Ducky Pond - Early Life and Playing Career

Early Life and Playing Career

Pond, after attending high school in Torrington, Connecticut, his birthplace, and the Hotchkiss School, was a member of the Yale Class of 1925, and a 1924 first-team All-American at halfback.

Pond starred in the 1923 edition of The Game. He was nicknamed "Ducky" by Grantland Rice for returning a fumble 63 yards that afternoon against Harvard on a field that resembled "seventeen lakes, five quagmires and a water hazard". Yale hadn't scored a touchdown versus Harvard since the end of World War I. As an undergraduate at Yale, Pond also played on the baseball team, where he was coached by Smoky Joe Wood.

Read more about this topic:  Ducky Pond

Famous quotes containing the words early, life, playing and/or career:

    I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.
    Linda Grant (b. 1949)

    There are three times in a man’s life when he has the right to yell at the moon—when he marries; when his children come; and when he finishes a job he had to be crazy to start.
    Borden Chase [Frank Fowler] (1900–1971)

    And there were present
    the Picninnies,
    and the Jobillies,
    and the Garyulies,
    and the great Panjandrum himself,
    with the little round button at top;
    and they all fell to playing the game
    of catch-as-catch-can,
    till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots.
    Samuel Foote (1720–1777)

    I’ve been in the twilight of my career longer than most people have had their career.
    Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)