“To-night I should like to say a few words about training and athletics in general. I am glad to see so much interest displayed in the approaching interscholastic meeting. I hope we’ll win it. We’ve lost it with good grace for two years past; I think we could win it with even better grace. But if we don’t come out on top this spring, why, I’m sure that we can give the other schools some points in the art of losing. It’s a great thing to be able to lose well; much greater than being able to win well. I think we do both well here at Hillton, but there may be room for improvement; there usually is everywhere. It’s fine to win. I’d rather win any day than to lose. But I don’t always manage it. And it’s got to be the same way with a track team or a football eleven or a crew. Sometimes it has got to come in second; perhaps third. If no crew was willing to accept second place there wouldn’t be any races, and soon there wouldn’t be any crews.
“I have a youngster at home; he isn’t very big yet—just put on his first pair of trousers the other day—but he looks a good deal like a football man already. Some day I expect he’ll come here to school. If he does I hope he will row on the crew and play on the eleven or the nine, and, if he can, run well or leap the hurdles. But if I had my way I’d fix his victories and defeats for him in about a proportion of one victory to nine defeats. For it isn’t winning that helps a fellow get a good hard grip on the world, but losing. Yes, fellows, a boy or a man will learn more wisdom—good, useful, every-day wisdom—in one defeat than he will in nine victories. It would be a hard course for Remsen, Jr., but it would make a better man out of him in the end than would a whole eight years of first prizes. So don’t despise defeat, as long as it is honorable. Learn to make the most of it. Don’t feel down-hearted for more than two minutes and a half; that’s quite long enough for regrets. Cheer the victors, and go back and try again. Don’t blame the other man because he won—it was probably your own fault; but shake hands with him and, if you must, tell him to look out for his laurels next time. Defeat ought to teach us courage, perseverance, manliness, good temper, and self-possession—all good things to learn. As I look back on my school and college days I can remember occasions when I won bigger victories through defeat than when I rowed in a winning crew or played on a winning team.
“But that’s enough about losing. You’ll think that I’m a bird of ill omen, I’m afraid. So let’s talk about something else. I wonder how many of you fellows realize the fact that all the hard work and training you have gone through with and are still undergoing is not, after all, a preparation toward winning a track meeting or a boat race? Did you ever stop to ask yourselves what the right aim of athletics is—what the chief aim should be? Some of you will answer: ‘That’s easy; the chief aim of athletics is winning.’ Wrong; the true aim of all athletics, the world around, is physical culture. Winning is of small importance; contests are only incentives. We go in for athletics because we wish to attain to a condition of physical fitness that will allow us to make the most of our lives. Athletics without training is useless; it will accomplish almost nothing good. I use the word training here in its fullest meaning: moderation in diet and exercise, temperance and regularity in daily life, cleanliness and self-restraint. We train in order that the actual athletics will benefit us. I might go through the most approved course of chest-weight and dumb-bell exercise, but if, as soon as it was over, I went to the table and stuffed my stomach full of indigestible food, drank a lot of liquor, smoked a lot of cigarettes or cigars, stayed up every night until one or two o’clock, took no outdoor exercise and breathed impure air all day, why, I might as well let the chest weights alone so far as any benefit is concerned. Athletics require training, whether we are going to compete in sports or not; and training means power to perform hard tasks with a modicum of fatigue and often with enjoyment; it enables the body to endure hardships, heat, cold, or fasting, without becoming endangered, and it clears the cobwebs out of the brain.
“Unusual strains without previous preparation will often prove injurious. Training prepares us for those strains; our ability to meet them increases as the training advances. The best training is that which trains all parts of the body in unison. Don’t allow your exercise to develop one physical portion of your body at the cost of any other; because you are going to throw weights don’t neglect your leg muscles; because you are going to try for the one-hundred-yard dash don’t neglect your arms. In short, avoid becoming a ‘specialist’ as much as possible. Keep in mind the fact that general health and not success at one feat is the end of athletic training.
“I’m doing a good deal more talking than I intended to, and I dare say I’m boring you badly, just as I feared I should. But there is one more thing that I want to touch on while I’ve got you where you can’t get away, and that——”
“Go on! We like it!” shouted a boy at the back of the room; and the audience clapped and laughed its approval.
“Well, that’s very good of you,” Remsen continued smilingly. “But I’m about through. If I was—well, a kind of athletic dictator in this country, I should require from every fellow a verbal signature to this pledge: ‘I will always play fair!’ It isn’t a very long pledge, but it means a good deal, as you will see if you’ll consider it. If every schoolboy, whether an athlete or a grind, and every college man would sign it and stick to it, we’d never hear of one school’s having ‘severed athletic relations’ with another; there’d be no brawling in football games, and we’d never see the charge of professionalism brought against a college. And it is a pledge that we need not leave behind us when we graduate; it’s a good pledge to stick to right through life.
“I have no fault to find with Hillton athletes on the score of unfairness. I earnestly believe that athletics are pure here; but I’m not going to assume any ‘holier than thou’ attitude; and I hope you won’t. Let us keep them as pure as we can and give an unobtrusive lesson to other schools—yes, and colleges. That’s all I’ve got to say, fellows. I thank you for listening so kindly.”