The students come from that class which can and does take the greatest interest in all manner of sports and athletic games. In the ‘Public Schools’ the boys learn the rules and requirements of their games, and get about all the coaching they ever get. Men do not often learn games at the ’Varsity; they play them. ‘Practice’ is a word little heard on a College field; only in rowing is a systematic and an evolutionary coaching-system in practice.
Each College has its own boats, its own football and cricket and hockey teams, with its own playing-fields. There is a constant programme of inter-college contests.
The Oxford idea is ‘exercise for every one’, a thing of vital importance for keeping in condition in the climate of Oxford. Exercise is taught the English boy with his A, B, C. Of the 2,800 students who keep Term at Oxford, fully two-thirds are out engaging in some vigorous exercise every afternoon. For games, it is not requisite that one be a ‘star’—every one may find room at something or other. The men who show up best in their College teams or in College crews are ‘tried’ for the ’Varsity. Thus the ’Varsity teams and crews are chosen from a very large number of men who are actually engaged in and practising the sports for which ’Varsity men are needed, and under this system athletic ability is often discovered which, under systems where only ‘promising candidates’ ever ‘try’, would never even be suspected.
The game more than the victory is the objective in College contests,[47] and although this may rob the play of a certain intense strenuousness, it at the same time eliminates roughness and foul play.
With the exception of rowing, systematic coaching and serious training are little applied. At times, this causes a decided lack of that efficiency which results from precise ‘team-work’, and may be criticized as leaving too much to the brilliancy of individual playing; but it eliminates professionalism and trickery.
There is little business connected with College athletics. The expenses of field and pavilion and barge and boats are met from subscriptions to the ‘amalgamated clubs’—to which nearly every College man belongs. The expenditure of a team is slight. The College provides the field. Every man furnishes his own ‘togs’, of which a different sort are required for nearly every sport. The clubs furnish boats and balls, and the few requisites which must be common property. Only to ’Varsity matches (and not to all of them) is admission charged. Almost no one watches a College match, for the simple reason that every one who is not playing on the field is engaged somewhere else at some other game. There is no ‘rooting’. A few scattered cheers break out at times, but there is no organized ‘encouragement’. One feature of Oxford athletics which is in striking antithesis to American College athletics is, that here, the more prominent and successful an athlete becomes, the greater his expenses, as he buys his own outfits, his own ‘blazers’, often pays his own railroad fares, usually incurs numerous social obligations, and receives no ‘compensation’ further than a row of shining prizes which may adorn his mantle-shelf.
From the river and fields the men come in at about 4.30 for tea. Years ago a German traveller wrote in his diary, ‘To the Englishman tea is as necessary as to the German his beer.’ The customs have not changed. In this respect as in others ‘Oxford is nothing if not the reflection of English life’. As a social institution the tea-hour, with rest and ‘something to eat’ and lively conversation ‘after the game’, is thoroughly enjoyable; while as a practical institution it is a necessity, as dinner is two and a half hours away and the inner man needs immediate fortifying after the vigorous exercise of the past two hours.
The hard-working man, then, has a chance to get in two hours of reading between tea-time and dinner.
Evening.
After the bells have struck seven the students stream, in gown and bare-headed, toward their College halls. At this one time during the day the students of each College really gather in a body. In the semi-gloom of the long hall, with its high ceiling and panelled, portrait-hung walls, with fireplaces glowing and electric lights illumining white cloths and bright silver, the tables are arranged in long rows, with flanking of narrow, backless benches on each side. Students file in; dons and Master enter, in evening dress, their loose gowns flowing back from their shoulders as they stride to ‘high table’. After the reading of a Benedictus benedicat all sit down and fall-to right merrily. The dinner hour can hardly be styled a social hour—in hall; in fact, so business-like does it become at certain undergraduate tables that it might well appear to the casual observer——but, as a matter of fact, casual observers are not allowed entrance.