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IX

PANEM ET CIRCENSES1

RICHARD RICE, JR.

In one of the great American universities there used to prevail a curious fashion, now abandoned, of heartening the 'varsity football team. Every afternoon during the week or ten days before the chief contest, the whole student body and a strong following of citizens marched in column from the campus to attend practise. With flags and trophies on high they paraded behind a brass band, encircled the gridiron a number of times, and then spent two hours on the bleachers glorying and cheering, while the evolutions of the 'varsity continued. Moreover, these last exercises, before the team went forth to victory or defeat, were only the culmination of a season-long performance in which the rest of the undergraduates appeared to have almost as important a daily part as the players themselves. The notion was generally encouraged that the team could do nothing at practise without a crowd of vociferous admirers. An undergraduate who failed to support this theory was generally known as a "quitter"; and, indeed, if he wanted to be thought a man of college spirit, the only obvious way was to attend practise assiduously and talk about it copiously-and very little else from the first days of the season. The real state of the case can perhaps be judged by

1Reprinted in part from an article in The Nation, through the courtesy of The Nation.

the fact that playing tennis or taking a country walk during the 'varsity practise hours was "the very worst form.”

Then the university got a new president, and all this changed. The new president was very popular; but he played golf every afternoon himself, and believed that the purpose of a university is intellect. He saw some connection between intellect and sport, very little between intellect and bleachers.

I

Those who know American colleges throughout the land have long realized that there are, in comparison to the total number of students, few players of games. Especially in the West sport is limited almost entirely to the socalled representative teams, which represent the name of the institution, but not an atmosphere of sportsmanship. At the most these teams are products of the anxiety of students to beat their rivals, and of an executive plan to achieve in this way a necessary amount of publicity. They are not products of intramural competition and of personal interest in the playing of games. It appears as if the prowess of the 'varsity team satisfied the athletic aspirations of all the other students.

That such a condition is bad for the tone of a college not everybody is ready to admit. There is an opinion that because the purpose of the college is intellect and study, then the more limited the athletic class the better for the institution. But this is a judgment based on a misconception of what athletics mean, a misconception fostered by the wide-spread indifference of undergraduates to the right sort of athletics. It is our general contention here that an academic institution will be sounder intel

lectually if sport is prevalent or, at least, not limited to the so-called "representative" few, the specialists.

This we believe to be true for two reasons. Sport within the walls, popular athletic activity, offers a stimulating variety of personal employment and interest, a zest for living, and a means for clean physical health. Where the playing of games is prevalent, the tone of the whole student body is more alert, more vigorous and sane. This is the obvious and positive reason. The other reason is negative, and, though more difficult to grasp, is equally in point. Where 'varsity sport is not the outgrowth of general athletic activity, or where it seems to absorb all athletic enthusiasm without being productive of individual sportsmanship in the rank and file of students, where it is the advertisement instead of the real thing, it becomes antagonistic to intellect and study, because it furnishes a second-rate employment to the main body of students, and a second-hand diversion. Vicarious athletics on the bleachers, attending practise, "heeling the team," talking athletics, breathing athletics, without some daily personal realization of the matter, may well promote an aptitude for mental inertia. Panem et circenses-peanuts and ball games! Where the teams furnish the only games, sport is merely a show. It lacks the chief effects of play. The tone it lends to an institution is mainly the noise of a welldrilled college yell. And it does little for the individual student except that, when his team wins, his own chest expansion is vicariously increased.

This latter reason is especially weighty because it describes the trouble not only with college athletics, but with American athletics in general. It describes what is growing to be our national outlook on sport, the grand-stand outlook. This point of view, which college students ought

not to assume but to correct, is the result of so professionalizing, or highly specializing, our chief games that nobody but experts play them. The fact that this undoubtedly helps produce our great specialists, our winners at Olympic games, is beside the present point. We may have the greatest experts in the world; but as a nation our interest is centred in these experts, not in the games. We have become, even in our colleges, not sportsmen but "fans."

Now, of course, there is plenty of room for the "fan," and outside college days he is a humorous and commendable institution. On sweltering afternoons in Pittsburgh or Kansas City, it is entirely in keeping that he should take his exercise in the shade of the grand-stand, and become, by continual assistance there and by continual study of the Sunday Supplement, a very great authority. But nobody would dream of calling the "fan" a sportsman. He is, on the contrary, only a "sport," which is a term, if you will look it up in the dictionary, that means "an anomaly, a divergence from the species." The "sport," and especially the college "sport," is not the real thing. Yet part of the perversion of our attitude toward athletics comes, in this case, either from imagining that without him there would be no sportsmanship at all, or—if we are especially obtuse-from thinking that the "sport" or the "fan" is himself the representative American athlete. But the second case is so absurd that we already catch a glimpse of the fallacy in the first.

When rightly understood, this fallacy reveals the fact, intimated before, that the grand-stand athlete is primarily not the cause of our present evil situation, but rather a result. He may, of course, become a positive reason for failure to eradicate the cause, since he is so profitable. But the prime

reason why we have not a greater number of sportsmen in sport, why so few people themselves play games for the fun of it, why the entertainment of the "fan," viz., high specialization, is growing to be even in colleges the chief consideration, is not the "fan's" fanaticism, but our national miscomprehension of the true spirit of play-our ignorance of how to keep games in their playable form.

Think, for example, how we have improved the good game of football till nobody but trained and armed specialists dare to play it. Englishmen had invented eminently playable forms of this game, in which anybody with legs and lungs might be expected to take part. Nearly every English village and town, as well as the colleges, has its teams for soccer and Rugby, and hundreds of Englishmen are playing these two games every autumn afternoon, where hundreds of Americans are only looking on. The reason for this difference is not climate; it is a simpler reason. We took these playable games of football and reduced them, with more cleverness than foresight, to one type of extreme difficulty and considerable danger. It is a game that requires far more skill in leadership, in preconcerted plans and secret signals, in thorough training and team-play, than any of the English games. It is, in fact, a game that can be played with profit only by regularly coached teams of men who enjoy constitutions that occur in most families but once in several generations. It is not a popular game; it is only a spectacular game. The people do not play football in America.

Like Americans, in regard to most of our national sports, we say: "Let George do it; we'll watch." But thus specialized, with all eyes on him, George is no longer the player of a game; he is a man burdened with a tremendous duty, the duty of being a representative athlete. This duty

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