The very rules under which the game is played are calculated to moderate the struggle. As a result of the rule against substituting, to which I have referred, any extreme of hard play in the practice games, such as lays off dozens of good American players yearly, is not likely to be encouraged. Of course good men "crock," as they call it; but where an injury is practically certain to disqualify a man from the inter-varsity match, the football limp and the football patch can scarcely be regarded as the final grace of athletic manhood. Willful brutality is all but unknown; the seriousness of being disqualified abets the normal English inclination to play the game like a person of sense and good feeling. The physical effect of the sport is to make men erect, lithe, and sound. And the effect on the nervous system is similar. The worried, drawn features of the American player on the eve of a great contest are unknown. An Englishman could not understand how it has happened that American players have been given sulphonal during the last nights of training. English Rugby is first of all a sport, an exercise that brings manly powers into play; as Hamlet would say, the play's the thing. It is eminently an enjoyable pastime, pleasant to watch, and more pleasant to take part in.
That our American game is past hoping for on the score of playability is by no means certain. As the historical critics of literature are fond of saying, a period of rapid development is always marked by flagrant excesses, and the development of modern American football has been of astonishing rapidity. Quite often the game of one season has been radically different from the games of all preceding seasons. This cannot continue always, for the number of possible variations is obviously limited, and when the limit is reached American Rugby will be, like English Rugby, the same old game year in and year out. Everybody, from the youngest prep. to the oldest grad., will know it and love it.
The two vital points in which our game differs from the English—"possession of the ball" and "interference"—are both the occasion of vigorous handling of one's opponents. When an American player is tackled, he seldom dares to pass the ball for fear of losing possession of it, so that our rule is to tackle low and hard, in order to stop the ball sharply, and if possible to jar it out of the runner's grasp. In England, it is still fair play to grab a man by the ankle. This is partly because of the softness of the moist thick English turf; but more largely because, as passing is the rule, the tackler in nine cases out of ten aims at the ball. The result is that a man is seldom slammed to the earth as he would be in our game. It is this fact that enables the English player to go bare-kneed.
The danger from interference in the American game is also considerable. When a man is blocked off, he is liable to be thrown violently upon the far from tender bosom of our November mother-earth. Any one familiar with the practice of an American eleven will remember the constant cry of the coaches: "Knock your man on the ground! Put him out of the play!" It has been truly enough said that the American game has exaggerated the most dangerous features of the two English games—the tackling of English Rugby and the "charging" or body-checking of the Association game.
Yet this is only a partial statement of the case. These elements of possession of the ball and interference have raised our game incalculably above the English game as a martial contest. Whereas English Rugby has as yet advanced very little beyond its first principles of grunting and shoving, the American game has always been supreme as a school and a test of courage; and it has always tended, albeit with some excesses, toward an incomparably high degree of skill and strategy. Since American football is still in a state of transition, it is only fair to judge the two games by the norm to which they are severally tending. The Englishman has on the whole subordinated the elements of skill in combination to the pleasantness of the sport, while the American has somewhat sacrificed the playability of the game to his insatiate struggle for success and his inexhaustible ingenuity in achieving it. More than any other sport, Rugby football indicates the divergent lines along which the two nations are developing. By preferring either game a man expresses his preference for one side of the Atlantic over the other.
IV
In track and field athletics, the pleasantness and informality of English methods of training reach a climax. In America we place the welfare of our teams in the hands of a professional trainer, who, through his aide-de-camp, the undergraduate captain, is apt to make the pursuit of victory pretty much a business. Every autumn newcomers are publicly informed that it is their duty to the university to train for the freshman scratch games. At Oxford, I was surprised to find, there was not only no call for candidates, but no trainer to whom to apply for aid. The nearest approach to it was the groundsman at the Iffley Running Grounds, a retired professional who stoked the boilers for the baths, rolled the cinder-path, and occasionally acted as "starter." As his "professional" reputation as a trainer was not at stake in the fortunes of the Oxford team, his attitude was humbly advisory. The president of the Athletic Club never came near the grounds, being busy with rowing on a 'varsity trial eight, and later with playing Association football for the university. To one accustomed to train not only for the glory of his alma mater but for the reputation of his trainer, the situation was uninspiring.
As I might have expected, the impetus to train came from the college. I was rescued from a fit of depression by a college-mate, a German, who wanted some one to train with. At school he had run three miles in remarkable time; but later, when an officer in the German army, his horse had rolled over him at the finish of a steeple-chase, and the accident had knocked out his heart; so he was going to try to sprint. I advised him against all training, and the groundsman shook his head. Yet he was set upon showing the Englishmen in Balliol that a German could be a sportsman. This was no idle talk, as I found later, when he fainted in the bath after a fast hundred, and failed by no one knows how little of coming to. We were soon joined by a third Balliol man, a young Greek poet, whose name is familiar to all who are abreast of the latest literary movement at Athens. He was taking up with athletics because of his interest in the revival of the ancient glories of Greece. When I asked him what distance suited him best—whether he was a sprinter or a runner—he answered with the sweet reasonableness of the Hellenic nature that any distance would suit him that suited me. A motlier trio than we, I suppose, never scratched a cinder-path. Yet the fellows in our college seemed almost as interested as they were amused; and we soon found that even so learned a place as Balliol would have been glad to bolster its self-esteem by furnishing its quota of "running blues." What was lacking in the way of stimulus from the university was more than made up for by the spontaneous interest of the fellows in college.
The rudimentary form of athletics is in meetings held by the separate colleges. These occur throughout the athletic season, namely, the autumn term and the winter term; and as hard on to a score of colleges give them, they come off pretty often. The prizes are sums of money placed with the Oxford jeweler, to be spent in his shop as the winners see fit. In America, the four classes, which are the only sources of athletic life independent of the university, are so moribund socially that it never occurs to them to get out on the track for a day's sport. It is true that we sometimes hold inter-class games, but the management of these is in the hands of the university; they are inspired solely by a very conscious attempt to develop new men, and to furnish the old ones with practice in racing. The vitality of the athletic spirits in the English colleges is witnessed by the fact that an Oxford college frequently meets a fit rival at Cambridge in a set of dual games just for the fun of it.