The Cap and Gown

by Charles Reynolds Brown

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.

III
THE FRATERNITY QUESTION

The sentiment of love between persons of the opposite sex has monopolized the popular interest, while other fine forms of human relationship have failed of their due recognition. The feeling of friendship between persons of the same sex has a profound significance. The friendship of Damon and Pythias and that of David and Jonathan have been sung by the poets and the memory of them perpetuated in the rituals of well known fraternal orders in such a way as to make them classic.