The Game

I

OFTEN I think how monotonous life must be to Jerome D. Travers or Francis Ouimet, — compared, that is, with what life can offer to a player of my quality. When Travers drives off, it is a question whether the ball will go 245 yards or 260 yards; and a difference of fifteen yards is obviously nothing to thrill over. Whereas, when I send the ball from the tee the possible range of variation is always 100 yards, running from 155 down to 55; provided’, that is, that the ball starts at all. To me there is always a freshness of surprise in having the club meet the ball, which Travers, I dare say, has not experienced in the last, dozen years.

With him, of course, it is not sport, but mathematics. A wooden club will give one result, an iron another. The sensation of getting greater distance with a putting iron than with a brassie is something Ouimet can hardly look forward to. Always mathematics, with this kind of swing laying the ball fifteen feet on the farther side of the hole, and that kind of chop laying it ten feel, on the nearer side. I have frequently thought that playing off the finals for the golf championship is a waste of time. All that is necessary is to call in Professor Münsterberg and have him test Travers’s blood-pressure and reaction index on the morning of the game, and then take ‘Chick’ Evans’s blood-pressure and reaction index. The referee would then award the game to Travers or to Evans by 2 up and 1 to play, or whatever score Professor Münsterberg’s figures would indicate.

The true zest of play is for the duffer. When he swings club or racket he can never tell what miracles of accomplishment or negation it will perform. That is not an inanimate instrument he holds in his hands, but a living companion, a totem comrade whom he is impelled to propitiate, as Hiawatha crooned to his arrow before letting it fly from the string. And that is why duffers are peculiarly qualified to write about games, or for that matter, about everything, — literature, music, or art, — as they have always done. To be sufficiently inexpert in anything is to be filled with corresponding awe at the hidden soul in that thing. To be sufficiently removed from perfection is to worship it. Poets, for example, arc preëminently the interpreters of life because they make such an awful mess of the practice of living. And for the same reason poets always retain the zest of life — because the poet, never knows whether his next shot will land him on the green or in the sandpit, in heaven or in the gutter. The reader will now be aware that, in describing my status as a golfer I am not making a suicidal confession. On the contrary, I am presenting my credentials.

II

A great many people have been searching during ever so many years for the religion of democracy. I believe I have found it. That is, not a religion, if by it you mean a system completely equipped with creed, formularies, organization, home and foreign missions, schisms, an empty-church problem, an underpaid-minister’s problem, a Socialist and I.W.W. problem, and the like; although, if I had the time to pursue my researches, I might find a parallel to many of these things. What I have in mind is a great democratic rite, a ceremonial which is solemnized on six days in the week during six months in the year by large masses of men with such unfailing regularity and such unquestioning good faith that I cannot help thinking of it as essentially a religious performance.

It is a simple ceremonial, but impressive, like all manifestations of the soul of a multitude. I need only close my eyes to call up the picture vividly: It is a day of brilliant sunshine and a great crowd of men is seated in the open air, a crowd made up of all conditions, ages, races, temperaments, and states of mind. The crowd has sat there an hour or more, while the afternoon sun has slanted deeper into the west and the shadows have crept across greensward and hard-baked clay to the eastern horizon. Then, almost with a single motion, — the time may be somewhere between four-thirty and five o’clock, this multitude of divers minds and tempers rises to its feet and stands silent, while one might count twenty perhaps. Nothing is said; no high priest intones prayer for this vast congregation; nevertheless the impulse of ten thousand hearts is obviously focused into a single desire. When you have counted twenty the crowd sinks back to the benches. A half minute at most and the rite is over.

I am speaking, of course, of the second half of the seventh inning, when the home team comes to bat. The precise nature of this religious half-minute depends on the score. If the home team holds a safe lead of three or four runs; if the home pitcher continues to have everything, and the infield shows no sign of cracking, and the outfield isn’t bothered by the sun, then I always imagine a fervent Te Deum arising from that inarticulate multitude, and the peace of a great contentment falling over men’s spirits as they settle back in their seats. If the game is in the balance you must imagine the concentration of ten thousand wills on the spirit of the nine athletes in the field, ten thousand wills telepathically pouring their energies into the powerful arm of the man in the box, into the quick eye of the man on first base, and the sense of justice of the umpire.

But if the outlook for victory is gloomy, the rite does not end with the silent prayer I have described. As the crowd subsides to the benches there arises a chant which I presume harks back to the primitive litanies of the Congo forests. Voices intone unkind words addressed to the players on the other team. Ten thousand voices chanting in unison for victory, twenty thousand feet stamping confusion to the opposing pitcher — if this is not worship of the most fundamental sort, because of the most primitive sort, then what is religion?

Consider the mere number of participants in this national rite of the seventh inning. I have said a multitude of ten thousand. But if the day be Saturday and the place of worship one of the big cities of either of the major leagues, the crowd may easily be twice as large. And all over the country at almost the same moment, exultant or hopeful or despairing multitudes are rising to their feet. Multiply this number of worshipers by six days — or by seven days if you are west of the Alleghanies, where Sunday baseball has somehow been reconciled with a still vigorous Puritanism — and it is apparent that a continuous wave of spiritual ardor sweeps over this continent between three-thirty and six P.M. from the middle of April to the middle of October. We can only guess at the total number of worshipers. The three major leagues will account for five millions. Add the minor leagues and the state leagues and the interurban contests — anti the total of seventh-inning communicants grows overwhelming. Take the twenty-live million males of voting age in this country, assume one visit per head to a baseball park in the season, and the result is dazzling.

It is easier to estimate the number of worshipers than the intensity of the mood. I have no gauge for measuring the spiritual fervor which exhales on the baseball stadiums of the country from mid-April to mid-October, growing in ardor with the procession of the months, until it attains a climax of orgiastic frenzy in the World’s Series. Foreigners are in the habit of calling this an unspiritual nation. But what nation so frequently tastes — or for that matter has ever tasted — the emotional experience of the score tied in the ninthinning with the bases full? Foreigners call us an unspiritual people because they do not know the meaning of a double-header late in September — a double-header with two seventh innings.

I began by renouncing any claim to the discovery of a complete religion of democracy. But the temptation to point out parallels is irresistible. If Dr. Frazer had not finished with his Golden Bough, — or if he is thinking of a supplementary volume, — I can see how easily the raw material of the sporting columns would shape itself to religious forces and systems in his hands. If religious ceremonial has its origin in the play instinct of man, why go back to remote origins like the Australian corroboree and neglect Ty Cobb stealing second? If religion has its origin in primitive man’s worship of the eternal rebirth of earth’s fructifying powers with the advent of spring, how can we neglect the vivid stirring in the hearts of millions that marks the departure of the teams for spring training in Texas?

If I were a trained professional sociologist instead of a mere spectator at the Polo grounds, it seems to me that I should have little trouble in tracing the history of the game several thousand years back of its commonly accepted origin somewhere about 1830. I could easily trace back the catcher’s mask to the mask worn by the medicine-man among the Swahili of the West Coast. The three bases and home-plate would easily be the points of the compass, going straight back to the sun myth. Murray pulling down a fly in left field would hark back straight to Zoroaster and the sun-worshipers. Millions of primitive hunters must have anointed, and prayed to, their weapons before Jeff Tesreau addressed his invocation to the spit ball; and when Mathewson winds himself up for delivering the ball, he is not far removed from the sacred warrior dancer of Polynesia. If only I were a sociologist!

An ideal faith, this religion of baseball, the more you examine it. See, for instance, how it satisfies the prime requirement of a true faith that it shall ever be present in the hearts of the faithful; practiced not once a week on Sunday, but six times a week — and in the West seven times a week; professed not only in the appointed place of worship, but in the Subway before the game, and in the Subway after the game, and in the offices and shops and factories on rainy days. If a true religion is that for which a man will give up wife and children and forget the call of meat and drink, what shall we say of baseball? If a true religion is not dependent on æsthetic trappings, but voices itself under the open sky and among the furniture of common life, this is again the true religion. The stadium lies open to the sun, the rain, and the wind. The mystic sense is not stimulated by Gothic roof-traceries and the dimmed light of stained-glass windows. The congregation rises from wooden benches on a concrete flooring; it stands in the full light of a summer afternoon and lets its eyes rest on walls of billboards reminiscent of familiar things, — linen collars, table-waters, tobacco, safety-razors. Unquestionably we have here a clear, dry, real religion of the kind that Bernard Shaw would approve.

I have said quite enough on this point. Otherwise I should take time to show how this national faith has created its own architecture, as all great religions have done. Our national contribution to the building arts has so far been confined to two forms — the skyscraper and the baseball stadium, corresponding precisely to the two great religions of business and of play. I know that the Greeks and Romans had amphitheatres, and that the word stadium is not of native origin. But between the Coliseum and the baseball park there is all the difference that lies between imperialism and democracy. The ancient amphitheatres were built as much for monuments as for playgrounds. Consequently they were impressed with an æsthetic character which is totally repugnant to our idea of a baseball park.

There is no spiritual resemblance between Vespasian’s amphitheatre with its stone and marble, its galleries and imperial tribunes, its purple canvases stretched out against the sun — and our own Polo grounds. Iron girders, green wooden benches, and a back fence frescoed with safety-razors and ready-made clothing — what more would a modern man have? The ancient amphitheatres were built for slaves who had to be flattered and amused by pretty things. The baseball park is for freemen who pay for their pleasures and can afford the ugliest that money can buy.

III

The art of keeping my eye on the ball is something I no longer have hope of mastering. If I fail to watch the ball it is because I am continually watching faces about me. The same habit pursues me on the street, and in all public places — usually with unpleasant consequences, though now and then I have the reward of catching the reflection of a great, event or a tense moment in the face of the man next to me. Then, indeed, I am repaid; but it is a procedure fatal to the scientific pursuit of baseball. While I am hunting in the face of the man next to me for the reflection of Doyle’s stinging single between first and second base, I hear a roar and turn to find that something dramatic has happened at third, and a stout young man in a green hat behind me says that the runner was out by a yard and should be benched for trying to spike the man on the bag.

The eagle vision of the stout young man behind me always fills me with amazement and envy. I concede his superior knowledge of the game. He knows every man on the field by his walk. He recalls under what circumstances the identical play was pulled off three years ago in Philadelphia. He knows beforehand just at what moment Mr. Chance will take his left fielder out of the game and send in a ‘pinch hitter.’ Long years of steady application will no doubt supply this kind of post-graduate expertship. But when it is a question, not of theory, but of a simple, concrete play which I did happen to be watching carefully, how is it that the man behind me can see that the runner was out by a yard and had nearly spiked the man on the bag, whereas all I can see is a tangle of legs and arms and a cloud of dust? My eyesight is normal; how does my neighbor manage to see all that he does as quickly as he does?

The answer is that he does not see. When he declares that the runner was out by a yard, and I turn around and regard him with envy, it is a comfort to have the umpire decide that the runner was safe after all. It is a comfort to hear the man behind me say that the ball cut the plate squarely, and to have the umpire call it a ball. It shakes my faith somewhat in human nature, but it strengthens my self-confidence. Yet it fails to shake the self-confidence of the man behind me. When I turn about to see his crestfallen face, I find him chewing peanut brittle in a state of supreme calm, and as I stare at him, fascinated by such peace of mind in the face of discomfiture, I hear a yell and turn to find the third baseman and all the outfield congregated near the left bleachers. I have made a psychological observation, but have missed the beginning of a double play.

My chagrin is temporary. As the game goes on my self-confidence grows enormously. I am awakening to the fact that the man behind me knows as little about the game as I do. When the pitcher of the visiting team delivered the first ball of the first inning, the man behind me remarked that the pitcher did n’t have anything. My neighbor could tell by the pitcher’s arm action that he was stale, and he recalled that the pitcher in question never did last more than half a game. This declaration of absolute belief did not stand in the way of a contradictory remark, made some time in the fifthinning, with our team held so far to two scratch hits. The stout, young man behind me then said that the visiting pitcher was a wonder, that he had everything, that he would keep on fanning them till the cows came home, and that he was, in fact, the best southpaw in both leagues, having once struck out eight men in an eleven-inning game at Boston.

When a man gives vent to such obviously irreconcilable statements in less than five innings, it is inevitable that I should turn in my seat to get a square look at him. But I still find him calm and eating peanut brittle; and as I stare at him and try to classify him, the man at the bat does something which brings half the crowd to its feet. By dint of much inquiry I discover that he has rolled a slow grounder to third and has made his base on it. Decidedly, psychology and baseball will not mix.

I suppose the stout young man behind me is a Fan, — provided there is really such a type. My own belief is that the Fan, as the baseball writers and cartoonists have depicted him, is a very rare being. To the extent that he does exist he is the creation, not of the baseball diamond, but of the sporting writer and the comic artist. The Fan models himself consciously upon the typeset before him in his favorite newspaper. It is once more a case of nature imitating art. If Mr. Gibson, many years ago, had not drawn a picture of fat men in shirt-sleeves, perspiring freely and waving straw hats, the newspaper artist would not have imitated Mr. Gibson, and the baseball audience would not have imitated the newspapers. It is true that I have seen baseball crowds in frenzy; but these have been isolated moments of high tension when all of us have been brought to our feet with loud explosions of joy or agony. But the perspiring, ululant Fan in shirt-sleeves, ceaselessly waving his straw hat, uttering imprecations on the enemy, his enthusiasm obviously aroused by stimulants preceding his arrival at the baseball park, is far from being representative of the baseball crowd.

The spirit of the audience is best expressed in quite a different sort of person. He is always to be seen at the Polo grounds, and when I think of baseball audiences it is he who rises before me to the exclusion of his fat, perspiring brother with the straw hat. He is young, tall, slender, wears blue serge, and even on very cool days in the early spring he goes without an overcoat. He sits out the game with folded arms, very erect, thin-lipped, and with the break of a smile around the eyes. He is usually alone, and has little to say. He is not a snob; he will respond to his neighbor’s comments in moments of exceptional emotional stress, but he does not wear his heart on his sleeve.

I imagine him sitting, in very much the same attitude, in college lecturerooms, or taking instructions from the head of the office. Complete absorption under complete control — he fascinates me. While the stout young man behind me chatters on for his own gratification, forgetting one moment what he said the moment before, — an empty-headed young man with a tendency to profanity as the game goes on, — this other trim young figure in blue serge, with folded arms, sits immobile, watching, watching with a calm that must come out of real knowledge and experience, enjoying the thing immensely, but giving no other sign than a sharper glint of the eye, a slight opening of the lips. In a moment of crisis, being only human, he rises with the rest of us, but deliberately, to follow the course of a high fly down the foul line far toward the bleachers. When the ball is caught he smiles and sits down and folds his arms. I envy him his capacity for drinking in enjoyment without display. This is the kind of fan I should like to be.

IV

Does my thin-lipped friend in blue serge read the sporting page? I wonder. My own opinion is that he does not, except to glance through the boxscore. It is for the other man, I imagine, the stout young man behind me who detected from the first ball thrown that the pitcher’s arm was no good, and who later identified him as the best southpaw in the two leagues, that the sporting page with its humor, its philosophy, its art, and its poetry is edited. The sporting page has long ceased to be a mere chronicle of sport and has become an encyclopædia, an anthology, a five-foot book-shelf, a little university in itself. The life mirrored in the pictures on the sporting page is not restricted to the prize ring and the diamond, though the language of the prize ring and the baseball field is its vernacular. The art of the sporting page has expanded beyond the narrow field of play to life itself, viewed as play.

The line of development is plain: from pictures of the Fan at the game the advance has been to pictures of the Fan at home, and so on to his wife and his young, and his Weltanschauung, until now the artist frequently casts aside all pretense of painting sport and draws pictures of humanity. The sporting cartoon has become a social chronicle. It is still found on the sporting page; partly, I suppose, because it originated there, partly because there is no other place in the paper where it can get so wide an audience. It entraps the man in the street who comes to read baseball and remains to study contemporary life— in violent, exaggerated form, but life none the less.

Even poetry. Sporting columns today run heavily to verse. Here, as well as in the pictures, there has been an evolution. From the mere rhymed chronicle of what happened to Christy Mathewson we have passed on to generalized reflections on life, expressed, of course, in terms of the game. Kipling has been the great model. His lilt and his ‘ punch ’ are so admirably adapted to the theme and the audience. How many thousand parodies of ‘Danny Denver’ and ‘The Vampire’ have the sporting editors printed? I should hesitate to say. But Kipling and his younger imitators, with Henley’s ‘Invictus’ and ‘When I was a King in Babylon,’ and the late Langdon Smith’s ‘Evolution’: ‘When I was a Tadpole and You were a Fish’ — have become the patterns for a vast popular poetry which deals in the main with the redblooded virtues, — grit, good humor, and clean hitting, — but which drops with surprising frequency for an optimist race into the mood of Ecclesiastes : —

And the writer goes on to remind the former king of the boxmen that sooner or later ‘Old Pop’ Tempus asks for waivers on the best of us, and that Matty and Johnson must in due time make way for

Yes, you prince of batsmen, who amidst the bleachers’ roar,

alas, Old Pop Tempus has had his way with you, too: —

Not that it matters, of course. The point is to keep on smiling and unafraid in Bushville as under the Main Tent, always doing one’s best

This is evidently something more than a sporting page. This is a cosmology.

V

Will those gentlemen who are in the habit of sneering at professional baseball kindly explain why it is precisely the professional game which has inspired the newspaper poets? Personally I like professional baseball, and for the very reasons why so many persons profess to dislike it. The game is played for money by men who play all the time. They would rather win than lose, but they are not devoured by the passion for victory. They will play with equal zest for Chicago to-day and for Boston to-morrow. But when you say all this you are really asserting what I have discovered to be a fact, — unless Mr. G. K. Chesterton has discovered it before me, — that only in professional sport does the true amateur spirit survive.

By the amateur spirit I mean the spirit which places the game above the victory; which takes joy, though it may be a subdued joy, in the perfect coördination of mind and muscle and nerve; which plays to win because victory is the best available test of ability, but which is all the time aware that life has other interests than the standing of the clubs and the Golf Committee’s official handicap. I contend that the man who plays to live is a better amateur than the man who lives to play. I am not thinking now of the actual amount of time one gives to the game, though even then it might be shown that Mr. Walter J. Travis devotes more hours to golf than Mr. Mathewson devotes to baseball. I am thinking rather of the adjustment of the game to the general scheme of life. It seems to be pretty well established that when your ordinary amateur takes up golf he deteriorates as a citizen, a husband and father; but I cannot imagine Mr. Walter Johnson neglecting his family in his passion for baseball. As between the two, where do you find the true amateur spirit?

I insist. Professional baseball lacks the picturesque and stimulating accessories of an intercollegiate game — the age-old rivalries, the mustering of the classes, the colors, the pretty women, the cheering carried on by young leaders to the verge of apoplexy. But after all, why this Saturnalia of pumped-up emotion over the winning of a game? The winning, it will be observed, and not the playing. Compared with such an exhibition of the lust for victory, a professional game with its emphasis on the performance and not on the result, comes much nearer to the true heart of the play instinct. An old topic this, and a perilous one. Before I know it I shall be advocating the obsolete standards of English sport, which would naturally appeal to a duffer. Well, I will take the consequences and boldly assert that there is such a thing as playing too keenly, —even when playing with perfect fairness, — such a thing as bucking the line too hard.

It is distortion of life values. After all, there are things worth breaking your heart to achieve and others that are not worthwhile. Francis Ouimet’s victory over Vardon and Ray is something we are justly proud of; not so much as a display of golf, but as a display of an unrivaled capacity for rallying all the forces of one’s being to the needs of the moment; for its display of that grit and nerve on which our civilization has been built so largely. Only observe, Ouimet’s victory was magnificent, but it was not play. It was fought in the fierce spirit of the struggle for existence which it is the purpose of play to make us forget. It was Homeric, but who wants baseball or tennis or golf to be Homeric? Herbert Spencer was not merely petulant when he said that to play billiards perfectly argued a misspent life. He stated a profound truth. To play as Ouimet did against Vardon and Ray argues a distortion of the values of life. What shall it profit us if we win games and lose our sense of the proportion of things? It is immoral.

I think Maurice McLoughlin’s hurricane service is immoral. I confess that when McLoughlin soars up from the base line like a combination Mercury and Thor, and pours the entire strength of his lithe, magnificent body through the racket into the ball, it is as beautiful a sight as any of the Greek sculptors have left us. But I cannot share the crowd’s delight when McLoughlin’s opponent stands helpless before that hurtling, twisting missile of fate. What satisfaction is there in developing a tennis service which nobody can return? The natural advantage which the rules of the game confer on the server ceases to be an advantage and becomes merely a triumph of machinery, even if it is human machinery. A game of tennis which is won on aces is opposed to the very spirit of play. As a matter of fact, the crowd admits this when it applauds a sharp rally over the net, for then it is rejoicing in play, whereas applause for an ace is simply joy in winning. I repeat : McLoughlin making one of his magnificent kills on the return is play; McLoughlin making his unreturnable services from placement is merely a scientific engineer — and nothing is more immoral than scientific management, especially when applied to anything really worth while in life. Incidentally, a change in the rules of tennis seems unavoidable. The ball, instead of being handed over to McLoughlin for sure destruction, will have to be thrown into the court by the umpire, as in polo.

VI

You will now see why I am so much drawn to the slender young man in blue serge who sits with folded arms and only smiles when Mr. Doyle is caught napping on first. It is because I am convinced that he sees the game as it ought to be seen, — with an intense sympathy and understanding, but, after all, with a sense of humor which recognizes that a great world lies outside the Polo grounds. You would not think that such a world existed from the way in which the stout young man behind me has been carrying on. It will be recalled that he began by instantly discovering that the visiting pitcher’s arm was no good. This discovery he had modified by the end of the fourth inning to the extent that the visiting pitcher now had everything. At the beginning of the ninth inning this revised opinion still held good. The score was 2 to 0 against the home team, and the stout young man got up in disgust, remarking that he had no use for a bunch of cripples who presumed to go up against a real team.

But he did not go home. He hovered in the aisle, and when the home team, in the second half of the ninth, bunched four hits and won the game, the stout young man hurled himself down the aisle and out upon the field, shrieking madly. But the thin young man in blue serge got to his feet, smiled, made some observation to his neighbor in an undertone, which I failed to catch, and walked out.