Publication: A Princeton Companion
Roper Lane, which extends between Cap and Gown Club and Cottage Club from Prospect Avenue to the main entrance of Palmer Stadium, is named for William W. Roper '02, varsity football coach during the years 1906-1908, 1910-1911, and 1919-1930. This short passageway is a modest memorial, but on autumn Saturdays, when it is crowded with Princetonians inching their way to or from football games, it is a lively and appropriate one.
Bill Roper was, in President Dodds's phrase, ``a vibrant personality.'' He was one of the last of the inspirational coaches; his staccato talks to the teams between halves and his oratorical periods at rallies before big games were histrionic masterpieces.
Roper's style was eclectic, opportunistic. He tended to borrow plays from teams that did well against Princeton. For example, in the fifth game of the 1919 season, West Virginia overwhelmed Princeton with its spread formation, 25 to 0. On the next two weekends, Princeton employed the same formation to good advantage, tying Harvard 10 to 10 and beating Yale 13 to 6.
Roper applied his gift for improvisation to language as well as to football. ``The trouble with you,'' he once told a recalcitrant star, ``is that you're too indegoddamnpendent.''
Newspapermen called Roper an evangelist; his fiery talks at rallies before the big games did indeed have a smell of brimstone about them. In 1920, before the Harvard game in Cambridge, Roper, looking in profile like General Sherman, strode up and down the front of the platform in Alexander Hall where the Princeton team was seated, and going down the list of players on both teams, position by position, declared in each case that the Princeton player was plainly superior to his opposite number at Harvard. He then announced that he had purchased one-way railroad tickets for the team and that if they didn't win, they would have to make their own arrangements for getting home. Harvard and Princeton played a 14-14 tie game, so hard-fought and so exciting that no one remembered to inquire whether any of the Princeton team had to walk home.
Roper was not a methodical type, and sometimes his associates had to improvise for him. In that same fall of 1920 Roper forgot about a Yale game invitation he had extended to some of his colleagues on the Philadelphia city council until a few days before the game, when all the seats had been sold. The best that George R. (Joe) Murray 1893, graduate manager of athletics, could do was to put a bench between the wooden stands and the goal-posts at the open end of the Stadium and to give Roper handwritten notes, instructing the ushers to seat the visiting councilmen there. As it turned out, these proved to be the best seats in the Stadium.
The game's first score came in the second quarter, when Frank Murrey drop-kicked a 34-yard field goal that sailed over the heads of the Philadelphia councilmen. Later Don Lourie, aided by Stan Keck's stalwart blocking, sprinted forty-seven yards across the goal line and touched the ball down a few yards from their feet, and Keck placed-kicked the ball over their heads for the extra point.
In the third quarter, Captain Mike Callahan recovered a Yale fumble on the Yale 15-yard line and crossed the goal line right in front of the councilmen for a touchdown, and Keck sent the ball over their heads for the extra point. Later, with Lourie holding, Keck place-kicked a 36-yard field goal, and once again the ball went spinning over the heads of the councilmen.
After the game, as the Princeton fans snake-danced around the field, tossing their hats over the goalposts in celebration of Princeton's 20 to 0 victory, the Philadelphia councilmen hurried to the Princeton dressing rooms to thank Roper for the marvelous arrangements he had made for them.
For many years Roper was the principal speaker at the annual meeting to acquaint freshmen with the history and principles of the honor system in examinations. ``No one,'' Dean Gauss said, ``ever had a more withering scorn for the dishonest, the hypocritical, and the unsportsmanlike. No one ever had a higher faith in the human spirit and in its possibilities.''
In addition to Roper Lane, Roper is remembered by a trophy, established in 1939 by his widow and the Class of 1902, which is awarded annually to that senior who best combines high scholastic rank and sportsmanship with general proficiency in athletics.
From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).