THE SPORTSMAN
The Englishman who is not a sportsman dares not mention the
circumstance. In the counties he must shoot and hunt, or be for
ever damned. In the towns he must have daily dealings with a
starting-price bookmaker and hourly news from the race-courses and
the cricket-pitches, otherwise Englishmen decline to know him. "I am
a sportsman, sir," is the English shibboleth. "It is the English love
of manly sports that has made the English paramount in every land and
on every sea." The Lord Chief Justice of England rowed stroke for his
college in Oxford _v._ Cambridge in 1815, otherwise he would not be
Lord Chief Justice of England. At eighteen the Lord Chancellor was
one of the best sprinters of his day, otherwise he would never have
dandled his little legs on the Woolsack. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman
is a keen shot, and was one of a party of seven who made the biggest
bag on record in 1865, otherwise he would never have been Leader of
the Opposition. Mr. Henry Labouchere is one of our most brilliant
and daring steeple-chase riders, otherwise he would never have owned
_Truth_. Mrs. Ormiston Chant is a cricket enthusiast; so are the
Archbishop of Canterbury, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, and Mr. Tommy Bowles.
Lord Roberts can take a hand at croquet with the best young woman out
of Girton, and Mr. John Morley understands a race-horse almost as well
as he understands the Encyclopaedists. In fact, the English eminent are
either sportsmen or nothing, and all the other English follow suit.
Now and again somebody gets up and points out that betting is a great
evil; whereupon the Duke of Devonshire opens one eye and says that he
never had a shilling on a horse in his life. Then everybody says that
horse-racing is good for the breed of horses, employing large amounts
of capital and large numbers of honest persons, and on the whole a
manly and profitable pastime. Incidentally, too, it transpires that
fox-hunting is an equally noble and English form of sport, and that
when farmers cease from puppy-walking, Britain may very well drop the
epithet "Great" from her name. Or perhaps Mr. Kipling, fresh from the
unpleasant truths of South Africa, conceives a distich or two as to
flannelled fools and muddied oafs. In response there is an immediate
and emphatic English howl. Why cannot the little man stick to his
Recessionals? How dare he call sportsmen like Ranji and Trott and
Bloggs and Biffkin flannelled fools, much less the Tottenham Hotspurs
and Sheffield United muddied oafs! Is it not true that the battle of
Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton? Were not flannelled
fools and muddied oafs among the first to throw up their home ties and
fling themselves into the imminent breach when the war broke out? Are
not cricket and football healthy and admirable old English sports, and
pleasantly calculated to keep the youth of the country out of much
worse mischief on Saturday afternoons? And so on right down the line.
The English are sportsmen. Sport is bred in the bone of them. Less
than a century ago they were cock-fighting and man-fighting in the
splendid English way. They would be doing it yet, if their own stupid
laws did not prevent them. Instead they race horses and pursue the
fox, watch cricket and football matches, and play tennis and croquet
and ping-pong. It is sport that keeps England sweet. If it were not
for sport, the English would cease to have red faces and husky voices
and check suits. One presumes, too, that if it were not for sport they
would entirely lose their sense of fair play, their love of honest
dealing, and that spirit of self-sacrifice which notoriously informs
all their actions. It is sport that has made the English the justest
as well as the greatest of the nations. It is sport which keeps her
unspotted of the lower vices, such as drunkenness, indolence, and
misspent Saturday afternoons. It is sport which gives her a standard
of manliness, an all-day press, and a platform upon which prince and
pauper, the highest and the lowest, meet as common men. Long live sport!
Perhaps it is pardonable in a Scot to note that the only forms of
sport which can be pronounced sane and devoid of offence came out of
Scotland. The grand instance in point, of course, is the ancient and
royal game of golf. Without attempting to say a word that would tend
to exaggerate the value of a pastime which is beloved by all Scotsmen,
and not without its appreciators even in England, it seems fitting to
remark that in golf you have a game which, while every whit as healthy,
as manly, and as invigorating as horse-racing, cricket, football, and
the rest of them, can never by any chance become the mere kill-time of
the idle, unparticipating spectator or the prey of the "professional",
the ready-money bookmaker, and the halfpenny journal. As to other
Scottish sports, one need not here particularise; but they are all
healthy and honest in the broadest sense, and with the single exception
of football, which has been corrupted by the English, they have not
been allowed to deteriorate into vices. The exploitation of popular
pastimes by covetous and unprincipled persons is an unmistakable sign
of national decadence. In England that exploitation goes on without
let or hindrance and in almost every department. Protest brings merely
contempt and objurgation upon the head of the protester, and the
national virility continues to be slowly but surely sapped away. That
the English notion of sport should permit of the orgies of bloodshed,
rowdyism, and partisanship which take place in the coverts and on
football-fields, race-courses, and cricket-grounds serves to indicate
that, in spite of all that has been said and sung in its praises, the
English notion of sport is an exceedingly sad and sorry one. It is
natural that a people given over to display and the getting of money
for the sake of the more unnecessary luxuries money can buy should in
a great measure lose its taste for outdoor sports of the primal order.
The English are losing that taste at a rate which can leave no doubt as
to the ultimate upshot. In brief, the Englishman as sportsman worth the
name seems to be disappearing; and in his place England will have the
adipose, plethoric, mechanical slayer of birds who goes to his shoot
in a bath-chair, and the cadaverous, undersized, Saturday-afternoon
zealot, the chief joys of whose existence are the cracking of filberts
and the kicking of umpires.