But if you won’t concede, in the face of the fans’ own statement, that it is recreation to look on at baseball or any other sport, then let me ask you to invite to your home some evening, not a mere spectator, but an active participant in any of our popular games—say a champion or near-champion golfer, or a first string pitcher on a big league baseball club. The golfer, let us say, sells insurance half the year and golfs the rest. The pitcher plays eight months of the year and loafs the other four. Bar conversation about their specialty, and you won’t find two duller boys than those outside the motion-picture studios.
No, brothers, the bright minds of this or any other country are owned by the men who leave off work only to eat or go to bed. The doodles are the boys who divide their time fifty-fifty between work and play, or who play all the time and don’t even pretend to work. Proper exercise undoubtedly promotes good health, but the theory that good health and an active brain are inseparable can be shot full of holes by the mention of two names—Stanislaus Zbyzsk and Robert Louis Stevenson.
It is silly, then, to propound that sport is of mental benefit. Its true, basic function is the cultivation of bodily vigour, with a view to longevity. And longevity, despite the fact that we profess belief in a post-mortem existence that makes this one look sick, is a thing we poignantly desire. Bonehead and wise guy, believer and sceptic—all of us want to postpone as long as possible the promised joy-ride to the Great Beyond. If to participate in sport helps us to do that, then there is good reason to participate in sport.
Well, how many “grown-ups” (normal human beings of twenty-two and under need not be considered; they get all the exercise they require, and then some) in this country, a country that boasts champions in nearly every branch of athletics, derive from play the physical benefit there is in it? What percentage take an active part in what the sporting editors call “the five major sports”—baseball, football, boxing, horse racing, and golf? Let us take them one by one and figure it out, beginning with “the national pastime.”
Baseball. Twenty or twenty-one play. Three hundred to forty thousand look on. The latter are, for two hours, “out in the open air,” and this, when the air is not so open as to give them pneumonia and when they don’t catch something as bad or worse in the street-car or subway train that takes them and brings them back, is a physical benefit. Moreover, the habitual attendant at ball-games is not likely to die of brain fever. But otherwise, the only ones whose health is appreciably promoted are the twenty or twenty-one who play. And they are not doing it for their health.
Football. Thirty play. Thirty thousand look on. One or two of the thirty may be killed or suffer a broken bone, but the general health of the other twenty-nine or twenty-eight is improved by the exercise. As for the thirty thousand, all they get is the open air—usually a little too much of it—and, unless they are hardened to the present-day cheer-leader, a slight feeling of nausea.
Boxing. Eight to ten play. Five thousand to sixty thousand look on. Those of the participants who are masters of defence may profit physically by the training, though the rigorous methods sometimes employed to make an unnatural weight are certainly inimical to health. The ones not expert in defensive boxing, the ones who succeed in the game through their ability to “take punishment” (a trait that usually goes with a low mentality) die, as a rule, before reaching old age, as a result of the “gameness” that made them “successful.” There is a limit to the number of punches one can “take” and retain one’s health. The five or sixty thousand cannot boast that they even get the air. All but a few of the shows are given indoors, in an atmosphere as fresh and clean as that of the Gopher Prairie day-coach.
Horse Racing. Fifty horses and twenty-five jockeys play. Ten thousand people look on. I can’t speak for the horses, but if a jockey wants to remain a jockey, he must, as a rule, eat a great deal less than his little stomach craves, and I don’t know of any doctor who prescribes constant underfeeding as conducive to good health in a growing boy.
Racing fans, of course, are out for financial, not physical, gain. They, like the jockeys, are likely to starve to death while still young.
Golf. Here is a pastime in which the players far outnumber the lookers-on. It is a game, if it is a game, that not only takes you out in the open air, but makes you walk, and walking, the doctors say, is all the exercise you need, if you walk five miles or more a day. Golf, then, is really beneficial, and it costs you about $25.00 a week the year round.