In October, 1914, I had a few hours between trains in Rugby and, of course, spent them in visiting the great public school where Tom Brown and East and little Arthur toasted cheese, tormented gamekeepers, played at hare and hounds and incidentally construed some Latin while they grew up by imperceptible mutations to be Englishmen of sturdy integrity.
On the playground the schoolboys were having military drill, the older ones instructed by army officers, the younger by boys of the upper forms. After drill came football, and some four or five games were in progress at the same time, so that from 80 to 100 boys were taking exercise at one time in this particular way.
At the English universities a very respectable proportion of the students go in for rowing, as each individual college at the university has its crew or crews. The great annual contest in London between Oxford and Cambridge has no analogue in this country, for the simple reason that the English university can draw from a large aquatic population; that is, from a large number of trained rowing men, men who have rowed in boyhood and rowed daily at college. In most of our universities the rowing men are but a handful and a winning crew may easily contain a fan who never had his hands on an oar until he began training for a special event. With the possible exception of baseball, a game played more or less generally in this country by all classes and all ages, our college athletics have ceased to be pastimes in which any large proportion of the students participate.
The athletic events have come to resemble those ancient contests in which a few highly trained individuals, graduates of the gladiators' school at Capua, performed for the delight of the multitude in Rome. A college football team will consist of 20 men or more and there are, besides, one or two scrub teams whose members loyally submit to being knocked about so as to furnish needed practice to the varsity team, each individual nourishing the secret hope that some lucky incident may bring him to fame and a place on the big team. This represents the football activities of the institution, so that in any large seat of learning the vast majority of the students have no part in the training or in the game, so far as any accruing physical benefit is concerned. Eleven men enter the arena and hundreds or thousands sit on the bleachers, sing songs, wave flags, blow horns and cheer. Track athletics subserve no more useful purpose than football, so far as the general physical improvement and up-building of the bulk of the students is concerned. One looks in vain for a seat of learning where the object of track athletics, or football or rowing is to afford a means of bringing every member of the student body to a reasonable standard of physical efficiency, much less to the nearest possible physical perfection. On the contrary, it is not exaggeration to say that the aim in view is rather to develop a few men of unusual prowess and skill in the games that lend themselves most readily to spectacular performance and which will attract the greatest number of alumni to the great annual contests with a rival school.
To be plain, and to be brief, the system of athletics in vogue in our colleges to-day produces a few specialized types, such as the football star, the record-breaking track athlete, the eight men who can sustain the grueling of a 4-mile, top-speed pull at the oars a little better than the eight men from another college.
If we followed the same plan in other departments we would have a solitary young professor of Greek philosophy, a writer of Latin verses, a team of chemical theorists, a mathematician squaring the circle, an embryo judge untying imaginary Gordian knots, a few specialists in some narrow field of medical endeavor as the yearly product of the various college courses. These graduates would have received special individual instruction, conducted in private. The concentrated energies of the professors would have been focused upon them alone, and the balance of the undergraduates in each university, 100, 500 or 2000 strong, would have received no attention whatever in the department of the humanities or in the professional schools, because the faculty was interested only in developing phenomenal ability. The bulk of the students in such a case would be granted access to libraries and laboratories (when they were not needed exclusively for the specialists), but in other respects would be left entirely to their own devices
We may be sure that colleges of this type would soon be lacking in students, for it is essentially un-American to aim to produce bookworms, to develop the few men of rare learning at the expense of the many capable of profiting- by a well-balanced educational course. Our country would, indeed, suffer if instead of hundreds of trained students leaving the colleges each year prepared to enter the various industrial, scientific and literary careers and do a man's part in the work of the world, our educational system merely yielded a few brilliant but one-sided individuals prepared to direct effort along lines in which the masses took no interest and in fields where there were none to help.
The practical common sense of the country is responsible for the type of college curriculum and for the standards maintained in regard to baccalaureate degrees, but the apathy and inertia, which also characterize our country when it comes to reforming abuses, permit the whole vast question of physical education and the incalculable opportunities to improve the physique of the people, afforded by college life, to be sacrificed for the gratification, not only in beardless undergraduates, but in grave and reverend alumni, of those same emotional instincts which once filled the Flavian amphitheater and made an amphitheater necessary in every considerable town of the Roman empire.
Any question involving the physical stamina of candidates for military service may with propriety be considered in this publication, and there are two vital reasons why the question of revolutionizing our college athletics should receive special consideration at this time.
First of all a change so disturbing and radical would seem to have little to recommend it to those most concerned and would be most difficult to effect except through the stimulus and by the aid of all those forces of love and patriotism and self-sacrifice which are now moving mightily in the world.
In the next place the necessity for reform in this direction becomes apparent when one calmly sets himself to consider the present situation. Thanks to a widespread indisposition to look ahead, we now face the necessity of furnishing without delay some four or five million men of such physical vigor as to withstand the hardships and the unfavorable but more or less inevitable concentrationof camp and transport, to be fit for the insalubrious existence of the trenches and finally for a life and death struggle with a savage enemy. We are proud of the fact that so many of our college men volunteered at once and that our army, even without the leveling influence of conscription, is full of men who have had grammar school, high school and college advantages, but when physical endurance is demanded then we have to admit that the present college course does not directly contribute thereto and that many of the vicious features of college athletics extend even into the preparatory schools. Our present college athletics may without hesitation be pronounced vicious, not only because there is lacking any systematic attempt to improve the physique of the student body as a whole, but because the few who are selected for so-called physical training are in a large majority of cases subjected to prolonged and excessive strain, for which they are unprepared and which accomplishes no useful purpose. It is not from malice or prejudice, but because of the frequency with which it can be appropriately applied, that the term "athlete's heart" has come to be recognized as a legitimate expression.
There is a unanimity of feeling, a consensus of opinion among medical men, as to the evils of modern athletics in America, which is lamentably rare in other fields. The excessive strain on the pump and tubing—cardiovascular or circulatory system—is generally admitted, and the consequent disaster is due to well-known pathological processes. One need not be a doctor, however, provided there is power of accurate observation, to draw fairly accurate conclusions as to cause and effect, and any officer of reasonable length of service who will look back over the years and inquire into the fate of the athletes of his Annapolis days will find that a goodly proportion of them have died or been invalided from the service. Perhaps an equal number are struggling along under unconfessed physical handicaps which could in a large measure be ascribed to the 4-mile boat race or some other athletic performance. And yet at Annapolis and West Point the daily drills and formations and other compulsory features of military training tend to obliterate in a measure the sharp line of demarcation between the athletic and non-athletic and insure to the latter a minimum of daily physical exercise, which is not without benefit. It forces the youth of physical indolence to a modicum of muscular effort and in a slight degree at least permits a less marked transition from the condition of training to that of every-day life in the case of these who go in for athletics.
We see no title to praise or patronage in the claim of a given college that it possesses the fastest runner in the athletic world, but would esteem that institution to have deserved well of its country which could boast that 100 per cent of its students knew how to swim and 90 per cent knew how to row; that 95 per cent of its students had by slow stages been brought to a point of training which enabled them to jog a mile in five or six minutes without visible distress, while 80 per cent of the undergraduates had qualified in wall-scaling, and 75 per cent of them, in recent track events, had participated in at least two events each.
Without any figures or calculations we venture to assert that the sum total of moneys expended on a single season of baseball and football at Harvard would suffice to enable every student to have two afternoons of tennis a week or one period of cavalry drill a week for the session, if the same enterprise and persistence and self-denial and the same business methods were employed.
Our universities have always been the hearthstones of patriotic zeal and the time may not be far distant when with real unselfishness they shall divest themselves of the meaningless honors previously acquired in the so-called college athletics and consecrate to the cause of human development and to the needs of their own homeland the most enlightened and comprehensive efforts to improve the physical constitution of the people.
The present and future military needs of the country demand universal physical training in schools, colleges and universities. Because athletic games afford a means of taking valuable physical exercise in a pleasant way they should be participated in by all, and then local rivalry and competition will in a measure render unnecessary the contests now in vogue.
Keefer has ably summarized the value to the nation of athletic games in the following words:
The value of athletic games to the military service is dependent upon the effect these have upon the mass, not upon the individual few. Training in these, in order to meet the requirements of the service, should have nothing in common with competitive athletics, but should be broad enough to reach out and include the development of every man, to the extent of his capabilities in those branches of athletics whose utility to the service is unquestioned. In other words, they should have an applicable value, be educational, recreative, and not spectacular, for it is the ability of the average of the mass that determines the efficiency of the whole.
On the faculty and athletic association, on the board of trustees and on the alumni of every college in America rests a huge responsibility. It cannot be said of these bodies that they are ignorant or incapable of sound reasoning and right thinking. It is therefore due to thoughtlessness, or rather to preoccupation with other topics, that such a state of affairs as now prevails has slowly come to pass. In our colleges to-day the cultivation of the mind is the recipient of infinite care and labor, but the manifest duty, the solemn, binding duty, resting on every educator, to agitate for sane, carefully planned physical education or training to go with the mens sana, is not appreciated.
From henceforth the college that does not maintain universal physical training is betraying its own best interest as well as those of the generations yet unborn.
The time for a change has come! Shall it be the privilege of Harvard or Yale, Pennsylvania or Cornell, Virginia or Michigan to set the example of practical patriotism in this respect?
Might it not be proper for the government to set the stamp of its approval on physical training instead of physical exhibits by requiring that intercollegiate athletic events between Annapolis and West Point be restricted to types which permit the participation of at least 75 per cent of the student body during the course of a given scholastic year, and of at least 20 per cent of the students in any given meeting? We say 75 per cent instead of 100 per cent to allow for sickness, absence on leave, etc.
This suggestion will, if it attracts any attention, excite determined opposition not only through sentimental objections, but on serious grounds of health and expediency. It will be claimed that there is a real necessity for games dissociated from military drill at West Point and Annapolis because one of the chief benefits of games and outdoor exercises is the complete change from previous occupation, association and ideas, which they permit. This is a perfectly legitimate contention, but does not invalidate ours. If the annual contest at football between these two institutions consisted of four games going on simultaneously in as many different cities on Thanksgiving Day, between class teams from Annapolis and West Point, respectively, or of eight games or 16 (if the size of the classes required them to furnish more than one team each), it does not seem to the writer that the sum total of the students' enjoyment or the pleasure of the attending public would be materially lessened. On the contrary, to increase the number of participants and attendants would seem to promise a considerable increase and diffusion of pleasure and enjoyment. It may be that the football played in these games might not attain the lofty scientific plane of the matches as now conducted, but the enjoyment and profit derived from playing or watching games is not directly proportioned to the science in them. It is possible that games played in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, etc., might in the total quite equal the single contest of the present day, and the preliminary training necessary to bring the teams to fitness would involve, or could easily be made to involve, the training of a large proportion of the student body. There is no room here to outline a scheme. Others are better qualified to do so, if they will only admit the justice of the views advanced.
All the arguments advanced for baseball, football, tennis, etc., at the military institutions can be urged with equal propriety on behalf of pastimes like wall-scaling, fencing, bayonet exercises, skirmish drills, riding, leaping, tent pegging, polo, etc., for use in the country at large.