[11] This paragraph was written before the outbreak of the Spanish-American war; but the events of that struggle do not seem to me to call for serious modification of the opinion expressed above.
[12] Sir George Campbell, in "Black and White in America."
VII
Sports and Amusements
In face of the immense sums of money spent on all kinds of sport, the size and wealth of the athletic associations, the swollen salaries of baseball players, the prominence afforded to sporting events in the newspapers, the number of "world's records" made in the United States, and the tremendous excitement over inter-university football matches and international yacht-races, it may seem wanton to assert that the love of sport is not by any means so genuine or so universal in the United States as in Great Britain; and yet I am not at all sure that such a statement would not be absolutely true. By true "love of sport" I understand the enjoyment that arises from either practising or seeing others practise some form of skill-demanding amusement for its own sake, without question of pecuniary profit; and the true sport lover is not satisfied unless the best man wins, whether he be friend or foe. Sport ceases to be sport as soon as it is carried on as if it were war, where "all" is proverbially "fair." The excitement of gambling does not seem to me to be fairly covered by the phrase "love of sport," and no more does the mere desire to see one's university, state, or nation triumph over someone else's university, state, or nation. There are thousands of people who rejoice over or bewail the result of the Derby without thereby proving their possession of any right to the title of sportsman; there is no difference of quality between the speculator in grain and the speculator in horseflesh and jockeys' nerves. So, too, there are many thousands who yell for Yale in a football match who have no real sporting instinct whatever. Sport, to be sport, must jealously shun all attempts to make it a business; the more there is of the spirit of professionalism in any game or athletic exercise the less it deserves to be called a sport. A sport in the true sense of the word must be practised for fun or glory, not for dollars and cents; and the desire to win must be very strictly subordinated to the sense of honour and fair play. The book-making spirit has undoubtedly entered far too largely into many of the most characteristic of British sports, and I have no desire to palliate or excuse our national shortcomings in this or other respects. But the hard commercial spirit to which I have alluded seems to me to pervade American sport much more universally than it does the sport of England, and to form almost always a much larger factor in the interest excited by any contest.
This is very clearly shown by the way in which games are carried on at the universities of the two countries. Most members of an English college are members of some one or other of the various athletic associations connected with it, and it cannot be denied that the general interest in sport is both wide and keen. But it does not assume so "business-like" an air as it does in such a university as Yale or Princeton. Not nearly so much money is spent in the paraphernalia of the sport or in the process of training. The operation of turning a pleasure into a toil is not so consistently carried on. The members of the intercollegiate team do not obtain leave of absence from their college duties to train and practise in some remote corner of England as if they were prize-fighters or yearlings. "Gate-money" does not bulk so largely in the view; in fact, admission to many of the chief encounters is free. The atmosphere of mystery about the doings of the crew or team is not so sedulously cultivated. The men do not take defeat so hardly, or regard the loss of a match as a serious calamity in life. I have the authority of Mr. Caspar W. Whitney, the editor of Forest and Stream, and perhaps the foremost living writer on sport in the United States, for the statement that members of a defeated football team in America will sometimes throw themselves on their faces on the turf and weep (see his "Sporting Pilgrimage," Chapter IV., pp. 94, 95).[13] It was an American orator who proposed the toast: "My country—right or wrong, my country;" and there is some reason to fear that American college athletes are tempted to adapt this in the form "Let us win, by fair means or foul." I should hesitate to suggest this were it not that the evidence on which I do so was supplied from American sources. Thus, one American friend of mine told me he heard a member of a leading university football team say to one of his colleagues: "You try to knock out A.B. this bout; I've been warned once." Tactics of this kind are freely alleged against our professional players of association football; but it may safely be asserted that no such sentence could issue from the lips of a member of the Oxford or Cambridge university teams.
Mr. E.J. Brown, Track Captain of the University of California, asserted, on his return from a visit to the Eastern States, that Harvard was the only Eastern university in which the members of the athletic teams were all bonâ fide students. This is doubtless a very exaggerated statement, but it would seem to indicate which way the wind blows. The entire American tendency is to take amusement too seriously, too strenuously. They do not allow sport to take care of itself. "It runs to rhetoric and interviews." All good contestants become "representatives of the American people." One serious effect of the way in which the necessity of winning or "making records" is constantly held up as the raison d'être of athletic sports is that it suggests to the ordinary student, who has no hopes of brilliant success in athletics, that moderate exercise is contemptible, and that he need do nothing to keep up his bodily vigour. Thus, Dr. Birkbeck Hill found that the proportion of students who took part in some athletic sport was distinctly less at Harvard than at Oxford. Nor could I ascertain that nearly so large a proportion of the adult population themselves played games or followed athletics of any kind as in England. I should say, speaking roughly, that the end of his university career or his first year in responsible business corresponded practically for the ordinary American to the forty-fifth year of the ordinary Englishman, i.e., after this time he would either entirely or partially give up his own active participation in outdoor exercises. Of course there are thousands of exceptions on both sides; but the general rule remains true. The average American professional or business man does not play baseball as his English cousin does cricket. He goes in his thousands to see baseball matches, and takes a very keen and vociferous interest in their progress; but he himself has probably not handled a club since he left college. No doubt this contrast is gradually diminishing, and such games as lawn tennis and golf have made it practically a vanishing quantity in the North-eastern States; but as one goes West one cannot but feel that baseball and other sports, like dancing in China, are almost wholly in the hands of paid performers.
The national games of cricket and baseball serve very well to illustrate this, as well as other contrasts in the pastimes of the two nations. In cricket the line between the amateur and the professional has hitherto been very clearly drawn; and Englishmen are apt to believe that there is something elevating in the very nature of the game which makes it shed scandals as a duck's back sheds water. The American view is, perhaps, rather that cricket is so slow a game that there is little scope for betting, with all its attendant excitement and evils. They point to the fact that the staid city of Philadelphia is the only part of the United States in which cricket flourishes; and, if in a boasting mood, they may claim with justice that it has been cultivated there in a way that shows that it is not lack of ability to shine in it that makes most Americans indifferent to the game. A first-class match takes three days to play, and even a match between two teams of small boys requires a long half-holiday. Hence the game is largely practised by the members of the leisure class. The grounds on which it is played are covered with the greenest and best-kept of turf, and are often amid the most lovely surroundings. The season at which the game is played is summer, so that looking on is warm and comfortable. There is comparatively little chance of serious accident; and the absence of personal contact of player with player removes the prime cause of quarrelling and ill-feeling. Hence ladies feel that they may frequent cricket matches in their daintiest summer frocks and without dread of witnessing any painful accident or unseemly scuffle. The costumes of the players are varied, appropriate, and tasteful, and the arrangement of the fielders is very picturesque.