Dick Randall, the Young Athlete

by Ellery H. Clark

Dick looked puzzled. "Won your 'F'?" he questioned. "What does that mean, Allen?"

"Why," answered his friend, "if you make the crew, or the nine, or the track team, you get an athletic suit and a sweater. And on the shirt and the sweater there's a big 'F', and a little 'A' on each side of it. A. F. A.--Fenton Athletic Association. The crew fellows get a white sweater, with the letters in red; the nine have gray sweaters, with red letters; and the track team have red sweaters, with the letters in white. And if you're on a winning crew, or a winning nine, you can rip off the 'A. A.' from your sweater, and that leaves just the big 'F', and shows you're a point winner for the school. With the track team, it's a little different, because there it's more a case of every fellow for himself. You can't have the same kind of team work that you can with the nine and the crew. So when the big meet comes for the cup, no matter whether the school wins or not, if you get first, second or third in your event, then you're a point winner, and you've got a right to your 'F'. Now, do you see?"

Dick nodded. "Sure," he answered, "I've got that all straight; but now there's another thing I don't understand. What's the big meet? And what's the cup? You were going to tell me about the cup when we started, and then we got switched off on to something else."

Allen smiled. "I guess 'something else' was Mr. Fenton," he said. "I'm pretty apt to talk people to death about him. I think he's a corker, and I don't mind saying so. I'd rather have him think I was all right than win my 'F,' ten times over, and that's putting it pretty strong, too. Well, about the cup. That's a cinch to explain. It's just like this. There are three schools, you see, right around here, in a kind of ten-mile triangle. There's Clinton Academy and Hopevale and ourselves. We've always had some sort of league with one another, in all kinds of athletics, ever since the schools started, but six or seven years ago the masters and some of the graduates got together, and put things right on a systematic basis. Some rich old chap in New York, who was a graduate of Hopevale, and had a couple of boys in the school, donated a cup--a perfect peach--to be competed for every year until one school won it three times and then it was to be theirs for good. They put five sports on the schedule: foot-ball, base-ball, track and crew, which counted three points each; and the Pentathlon, which counted one. The school that won the most out of those thirteen points held the cup for that year.

"Well, Hopevale made a great start. They had some dandy athletes in the school then--some folks were mean enough to say that was why the old fellow in New York gave the cup--but anyway, however that was, they won, hands down, for two years running. The next year they thought there was nothing to it--they thought they couldn't lose--and I guess they eased up a little, and didn't train quite so hard as they did the other years. Well, they got a surprise all right, for Clinton beat them out. They made six points that year, to four for Hopevale, and three for us. And then, the year after that, Dave Ellis entered school, and we had our turn. We got so, with Dave at full-back, we never thought about the three points in foot-ball at all--we figured them just like money in the bank--all we used to wonder about, was how big the score was going to be. And then, in the spring sports, we had Mansfield pitching on the nine, and Harrison stroking the crew, and of course Dave came in strong again on the track. Oh, we had things easy for the next two years. The second year we won all thirteen points--made a clean sweep of everything. So we began to get cocky--same as Hopevale--but we never let up, you can bet; we worked as though we thought we hadn't a show, unless we kept on doing our darndest.

"And then of course everything had to go wrong. Mansfield graduated that year, and Harrison's father died, and he had to leave school; and then this fellow Johnson came to Clinton, and he was certainly a find. He and Dave had it out, hammer and tongs, in the track meet, and again in the Pentathlon, and Johnson had the best of it both times. And Clinton beat us by four points, and evened things up again. So you can see what a scrap it's been, right from the start--it couldn't very well have been closer--and you can imagine what it's going to be next spring. Each school has won the cup twice, so of course this time's got to settle it. Clinton has it all figured out that they're going to win. They give us the crew, and Hopevale the base-ball, but they say that with Johnson right they're sure to take the track meet, and the Pentathlon, too. But of course no one can tell as far ahead as that--it's foolish to try. Still, that's a pretty good prediction, I think myself, unless Dave can show an improvement over last year on the track. He says he can--he says he's been training all summer, and that he's in the shape of his life.

"I know what he's figuring on. If the three schools should be tied, and it should all hang on the Pentathlon, why, the fellow who won that would be a regular tin god, you know; he'd go down in the history of the school like George Washington in the history of the country. And Dave wouldn't mind being that fellow a little bit. Not that I'm trying to knock him, you understand. That's a good, legitimate ambition. I'd like to be the fellow myself; only I need a hundred pounds of weight, more or less, and about a foot more height, before I'd fit in the Pentathlon. And there's another reason for Dave's practising, too; he wants to get back at Johnson. Dave can't take a licking, you know; he isn't used to it, and it hurts. He claims he's going to square up this spring, but I'm not so sure. Johnson's an awfully good man, and the Pentathlon's no cinch for any one, no matter who he is."

Dick, wholly absorbed in his friend's recital, drew a long breath as Allen concluded. "By gracious," he exclaimed. "That is exciting, isn't it? Suppose it did work out that way. Just think of it. To have it hang on a single point, and then to have our school win--to have Ellis beat Johnson. Oh, that would be great!" He paused a moment, and then added: "Just tell me one other thing, Allen, and I won't bother you any more. I've got everything else straight, but just what's the Pentathlon, anyway?"

Allen laughed. "I'm going to send you in a bill for private tutoring," he said good-humoredly. "This is an awful strain on my mind, giving you so much information free. And it would take a Philadelphia lawyer to explain the Pentathlon straight. We go back a few thousand years, just for a starter, to the days of the Greeks. 'The glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome.' Edgar Allan Poe, Randall. Ever read him? Ever read The Haunted Palace? No? Well, you just waltz into the library some day and take a crack at it. If I could write one poem like that, I'd quit work for the rest of my life; I'd feel I'd done enough. Well, never mind, that's not the Pentathlon, is it? I need a muzzle, I think; that's the only trouble with me. Now, then, reverse the power. Back we go, back to the Greeks. They had a kind of all-around championship in their sports, you know; they called it the Pentathlon. Pente, five; athlos, contest; five-event, I suppose we'd say, now. First, I believe, it was running, jumping, throwing the discus, wrestling and fighting; and then, later, they cut out the fighting and put in the javelin instead. We've got the same kind of thing to-day--the all-around championship they call it. Dave says he means to try it some time when he goes to college. But it's too much for school-boys, of course; it's ten events instead of five, and there's a mile run in it and a half-mile walk.

"So our Pentathlon is modeled on the Greeks. We have five events, too: hundred-yard dash, sixteen-pound shot, high jump, hundred-and-twenty-yard high hurdles and throwing the twelve-pound hammer. You see, it's a pretty good test. You've got to have speed for the hundred and the hurdles, and spring for the high jump, and strength for the shot and the hammer. And something else besides; skill for all five of them. The four S's, Mr. Fenton says, speed, spring, strength and skill. He's a great believer in the Pentathlon; says it develops a fellow all over; arms and legs, back and chest; the whole of him. There's a dandy prize for it, too--a silver shield with an athlete on it, going through all the different events. But the scoring is the ingenious part; the man who thought that up was a wonder. You see it isn't like regular athletics--it's more like a kind of examination paper. Take the hundred, for instance. If you went into the Pentathlon and ran the hundred in nine and three-fifths--that's the world's record, you know--you'd get a hundred points; just the same as if you answered all the questions right in an examination. And then, at the other end, they set a mark so low that the smallest kid in school could beat it; twenty seconds, say. That's the zero mark, same as if you answered every question in the examination wrong. And for every second, and fraction of a second, in between you're marked according to what you do.