decency Alike Discarded. The Delphi Independents carried out their implied threats of the past three weeks and when the militia team went to that town Tuesday night employed every disgraceful tactic known in the shanty substrata, in which the team and Its backers evidently exist, to prove their total lack of decency. They slugged, held, pushed, fouled in every conceivable way and the game was in no respect a basketball contest but on the part of Delphi an example of bruatlity, the kind that 8-yeax-old boys boast of being able to administer behind their own woodpile. For three weeks the Delphi basketball players, assisted by one or two of the newspapers, have labored to poison the minds of the Delphi rooters and they evidently planted their seed of hatred and abuse into fertile soil, for the basketball hall had every appearance of being a breeding place of thugs and maniacs. ....

Such expressions as “slug him,” “kill him,” “put him in the hospital,” and similar idioms of cowardice Ailed the air and the mutual feeling between rooters and players was proved by the eagerness with which the players executed the injunctions. Clark, at forward, was made a special object for their attack and every time he went after the ball two or three of the rowdies would push -him into the wall, bruising him until he was scarcely able to walk after the game, and to make it worse, after the game was over and Clark was going to the dressing room, O’Connor, the big center of the Delphi team, gave him a push through the door, the act of an arrant coward. Kirk was slugged in the neck and otherwise bruised up. Lloyd Parks was repeatedly slugged by his opponent and when this could no longer be endured and he squared away to retaliate, one of the other players struck him a blow with his Ast square in the face and his nose seems to bo broken. The other players came in for many bruises. Naturally enough, under such conditions, Rensselaer lost the game. They had no chance to win. Delphi proposed to win the game by any foul means and the score of 56 to 18 is no proof of their respective abilities, but the result of Delphi’s unsportsmanlike and cowardly brutality. In the practice before the game, every time a Rensselaer player would make a basket, some roughneck spectator would shout “We’ll get you.” The players were informed as soon as they got off the train that the program was to beat them up, and had they been less game they would have taken the next train back home. There was disappointment expressed by the Delphi players that Morgan was not there. They wanted to “murder” him, so they indicated. If leather medals were to be awarded to the largest collection of cheap sports that ever assembled under one roof the judge should have been at Delphi Tuesday night and passed out his badges of dishonor about to the Independents and their degenerate backers.

The following is the wording of a bill that was posted in Delphi and proves by its sly innuendo that the attack on the Rensselaer players was premeditated. The bill read: “Rensselaer says the Independents are a ‘toy team.’ The ‘toy team’ is going to mix with them Tuesday eve. Come and see them perform. Rensselaer Co. M has a good team all right but we can’t say they are very polite. They held Monticello 19-21 and consider themselves world-beat-ers. The Independents are not saying anything but they have waited patiently for this game and will be on the job. This game will be ‘a peach.’ ” They advertised that they were “not saying anything,” but Delphi people generally said that they were openly boasting of the style of rough play they proposed to inaugurate. The Rensselaer team would be glad to meet the "toy team” from Delphi on any neutral floor where they can be assured of a square deal and a basketball game instead of a prize fight Has Manager O’Connor any proposition to submit? If he has Manager Tuteur will be ready for business.