Athletics and Morals

FEBRUARY, 1914

AMONG the impersonal forces which mould the character of boys at boarding-school athletics takes first rank. At college this dominance, although less complete, still persists. Yet it is not too much to say that, if the current standard of athletic honor were applied to other undergraduate interests, the training of American youth would border on demoralization. Sit among the college ’rooters’ and listen to the running comments on a game; join a gymnasium group of schoolboy coaches, and you will gauge the influences at work. In many schools and colleges, particularly in the East, there has been of late years intermittent but decided improvement. Certain brutalities of football have been expunged or modified. The personnel of baseball teams has been confined more closely to the body of genuine students. But it can be soberly stated that underhand, perverted, and dishonest practices are, with honorable exceptions, still part and parcel of undergraduate athletics.

School and college are not mere tiny subdivisions of society. They bear no relation to the natural universe. They are separate worlds, as artificially administered as any laboratory. Outside the barriers of youth we are accustomed to base the laws we make on public opinion; within them the community is compelled to accept an alien code, but its opinion remains its own and the two are in sharp contrast. Nor does public opinion within school or college bear any real relation to opinion in the world at large. The product of an artificial system, it is wholly artificial in itself, based on a curious medley of prejudice and idealism, of romantic honor and highly technical discrimination. Of schools it may be said, with no disrespect to teachers, that the body of boyish opinion teaches lessons beyond their power to impart. And of colleges a similar statement would not be far from accurate. To shape this opinion, or rather, to use it wisely and with discretion, is, I believe, the larger part of the unsolved problem of education.

Youth is radical, and, at the same time, it is conservative beyond the furthest reach of Toryism. Was there ever a collegian who turned his hat up and his trousers down when custom prescribed a contrary procedure? It is hard to realize the fixity of student opinion once it has run into the mould. A code of behavior may be established in a year; in two it becomes a mark of caste; in four it is immemorial precedent. And, yet, a sudden shaft of idealism will transfix a school or college and alter opinion over night. The tonic effect of an honest captaincy upon a school team is one of the most exhilarating phenomena of school life.

So much is familiar to those who have kept young by knowing youth. It is in the light of these conditions that I should like to consider the question of athletics and morals in a brief introduction to the more deserving papers by the headmaster of Phillips Academy at Andover, and by Professor Stewart of Idaho, which follow in this number.

It is a rule with few exceptions, that the standard of school and college athletics runs level with the standard of public opinion in school and college. Coaches may introduce dirty tricks; an occasional team may be willing to buy a victory at any price; but, in the last analysis, undergraduate policy and action are determined by social rewards and social penalties. If the feeling once gets abroad that a championship has been too dearly bought, the high price will not be paid a second time.

Not many years ago standards of honor in the classroom were not much higher than those on the athletic field to-day. The problem then was much like the problem now. It was solved, not by imposing additional regulations upon the students, but by allowing them to regulate themselves. The tone of student honesty conforms to the public opinion set in the last analysis by a small group of the older and abler boys. If you subject that group to the influences of the larger body, you will have a public opinion less strained and more responsive to the healthy reaction of the normal mind. Thanks to social discipline the Honor System has triumphed in the examination room: if athletics was generally under the supervision of student councils, directly responsible to the student body, discussion would take a different turn and honesty would follow fast. Dishonesty never throve on publicity, and never will.

Consider for a moment the condition of the student mind regarding athletics. If a boy moves his golf-ball ever so gently and thereby improves its lie, detection in the act means social annihilation. But note the delicate graduation of the criminal code. If the same boy habitually plays off-side at hockey, he incurs dislike. But if he trips his opponent at football, or saves a run at baseball by unfair blocking, why, then it is merely a question for the umpire to decide.

The memory of men still young is not taxed to recall the time when technical distinctions of like nicety generally prevailed in college tests. To cheat for a ‘gentleman’s pass’ was one thing; to cheat for honors quite another. In the latter instance you might be defrauding a competitor; in the former you were simply justifying your right to live. To lie to the Dean seemed about as reprehensible as thanking your hostess for a dull party.

Much blame to-day is showered on professional coaches.¹ Statistics in such matters are naturally not available, but I gravely question whether, when a man’s professional career is involved, there is not less danger of dishonest instruction than when a graduate is called upon to pull a team together for a single season. Again, when popular indignation does pursue an infringement of athletic integrity, it commonly concerns itself with the academic status of the players. If a college athlete uses his single talent and plays ball for a living during I the summer vacation, then the amateur spirit is troubled as tricking the umpire never troubles it. I do not defend the encroachment of the professional into the amateur field; I deplore it; but I maintain that our American spirit of sport concerns itself more with technicalities than with that single-minded devotion which gives to the word amateur the full significance of the lover who follows sports for sport’s own sake.

I have spoken of the moral technicalities of athletics. Even persons with a maturer moral code than student honor may well be puzzled by them. In one of his admirable essays on athletics and decency, Dean Briggs gives an amusing instance of a Harvard endrush, in the pink of condition, who limped through a hard game, allowing his knee to impersonate, so to speak, the injured joint of the other end, whose weakness had been heralded in the enemy’s camp, and, by his acting, deluded his adversaries into attacking his line at its strongest instead of its weakest point. A stratagem, not dissimilar, won eternal renown for the last of the Horatii some twenty-five hundred years before. But, against the deceitful end, it can now be argued that sport is not war, whether it seems like it or not; and that the kind of strategy he practiced is as far outside the proper domain of football as would be the screech of a tennis-player calculated to distract his adversary at a critical moment.

It is not alleged, but I believe it to be felt, by young men and boys, that when a member of a team breaks a rule or otherwise takes an unfair advantage in a game, he does so for the sake of his school or college and with no personal end in view, thus placing himself on a moral height infinitely above that of a player who cheats for his own advantage. The fallacy involved seems to us too ludicrous to require comment; one must be a boy again to realize the intensity of the tradition that demands victory for the ‘honor’ of the school.

In all the questioning regarding athletics, one thing must never be forgotten, and that is its great, its almost essential importance in education. The progress of civilization means many good things, but it also means that luxuries are sinking into comforts and comforts into necessities. What Miss Repplier says is true: we are losing our nerve. It is a process more widespread, more insidious, than most of us like to believe, and the forces which battle against it are for the most part sporadic and desultory. Among boys to-day athletics is the only systematic training for the sterner life, the only organized ‘moral equivalent of war.’ As every good schoolmaster knows, there is no other substitute for the ancient austerities. No other artificial discipline is so efficient, no vent so wholesome, for the turbulent energies of youth. Athletics must be purified, for athletics must stay. The boy must still obey the expectation of his mates and play; he must not misinterpret the perilous command, ‘Play to win.’

We seem very far away from a generous rivalry of noble sport. Forgetting that the world is growing better, we like to hark back to the Golden Age which never was, and recall some heroic incident which shows the possibilities that lie ahead. Years ago two college teams, intensest of rivals, were playing the decisive game of a baseball series. It was the end of the ninth. One team led by a single run, but the other, with two men out, had two men on bases. Then the batter knocked a Homeric fly to the remotest field. The two runners dashed home. Far to the right, close to the outer fence, a fielder, still famous in song and legend, flew toward the ball. Could he reach it? Not a groan broke the stillness. He is close to it! He is under it! Ye Gods of the Nine Innings, he’s got it! No! He’s down! His cleat has tripped him. Over and over again he rolls. Now he’s up, and there, clutched in his right hand, is the ball.

Did he catch it? Did he hold it? No mortal umpire could ever tell. A roar of protest went up from the benches on the left. With all the dignity of the National League upon him, the umpire waved to the rocking bleachers to be quiet, so that his decision might be heard. But that decision was never given. Sullivan, captain of the team at the bat,— Sullivan, who was a millhand before he climbed the heights of Olympus, —understood the amateur spirit. Disregarding the umpire he ran toward the incoming fielder, and, in the agony of prolonged suspense, cried aloud, ‘Honest to God, Chick, did you catch it?’

And Chick, the hero, answered, ‘ Honest to God, Sully, I did.’

And so the game was won in the days before coaching was made perfect.