A Near-Sighted Approach To Football

The Near-Sighted Longstreth

The Princeton football player was in the clear. The pass to him was perfect – a sure touchdown.

Only one problem, 
W. Thacher Longstreth was practically blind without his glasses. 

“The pass not only hit me in the helmet, the ball bounced straight up in the air, so all I had to do was look up and catch it as it came down – which of course I didn’t do,” Longstreth writes in his enjoyable autobiography, Main Line Wasp.

The Princeton fans were booing and shaking their fists and the coach took Thacher out of the game. He recalls it as “perhaps the most horrible moment of my life up to that point.”

Another time the badly near-sighted Longstreth was sent into the game. He could make out two men, so he ran between them. They were the linesmen holding 10 yards of chain between them. Longstreth tripped on the chain, taking one of the hardest falls imaginable .

“I had to be carried off the field on a stretcher before I’d even been on the field.”

The likeable Republican,who would run for Philadelphia mayor twice, was actually an excellent football player in some respects. He was an end on the starting team and played both offense and defense when Princeton was in the national top 10 football colleges in the late 1930s.

He was fast and a good tackler. He was tall 6-foot-6, so if the ball was lobbed to him within a few feet of scrimmage, he could see it, reach up and catch it.

The coach discovered that Thacher had a great throwing arm. He could toss the football 80 yards. Of course, he couldn’t see that far down field

Princeton developed “a mystery play” but used it only once. Longstreth threw a “straight arrow pass” 80 yards. But the player who was supposed to be downfield to catch it had fallen at the line of scrimmage. “So there was no one within 50 yards of my beautiful pass.”

He writes that he was the first football player in America to wear contact lenses. He says they helped but he always had to remove them because a bubble would develop between has eyes and the lens.

Although married and expecting his first child, Longstreth was determined to service in World War II. The Army gave him an eye test and told him “forget it.”

He devised a devious plot and passed the Navy eye-test by secretly using the contact lens. He served with distinction, mostly aboard aircraft carriers.