While football is a fine, manly sport, the objectors have good reason on
their side for wishing to suppress it.
A good many young fellows seem to forget the true sporting spirit in
which they should play the game, and to use it as a means for paying off
old grudges.
If they cannot rise above their own feelings in the game, the sooner it
is forbidden the better.
A statement from a noted Harvard Right Tackle has appeared, which is so
shocking to all true sportsmen that they can but feel that Georgia's
example cannot too soon be followed by the other States.
This statement is in reference to a famous game played in 1889. It says
that in the rival team was a man who had been the Right Tackle's
unsuccessful rival at a preparatory college. In the course of the game
this man walked deliberately up to the Right Tackle, kicked him
severely, then limping off to the umpire, complained that the Harvard
man had kicked him. The Harvard man was ruled out of the game, and as he
left the field his rival again approached him, and said: "I've got even
for that old grudge at ---- College." The Harvard man knocked him down,
and that ended the matter.
It seems incredible that men calling themselves gentlemen should not
only do such things, but speak of them unconcernedly afterward.
In England, which is the home of football, the game is rough enough, but
kicking or "hacking," as it is called, is not allowed, and the man who
would deliberately strike or seek to injure another in the course of a
game on account of a private grudge would be forced to leave college and
hounded out of society. The love of sport for sport's sake is so well
developed in England that a man would be disgraced for life who would so
far forget himself as to permit any such exhibition as the one quoted
above.