"Old College Try" from Columbia? (1935)

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Tue, 24 May 2005 12:16:52 EDT, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:

>See the ADS-L archives for "old college try." I came across this. Is it
>from Columbia University? Is this mentioned "inside the book" in the new
>Gehrig bio?
>...
>Also, leave off "old" and just look for "college try."
>...
>...
>15 August 1935, Sporting News, pg. 4, col. 1:
>No player in baseball has saved himself less than Gehrig. They still
>chide him in New York for giving everything the "old college try," an
>undergraduate custom at Columbia which he never outlived.

I just looked through _The Luckiest Man_ and didn't see anything about
"the old college try", though it does talk about how Gehrig's teammates
(first on the Hartford Senators and then on the Yankees) made fun of him
for being a college boy.  Gehrig could have picked up the expression from
his days at Columbia, but he enrolled in 1921, well after the first known
cite from the preacher Billy Sunday.

Sam Clements found a 1918 printing of Sunday's "The Old College Try" in
the _Elyria Evening Telegram_ -- now that the _Atlanta Constitution_ is on
Proquest, you can find it there in the Oct. 30, 1917 edition (p. 8,
columns 5-6).  A subheading says the piece was written "For the
Constitution" (perhaps based on one of his sermons), so this is probably
its earliest appearance in print.

By the way, Billy Sunday attributed the expression to Giants manager John
McGraw.  I see in _The Luckiest Man_ that Gehrig tried out for McGraw soon
after entering Columbia in 1921.  The Giants turned Gehrig down, but I can
imagine McGraw consoling him by saying that he had given it "the old
college try"!


--Ben Zimmer