“Imponit finem sapiens et rebus honestis.”
Juvenal.
I very well remember the morning when the post brought me an advance copy of the first number of Mr. C. B. Fry’s Magazine.
One saw at once, as the public has since seen, that the periodical struck a new note in regard to matters of sport. It was to be both practical and idealistic, sport in the realm of action was to stand side by side with sport in the sphere of thought. Mr. Begbie sounded the keynote, in his beautiful inaugural poem—when the clean, strong body sings a hymn of praise and thankfulness for its splendour of strength and health; because the joy of physical achievement is so intense, because the currents of the blood run fast and free.
It is a curious fact in life that a fine and noble thing in itself nearly always harbours or begets an ugly parasite. No plant grows unhampered by the insect world, a filthy mildew—so the curator of a famous picture gallery told me the other day, will appear mysteriously upon the finest canvas.
In particular, certain phases of sport to-day present the observer with a curious spectacle. There is a monstrous liaison, a horrid entanglement between sport and drink!
It is as well to put it quite bluntly at the beginning. If an unpleasant fact is not stated in the frankest way, it loses its appeal to the hearer. The man in the street, gets up and strangles a half-statement with the flippancy of a catch-penny juggler at a country fair. One is not heard.
I say that a grave danger menaces modern sport and that the danger is just this....
The more popular games of England are being disturbed and discredited in a marked manner by the amount of drinking—plain, vulgar excess in alcohol—which surrounds them and follows in their train. A great number of sportsmen know this perfectly well and genuinely deplore it, but I am not aware that the subject has been properly ventilated as yet, save perhaps by “temperance” cranks and prejudiced or ignorant people, who hide a polemic puritanism under the banner of a misused word.
Some time ago I had occasion to spend a night in a large manufacturing district in the North of England. I put up at a local hotel.