Sport is the Great Secondary Interest in
Our Universities, Says Professor
Ostwald, a German Visitor.
Professor Wilhelm Ostwald, of the University of Leipsic, is not only a
great chemist; he is also a philosopher, and his mind is alert to every
kind of human interest. The courses of lectures which he delivered not
long ago at Harvard and Columbia universities attracted much attention.
Among other things he predicted that before long scientists might be
creating living things.
Since his return to Germany, Professor Ostwald has been preparing for the
Prussian government a report on what he observed in America. Meantime he
talks freely to German press interviewers. He says of our college sports:
The personal interest of the students, next to their
studies, is concentrated on sport. Football before all is
loved uncommonly, and it is practised in such a fashion that
academic and State authorities are near to forbidding it
altogether. In the course of a single semester nineteen
students fell victims to brutal handling. At every American
university is a sort of open amphitheater, in which many
thousands of spectators view the periodic football battles.
The trouble is not, of course, that the great secondary interest of
student life is sport, but that the American idea of college sport has
come to be the training of a few champion athletes for the purpose of
winning, not the training of all young men and women for the purpose of
recreation. G. Upton Harvey dwells on this point in an article published
in the _Review of Reviews_:
It really is not fair or profitable to judge athletics in
general, or any particular sport or game, by the benefits
secured by the few. The test should be the good accruing to
the nation at large. Athletics should build us up as a
people, raise the standard of average manhood, and thus
benefit us as a nation, rather than develop a selected few
who use their strength and skill chiefly as a means of
earning money.
In America, we love our players rather than our games. The
result is that only one man in a thousand acquires the
strength and proficiency which make him an acceptable
player. Our athletics develop the few, and benefit us but
little, if at all, as a people.
Of course, we turn out teams and individual athletes
unequaled anywhere else in the world. But what good does
that do you and me, who are shut out from participation in
the games because we are not giants in point of strength or
wizards in point of skill?
We are compelled to be mere onlookers at the present-day
baseball or football game, or track meet, to watch the
players with mingled feelings of awe and admiration, much as
the Romans of old sat about the amphitheater and marveled at
the exploits of the gladiators.
The "sport" of the Romans--desperate encounters between man
and man, or between man and wild beast--undoubtedly
developed men of unsurpassed courage, skill, and strength.
But did it benefit Rome?
Our athletes lead the world. That is a matter of record. But
how has this superiority been achieved? By making athletics
a business or a profession for selected individuals, instead
of a sport, a pastime, and a recreation for all. Athletics
as we know them may be sport or pastime for us as
spectators, but our games are no recreation for those who
participate in them.
The desire to excel, to win at any cost, is the root of the
evil. If we can't win, we drop out of the game and join the
ranks of spectators. The benefits of participating in an
afternoon's sport, even as a loser, are lost sight of. We do
not play for the sake of playing, or for the betterment of
our physical condition--we play to win, to come out first,
to excel our neighbors.
What we need to learn is to be cheerful losers. Any one can
be a gracious winner, but few of us are good losers. Until
we do learn that there is something in the game besides the
winning of it, we cannot hope that our athletics will be of
general benefit to the nation.