All the human beings we know anything about have the cheerful habit of living in bodies; there is a physical basis underlying and conditioning all earthly activity. Physical vitality, therefore, has a direct bearing on possible achievement. A rousing stomach ready to take what you give it and rejoice over it; lungs large, sound, and unspoiled by inhaling what was never meant for them; heart action reliable because never tampered with by drugs or hurtful indulgences; nerves prompt and accurate as telegraph instruments, but ready to sleep when put to bed because never abused; muscles which take up hard work and laugh over it as those who find great spoil—all these are useful items in that physical excellence to be gained and guarded as a priceless heritage. In all intellectual work where men undertake to think, write, or speak there is a demand for red blood, which is better ten times over than the blue blood of any fancied aristocracy! And in moral life, if you are to put down evil under your feet and be vigorously, joyously, winsomely good, a sound physique for your moral nature to ride in all weathers will be a perpetual advantage.
In making young men physically competent, high school and college athletics, provided they are not tacked on from the outside as a frill or held as a mere aside to which the students carelessly turn in hours of leisure, may possess high value. They can be made a genuine, vital expression of the life of the school and be related in some wise way to the larger purpose of education. Rightly ordered they aid mightily in keeping the tools sharp, in developing a full stock of vital force, in giving the poise, self-mastery, endurance needed for the work of life. The boy who learns to play with zest will be better able to do the work of a man with his own full sense of joy in it.
David Starr Jordan has said many times that “the football field is a more wholesome place for a young man than the ballroom,” and those who know the facts endorse his claim. The young fellow gets hurt now and then in football, but taking into consideration the part of him which suffers and the after effects of it, we commonly find that the injury is less damaging than are the hurts received in indoor, fashionable dissipation. Athletics bring men out under God’s open sky, into the fresh air, and under the stimulus of healthy rivalries. They train men to see clearly, to hear accurately the first time, to decide quickly, to move instantly, and to stand together in a genuinely social spirit. These qualities have high place in the combination of talents which makes for success; they have high place as well in the formation of sound character.
But to tackle the subject more closely let me name several ways in which athletics worthy of an educational institution are particularly beneficial. They serve as an outlet for the surplus physical energy of boys and young men. In simply walking to school, even though he carries some girl’s books as well as his own, the healthy young man does not consume in twenty-four hours all the physical energy he manufactures. Throbbing within him there is an exuberant physical life, excitable and not yet under firm control. There is the consciousness of new and untried powers in regard to which he feels deep concern. There is the push of impulse not fully regulated by conscience or experience. Unless there is some wholesome outlet he will burst the levee, devastating whole fields of his own nature and of other natures besides, by an unwholesome use of that surplus physical energy.
Training for athletic events means early hours, clean habits, constant occupation of mind and body, for in any college worthy of the name the young man must be a student all the while, as well as a quarterback or a pitcher. The training, therefore, becomes a mighty safeguard thrown around a lot of young fellows who are face to face with the devil of temptation. Even for those who do not make the team or the nine or the track, if they are taking regular gymnasium work in hope of that success next year, or if in other ways they have caught the spirit of clean, honest, joyous sport, athletics give an added motive and a stronger impulse toward clean living.
“Wild oats,” as they are lightly called, produce a sorry and a debasing harvest. No man with sense enough to be allowed to run at large ever looks himself in the face and takes satisfaction in the memory of such sowing. The fellow who thinks he is not wise or experienced until he has become familiar with the haunts of gamblers and harlots, until he has the smut and smell of those associations upon him, is regarded by saner men as green, oh, so green! He sometimes calls his escapades “seeing life,” but it is not life he sees there; it is death—and a foul, rotten, ill-smelling type of death. The trainer will not tolerate it. The man himself would be regarded as a traitor to the university if on the team he “broke training” for such indulgence. And the whole spirit of wholesome athletics is such as to stamp that course as base and mean. As an outlet for surplus energy then and as a safeguard against certain forms of wrong-doing, wholesome athletics in college life hold a place of honor.
They furnish also a means of joyous recreation. The mind bent and strained all the time with serious employment loses its spring, if not sometimes its sanity. The relaxation of honest fun, the excitement of a sport where one measures his strength and skill against that of others, the self-forgetfulness which comes with absorption in something other than one’s work—all these are imperatively demanded for the normal development of youth into maturity. We would all bring up in the madhouse or the sanitarium, if we did not now and then have some such diversion!
This demand for recreation, if no intelligent and wholesome forms of expression are at hand, crops out in those college pranks which sometimes border on lawlessness. The spontaneous fun of college life is ever enjoyed and applauded. There was a Yale man once suspended for this excusable caper. The students were required to attend service on Sunday in the chapel where the preacher was sometimes dull and tiresome. One particular offender against the youthful demand for vitality and brevity used to divide his sermons into heads and subheads almost endlessly, Roman 1, Arabic 1. One in brackets, a, b, c, etc., etc. This friend of mine arranged to have his class of one hundred and sixty men sit together well up in front, and every time the preacher passed from one head to another, they uncrossed their legs in unison and crossed them over the other way. When the reverend doctor passed from one in brackets to two, or from a to b, he saw one hundred and sixty pairs of legs taken apart and recrossed simultaneously. When this had been done six or eight times the people in the adjacent section and in the galleries became more interested in watching this mighty movement of legs than in the sermon, and the minister himself was so disconcerted that he presently gave it up and closed the service with the sermon unfinished. The dull preacher might better have put more life into his sermon, thus affording some legitimate opportunity for the exercise of interest on the part of his hearers.
Athletics bring wholesome recreation not only to those who play on the eleven or the nine, or who appear on the track, but to that larger company of fellows who strive for that honor; to a multitude whose interest in exercise and outdoor sport is quickened though they never aspire to ’varsity positions; to the thousands of spectators who assemble to witness the game and cheer the winners. The physical quickening, the mental relaxation, the temporary forgetfulness of hard work, the joyous hours in the open air, are all good for the whole company of people who thus, directly and indirectly, share in the advantages of athletics. Keep the game free from the taint of professionalism, free from betting, free from the disposition that would win fairly if possible, but win at any cost, and we have a form of recreation distinctly beneficial to the whole community!
The discipline of athletics develops obedience, self-control, and the spirit of cooperation, all of them useful, moral qualities. Many a rich man’s son, ambitious for college honors, has gotten his first taste of real discipline on the athletic field. At home he had indulgent parents—they were self-indulgent because of their wealth and they scarcely knew how to be other than indulgent to their children. The boy was waited upon by well-paid servants eager to do his bidding and humor his whims. His generous tips greased the way for him when he traveled or went in pursuit of pleasure. He had never felt the rough, raw edge of an exacting discipline.
But when the trainer took him in hand this son of affluence was treated as though he had been working his way through college by currying some man’s horse or by waiting on the table at a boarding club. If he played football he was knocked down as promptly and as hard, when he got in the way of a bigger and better player, as if his father had been a hod-carrier. And all this is exactly as it should be! Sometime, somewhere, he should learn the democratic spirit by being compelled to meet his fellow men without favor shown or advantage given; he should learn how to take the hard knocks and keep sweet, not losing his head or his temper. The boys say, “If a fellow plays football it does not take long to find out what kind of a fellow he is.” The real quality of the man comes out more readily and more genuinely perhaps than it would in a college prayer-meeting. And the man himself finds out what kind of a fellow he is, to his own lasting advantage.
Wellington used to say that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the athletic fields of the English schools. He meant that when he found himself standing up against Napoleon’s fiercest attacks, he had under him a body of men who had not waited for their army experience to learn discipline. Obedience, self-control, and the necessity of standing together had all been learned long ago at Rugby and Eton and Harrow until these qualities were bred in the bone! Now as mature men they fought the great battle through to a finish just as they used to put the pigskin across their opponent’s goal in the years gone by.
To gain this benefit in any worthy measure there must be a genuine participation in the athletic life of the institution. Some students imagine that they are greatly interested in athletics because they talk about the various events, smoke countless cigarettes on the bleachers, gossip endlessly in the fraternity house as to how the game was lost or won, taking up the time of the players with their useless prattle. All this, however, is as much like real interest in athletics as a bandbox is like a granite block. The interest to be worthy of the name and to insure any actual benefit must be a genuine interest.
There is something admirable in the attitude of those men who try for the team or the nine, and having failed, show themselves glad to play on the second eleven or nine. “Scrub teams” they are sometimes ignominiously and erroneously called—their loyalty and devotion to the institution is often such that they might be called “Sequoia teams.” Their spirit of sacrifice is such that they are willing to stand out as only second best and to be practised on by better men to the end that those better men may gain still more honor and glory for themselves. This spirit of loyalty and good will serves to exalt the part they take into a genuine culture in character.
The spirit of cooperation is strengthened by college athletics. Men are knit together by close ties when they participate in training or in the game. They learn to rely upon each other. Conceit and selfish pride are eliminated until the whole nature is in a fair way to be genuinely socialized. The man learns that he cannot catch and pitch and play left field all at once. He must fill his own place and act with other men who are filling their places. He must take his color in the pattern and join his yarn to their yarn in a genuine spirit of fraternal cooperation. He must subordinate his own personal interest or advantage to the larger interests of the institution which he represents. If he has really entered into the spirit of the best college athletics, he will forever after be a better husband and father, a better neighbor and citizen, a better man in the world of industry, and a better churchman, for his systematic training in this spirit of cooperation.
Athletics also express and develop what we call “college spirit.” This sense of joy in one’s own college, the generous pride and enthusiasm over victories won by other students, the knitting together of the student body in paying the necessary dues, in cheering the games, in helping to maintain high and honest standards, all go to make up that “college spirit.”
This bit of sentiment over one’s own institution does not pay term bills or prepare lessons or write examination papers, but it aids in the doing of every one of these things. The fife and drum in the army do not throw up breastworks or fire off guns to disable the enemy, but they do aid in the general undertaking by the enthusiasm and esprit de corps they help to arouse. That college spirit, which is indeed a useful educational force, is always heightened by wholesome athletics. That splendid hit when there were three men on the bases; that break through the line or around the end and the run down the field; that last spurt at the end of the hundred-yard dash, with a whole horizon of students and other spectators rending the skies with their enthusiastic cheers, all aid in the development of a wholesome enthusiasm over one’s own college.
The student who holds himself apart from it all in blasé fashion, affecting to look with cool contempt on the joyous fervor of his fellows is either diseased or else his show of indifference is only skin deep. The sneering, flippant, cynical young person is as much of a freak as would be a ten-year-old boy bald-headed, with a long white beard. Intensity, enthusiasm, absorption, belong to college life and they work their good results in transforming youth into manhood.
The two main evils, aside from the common evils of betting and dissipation which are not confined to athletes, to be guarded against are the spirit of professionalism and the habit of unfairness. The smuggling in of a professional baseball or football player whose college standing is maintained by snap courses or by indulgent professors, is a thing despicable in the eyes of all right-minded college men. It is the sacrifice of the university idea to the demand for victory in college sports. And in similar fashion the disposition to win by fair means or by foul, which has sometimes disfigured our college athletics, lies at the root of the ugly distrust felt by institutions for each other on the athletic field. Better no victories than victories of dishonor! The word of the old professor is always in point: “Play your games as gentlemen, fair, true, and generous. Win your games as gentlemen when you can, with no offensive conceit over your success. Lose your games as gentlemen when you must, with no whimpering or silly excuses.”
It is of vital importance that the whole interest of college athletics be held firmly within the grasp of that larger purpose already indicated. The main business of life is not to play baseball or football, but to do certain things treated more directly in other departments of college life. You cannot afford to play any game at the expense of your highest development as one preparing to do his full share of the world’s work. Strive to make your life rich in meaning, full of the power to serve, fine and true in its inner quality, and that fundamental purpose will so dominate your interest in athletics as to render your bodily exercise profitable both for the life that now is and for that larger life that lies ahead.