AMERICAN COLLEGE ATHLETICS.
II. YALE UNIVERSITY.
BY RICHARD M. HURD,
Author of “A History of Yale Athletics.”
YALE student life has changed much in all aspects since the beginning of the present century, but in no respect has the advance been more marked, or the evolution more complete, than in the department of athletics.
The picture of the Yale student of eighty years ago, to whom the words “physical culture” were unknown, and whose ideas of out-of-door exercise were limited to an impromptu running or jumping contest, a game of “one-old-cat,” or the kicking of a football, forms the strongest contrast to the present Yale undergraduate life, with its five branches of intercollegiate sports, its long and arduous months of preparation for a contest, its highly organized system of management, and its yearly expenditure of thousands of dollars. The difference between what athletics meant to the student of that period, and what they mean to-day, presents a more striking contrast, however, than the change in their mere outward form. They were then passing amusements, acting as a safety-valve for exuberant spirits; they are now serious and absorbing pursuits scientifically studied, to which are devoted the highest qualities of courage, skill and endurance in their accomplishment, the greatest resources of experience, foresight and generalship in their command, and the best organizing and business ability in their management to be obtained in the undergraduate body. In a word, the contrast lies between the student world of the old days, which directed its best efforts into channels mapped out and set before it by authority, and the body of modern students who find in all the duties connected with athletics, the opportunities to develop by actual experience, untrammeled by supervision, those qualities, of physique, of organization, or of command, to which their tastes most tend.
To forge, then, the connecting links between the Yale athletics of 1800 and those of to-day, and to show how the latter have gradually grown out of the former, will be the purpose of this article.
Regarding it as settled that the sports of our predecessors were confined to “one-old-cat,” or the kicking of a football, the first indication of any interest in athletics occurs in 1826, when the corporation appropriated $300 to erect gymnastic apparatus upon an uncovered piece of ground. About 1840 there sprang up an annual game of football between the sophomore and freshman classes, which has survived to the present day in the form of an annual “rush.” To call this class scrimmage football is a decided stretching of the term, as may be judged from the contemporary description of a game whose participants, attired in a unique grotesqueness of style, and with faces painted in all imaginable hues, formed wedges and phalanxes, and charged and scrambled with a most healthy rivalry, but in whom all knowledge of football was evidently lacking.