If games are so good for the health, why does one see so many young men with round backs and contracted chests, and heads poking forward, in England?
Until the war is forgotten, shooting men will be considered as making better use of their time than players of games, and the latter will not consider themselves superior to all others, and, figuratively speaking, carve footballs on the tombs of their heroes (as the feet were crossed on the tombs of crusaders) to indicate the greatest deed of the deceased.
A great deal of this worship of “Sports” is the confusion, owing to the similarity of the sound and spelling, between “sport” and “sports.”
“Sport” is the backbone of all manhood. It is the hunting instinct inherent in all healthy, normal males; it means the cultivation of skill in shooting and horsemanship, and men proficient in it are ready to rise in the defence of their country.
This is what “sport” means. Now, however, the term “sportsman” is employed to mean a man who has never fired a shot or swung his leg over a horse, but one who is merely a kicker or hitter of balls, or worse, one who sits sucking at a cigarette watching others playing games. The things he indulges in are called “sports,” and it is “sports” which, before the war, were considered to overshadow all else, and were taught at schools and colleges.
A feeble old man, past active participation in “sport” can be, of course, excused if he keeps himself in health by playing golf, but a healthy young man should shoot or ride.
The general public, not knowing the training necessary before a man can either shoot or ride, imagines that there is no necessity to learn either.
They think that the moment a man puts on a military uniform he can ride in a cavalry charge, break wild horses, or hit a man a thousand yards off with either pistol or rifle.
Besides the absence of skill in shooting, there is not in such men the instinct to shoot.
A shooting man has in him the instinct of shooting, so innate that he aims and presses the trigger as instinctively as he lifts his foot when stepping off the road on to the curb.