In the first place, it needs to be appreciated that student athletics in some form or other have absorbed a considerable amount of attention of collegians in American institutions for over half a century. Fifty years ago, even, we find foot-ball a fast and furious conflict between classes. If we can judge by ancient records, these conflicts were often quite as bloody in those days as at present. An old graduate said recently that, compared with the titanic struggles of his day, modern foot-ball is only a wretched sort of parlor pastime. In those days the faculty took a hand in the battle, and a historical account of a New England college depicts in immortal verse the story of the way in which a divinity professor charged physically into the bloody savagery of the foot-ball struggle of the class of ’58.
Poor ’58 had scarce got well
From that sad punching in the bel—
Of old Prof. Olmstead’s umberell.
It will be impossible to fully represent the values of athletics as a deterrent to the dissolute wanderings and immoralities common in former times. Neither can one dwell upon the real apotheosis of good health and robust strength that regular physical training has brought to the youth of the country through the advent of college gymnasiums and indoor and outdoor athletic exercises. Much also might be said in favor of athletics, especially foot-ball, because of the fact that such exercises emphasize discipline, which, outside of West Point and Annapolis, is lamentably lacking in this country both in the school and in the family. While there is much need to engage a larger number of students in general athletic exercises, it is nevertheless true that even though a few boys play at foot-ball or base-ball, all of the students who look on imbibe the idea that it is only the man who trains hard who succeeds.
There is, too, a feeling among those who know intimately the real values of college play life, when wholesale denunciations are made of undergraduate athletics, that it is possible for one outside of college walls or even for one of the faculty to produce all the facts with accuracy, and yet to fail in catching the life of the undergraduate at play. Inextricably associated with college athletics is a composite and intangible thing known as “college spirit.” It is something which defies analysis and exposition, which, when taken apart and classified, is not; yet it makes distinctive the life and atmosphere of every great seat of learning, and is closely linked not only with classrooms, but also with such events as occur on the great athletic grand stands, upon fields of physical contest in the sight of the college colors, where episodes and aims are mighty, and about which historical loyalties cling much as the old soldier’s memories are entwined with the flag he has cheered and followed. While we are quoting from Phi Beta Kappa orators, let us quote from another, a contemporary of Longfellow, Horace Bushnell, whom Henry M. Alden has called, next to Emerson, the most original American thinker of his day. In his oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard sixty years ago, Dr. Bushnell said that all work was for an end, while play was an end in itself; that play was the highest exercise and chief end of man.
It is this exercise of play which somehow gets down into the very blood of the American undergraduate and becomes a permanently valuable influence in the making of the man and the citizen. It is difficult exactly to define the spirit of this play life, but one who has really entered into American college athletic events will understand it—the spirit of college tradition in songs and cheers sweeping across the vast, brilliant throng of vivacious and spell-bound youth; the vision of that fluttering scene of color and gaiety in the June or October sunshine; the temporary freedom of a thousand exuberant undergraduates; pretty girls vying with their escorts in loyalty to the colors they wear; the old “grad,” forgetting himself in the spirit of the game, springing from his seat and throwing his hat in the air in the ebullition of returning youth; the mercurial crowd as it demands fair play; the sudden inarticulate silences; the spontaneous outbursts; the disapprobation at mean or abject tricks,—or that unforgettable sensation that comes as one sees the vast zigzagging lines of hundreds of students, with hands holding one another’s shoulders in the wild serpentine dance, finally throwing their caps over the goal in a great sweep of victory. One joins unconsciously with these happy spirits in this grotesque hilarity as they march about the stadium with their original and laughable pranks, in a blissful forgetfulness, for the moment at least, that there is any such thing in existence as cuneiform inscriptions and the mysteries of spherical trigonometry. Is there any son of an American college who has really entered into such life as this who does not look back lingeringly to his undergraduate days, grateful not only for the instruction and the teachers he knew, but also for those childish outbursts of pride and idealism when the deepest, poignant loyalties caught up his spirit in unforgettable scenes:
Ah! happy days! Once more who would not be a boy?
A friend of mine had a son who had been planning for a long time to go to Yale. Shortly before he was to enter college he went with his father to see a foot-ball game between Yale and Princeton. On this particular occasion Yale vanquished the orange and black in a decisive victory. After the game the Yale men were marching off with their mighty shouts of triumph. The Princeton students collected in the middle of the foot-ball-field, and before singing “Old Nassau,” they cheered with even greater vigor than they had cheered at any time during the game, and this time not for Princeton, but for Yale. The sons of Eli came back from their celebration and stopped to listen and to applaud. As the mighty tiger yell was going up from hundreds of Princetonian throats, and as the Princeton men followed their cheers by singing the Yale “Boolah,” the young man who stood by his father, looked on in silence, indeed, with inexpressible admiration. Suddenly he turned to his father and said: “Father, I have changed my mind. I want to go to Princeton.”
