Discipline and the Derelict (collection)/The Athlete
For many a generation past the athlete has been the undergraduate idol, the big man in college, the god whom the incoming freshman worshiped and to whose attributes and accomplishments he hoped through physical tribulations to attain. There may have been a time, when our great grandfathers were in college, that the orator or the scholar was most envied and emulated by the ambitious undergraduate, but, if so, that time is long past. The student crowd will go wild over a successful athlete, shouting themselves hoarse in proclaiming his excellencies, and fighting like demons to get a chance to carry him off the field. No one molests the orator or the scholar or follows him down the street with an ovation. They have an unobstructed path from the scene of their accomplishments to their lodging houses.
Don't misunderstand me: I am in no sense advocating or defending this condition of affairs; I am simply making a conservative statement of facts. Scholarship may be and should be the goal toward which the ambitious undergraduate in general is struggling, but physical strength and physical accomplishment is in reality what youth most admires. We might as well recognize and acknowledge the fact, change it if we can, and become resigned to it if we must.
We had for many years at the University of Illinois, permitted—I scarcely dare to say approved—by the faculty, an underclass contest or "scrap" which took place early in the fall and which furnished an outlet for the class feeling and class rivalry which has been extant in colleges between freshman and sophomore classes from time immemorial. The contest took on various forms during the twenty-five years or more of its continuance. It was always a test of physical strength, directed at rare intervals by some little brains; it was rough, not without danger, and occasionally to the onlooker it presented strong symptoms of brutality, though I believe, through the providence which is said to watch carefully over fools and children, no contestant was ever seriously hurt. Ultimately through the influence of certain members of our faculty, nervous or soft-hearted, the contest was barred. The main arguments against it were the danger involved, the fact that such a contest was undignified and out of keeping with the character of college gentlemen, and most strongly urged, perhaps, was the argument that our college man of to-day is more refined, more intellectual, and less given to rough boisterous sport than was true a generation or two ago. I may be pardoned, I hope, if I decline to believe this statement. The young college man of to-day is in many respects as barbaric as he was a hundred years ago, he is just as fond of a fight, just as much an admirer of physical strength and physical contests as he ever was, and that is why the athlete is going to continue to be for the growing youth a hero, and in college the person to be most admired and emulated.
The athlete in college was not always so worthy of emulation as he is at present. I do not have to go back farther than my own college days nor even s0 far as that to recall instances of men who found their way into colleges for the sole purpose of developing or exhibiting their physical powers, of making an athletic team, and without any intention of adding to their intellectual strength. Mr. George Ade's crude young Hercules in the "College Widow" whose ostensible purpose in entering college was the study of art but whose real object was to help make a winning football team, might find a counterpart in many another college. I myself can recall a big hulk of human bull who had been employed about town in driving an ice wagon and who was drafted by a few local enthusiasts to enter college in order that he might play center on the football team. He was a crudely impossible yokel, and unfortunately of little use, for he had no brains to manage his brawn, and proved more of a hindrance than a help. Such proceedings as his are happily at an end in self-respecting colleges, and the athlete of to-day is a very different character morally and scholastically than he once was. For membership on one of the Middle-West conference teams, at least, a man must be a bona-fide student, must be in good standing, and must have carried a full year's college work in the institution which he wishes to represent. Our own athletes for years have maintained a scholastic standing considerably above that of the average man in college and in many cases, in fact proportionately in quite as many cases as the men not in athletics, have attained a standing which has entitled them to election to such honorary organizations as Phi Beta Kappa, Sigma Xi, and Tau Beta Pi. In conference colleges the athlete as a class is not a flunker, for when he becomes a flunker he can no longer represent his college as an athlete. No more is he satisfied merely to pass, for he has been taught that intellectually, at least, a miss is not nearly so good as a mile, and that his physical safety lies in making his intellectual calling absolutely sure.
The athlete is the best known man in college. The man who made high scholastic average for the year is occasionally pointed out; the editor of the college daily, or the student colonel of the cadet regiment may swagger a little as he walks across the campus; the fellow who took the rôle of leading lady at the spring performance of the Union opera may cause a few admirers to crane their necks as he passes, but every one knows the athlete. When "Shorty" Righter made three home runs in the last baseball game with Chicago and settled the conference championship for that year, he was a bigger man in the eyes of the undergraduates than if he had been president of the steel trust or Ambassador to the court of St. James. There wasn't any one in the country, they were quite convinced, who had anything on "Shorty."
The athlete sometimes excuses his too vigorous participation in physical affairs to the consequent detriment of his studies on the ground that it is for the good of the college—it is all for the love of Alma Mater. There is very little to such talk. The real athlete is such from pure love of it. He longs for a fight; he enjoys being in a contest; he is overflowing with strength and animal spirits; it gives him pleasure to win, and if through his winning Alma Mater gets an incidental mention he is not annoyed. Few athletes consider the time they put in in practice or the punishment they receive in a game as a sacrifice; the joy of contest and of victory more than outweighs all the sacrifice and pain endured. If there is doubt of this in any one's mind let him watch the successful athlete as he looks over the sporting sheet of the Sunday paper following a successful game or meet and reads his own eulogy and sees his own photograph; there is very little thought of Alma Mater in his mind at such a time.
Because he is so well known, there is no one else in college whose daily life is so much under observation, whose habits and ideals and accomplishments are so much discussed and whose dicta count so much in setting the standards for the college community What the athlete thinks and does determines what is right; what he says settles a matter for all time. He can quell a riot or stop an objectionable undergraduate practice with a word, if he will. He is often so harassed by the severe exactions of his athletic training and by the necessity, under this training, of keeping up his college work, that he has little time for leadership in any active way, and though he stands out in a notable manner as an example which the students in general are likely and willing to follow, he usually makes a poor chairman of a committee, an indifferent president of an organization, and a not very active member of anything that requires aggressive leadership. He takes the popularity, and the prominence, and the adulation, but he side-steps the responsibility which this prominence brings him. I have known a number of athletes who were elected president of the Young Men's Christian Association, but I do not now recall one who was any good in the office; as class officers and as presidents of student organizations they have pretty generally been figureheads, put into office for advertising purposes only, as prominent men in real life sometimes lend their names to the furtherance of some enterprise or to the advertising of some nostrum in which they have little real interest.
There are exceptions, of course, many of them, and one I recall which is a joy to remember. He was a big husky guard on the football team who made Tau Beta Pi and who was elected president of his fraternity and who really was president after he was elected. He counseled the freshmen like a father, and they adored him. He was a veritable D'Artagnan in leadership; he set all the fellows an example in conduct and morality and scholarship that they never forgot.
On account of his popularity, also, there is no man who can so easily be elected to office as the athlete. His prestige carries him through; what he has done to win athletic prominence for the college, his followers argue, entitles him to the reward of the office he seeks, and forgetting that his other duties are already a tax upon his time and his strength, he yields to his ambition and to the insistence of his friends. I have wished over and over again that he might have had the strength to decline when he was urged, for he seldom assumes seriously the responsibilities of his office. It would be better usually for all concerned if he would be satisfied to stay in his own field and trail along in second place when it comes to politics.
The successful athlete as a student in these days has much to commend him. Of course there is the man who is in college primarily for athletics, who is satisfied merely to pass, who has no intellectual ambitions, and who is willing by any unscrupulous methods to get by. He cares very little how his work is done just so he passes. Such a man, however, is not now common, and he seldom lasts through the college course; somebody gets wise to his methods and he passes on. One such man, whose work was in pretty serious condition, wrote me not long ago. He was anxious that by some act of providence or the faculty he might be made eligible, and when I assured him that this was impossible he replied, "Of course there would be no use of my returning to college if I could not take part in athletics." I felt the same way as he did about it, and suggested that he go to work. It is not of this sort but of the normal man in college of whom I am speaking, who is seriously and honestly preparing himself for the business or profession of life, and who considers athletics a secondary matter. The student who would be an athlete learns first of all that if he would keep up his studies and not neglect his athletic training he has little time to waste; if he would succeed he must learn concentra—tion, he must utilize every available minute. He learns to get his lessons during the vacant hours of the day; he knows that when he comes in at night from practice tired and sore, that he can not afford to loaf much after dinner or to let his mind wander when he gets at his books. He will grow sleepy early in the evening from exhaustion, and if he is to be alert and fresh the next day he must get to bed soon. All this, if he is wise, and he often is, teaches him some of the most valuable lessons he can learn in college—the value of concentration and the value of utilizing his spare hours, and these lessons are valuable not only during his undergraduate days but immeasurably more so when he gets out of college into the more trying and strenuous work of life.
More and more the athlete is learning the value of self-control and morality. The young fellow in training learns to control his temper, for he finds often that when he loses control of his temper he loses control of himself. He learns, too, to take adverse criticism without being offended by it, for he soon sees that to take offense gets him nowhere. He learns not to expect praise for work well done, but to be pleased if his efforts do not bring upon him a storm of criticism and reproach. The hard physical exercise which the man in training gets, helps him in the control of his physical passions; if a man wants to live a decent clean moral life, he will find that the strenuous exercise he gets in the development of athletic ability will help him toward this end more than almost anything else. The man, on the other hand, whose moral ideals might not be otherwise high, is not infrequently led to see that he must choose between a self-controlled, temperate, clean life and failure to accomplish his highest possibilities in athletics. In all my experience with undergraduates I have seen few things that would act more vigorously as a discourager of immoral practices than an ambition for success in athletics, I have seen over and over again the loose dissipated habits of a young fellow changed completely because he developed a desire for athletic success and was willing to learn self-repression and self-control in order to attain his desire. The athlete, too, who might have a tendency to break training or to yield to the temptation to immoral practices is frequently held somewhat in restraint by public opinion as expressed by the undergraduate crowd. The athlete who would risk the success of his team by indulging in dissipations of any sort would soon find himself, in most college communities, pretty thoroughly in disfavor. Very few of us realize, I imagine, just what part this fear of public opinion has played in our own individual cases in keeping us in the straight moral path; sometimes when we should be inclined to hold that it was our staunch principles which held us back, it was quite as likely the fear of what the neighbors would say if they should find out our irregularities. We say, often, that we don't care what people think of us, but when we say it we are joking.
The training which the athlete gets is not advantageous merely from a physical standpoint; I have many times been convinced that it is least valuable from such a standpoint, because the college athlete is not infrequently overtrained, and when he gets out of college and relaxes this training he finds himself in a critical if not in a dangerous condition. The chief advantage that accrues from athletic training is its effect upon the man's judgment and upon his character. The man wanting to make an athletic team in a big university can not afford to yield easily to discouragement; if he does he will never make the team. He has a score of men working for the same place, often, many of them more experienced and better trained than himself. Success often means years of persistent practice with one failure after another. Other things being equal, it is the man who sticks who ultimately succeeds.
I recall a slender green country boy who came up to college from southern Illinois. He had the ambition to do the pole vault, but it seemed at first little more than an ambition. He came out for practice every day during his freshman year, but his accomplishments were rather commonplace. "Plucky little sinner," the coach commented, but that seemed about as far as it went. He might keep on the squad; that was about all. He stuck to it through the sophomore year, gaining form and making gradual progress, but he was still far below the best in his attainments. Most fellows would have dropped gut and taken a place among the rooters on the side lines.
"I really believe Gordon is improving," the coach ventured to remark during the boy's junior year when he was still sticking to his regular practice. "We may hear from him yet." And we did; for he took second place in the spring meet in his junior year, and when he waa a senior he won first place in the Western Conference. He had learned what it means to laugh in the face of defeat and to push on ta the accomplishment of an ambition, and he had set an example of persistence and grit to his college mates which is still a campus tradition. The lesson which he had learned of sticking to a difficult job until it is accomplished, no matter how long it takes, has shown itself in the way in which he has fought difficulties since he left college, and in the way in which he has climbed steadily to success. Whenever a boy balks at a difficult task or begins to lose confidence in his ability to make good, I tell him of Gordon.
Dinwiddie had two ambitions when he came to college; one was to become a good engineer and the other was to make the baseball team. He got a good room over-looking the athletic field so that he could get the inspiration from seeing other athletes out practicing, and would need to waste little time in getting into the game when his turn came. He had a good mind, and he was not afraid of work, so that there seemed very little difficulty in the accomplishment of his first ambition, but the second was not so easy to attain. He had been the star player in the little country town from which he came, it is true, but that is a very different matter from playing left field on the varsity. He went out on the first cut from the squad in his freshman year, but he kept on with his practice with his class team and with his fraternity nine. He hung on a little longer in his sophomore year.
"Give it up, kid, and try croquet," some of his pessimistic friends suggested; but he had no intention of giving it up; it was one of the things for which he had come to college, and he was not going to be turned from his purpose. During his junior year he was kept on the squad during the season, but he got no active participation in the game; all his rivals for the position which he wanted to play seemed just a trifle better than he, and he sat silently on the bench all season, waiting eagerly to be called out. All this time he studied the game, he listened to the suggestions of the coach, and he kept up his practice religiously throughout the spring and summer. When the men were called out for practice in his senior year he seemed to have got his batting eye.
"You'll make it, Mark," the coach told him encouragingly, "if you keep up that gait," and Mark did make it.
Would any one hold that this persistence, this refusal to accept defeat, this willingness to work and to accept criticism through one season and another without apparent hope of success did not have its effects upon the characters of these men, and does not have its effect upon all men who submit to it?
In addition to this refusal to accept defeat which becomes a part of the character of a real athlete, is the training in judgment and quick decision which a man gets. The athlete has little time to decide on his play in any game. He must gauge a ball, or determine upon a play instantly and his decision must be right or he will endanger or lose the game. He can not stand round looking for a hole in the line; he must be through it the instant he has discovered the weak spot. He must solve his opponents' play almost before it is made and must learn at the same time to assist his fellow players in the work which they are doing. He is trained in accuracy, in alertness of mind, in quick decisions. He can not give up when he is tired, he can not fall out when he is hurt, he must fight the game through to a finish with spirit and enthusiasm. Four years of this sort of training, I am convinced, leaves an ineffaceable stamp upon a young fellow's character and is seen in his business methods in after life. It was a very significant fact to me that more than ninety-five per cent. of our athletes who were in attendance at the various Reserve Officers' training camps of the country in preparation for the war, reccived commissions at the close of the camps. They had learned to follow directions, to obey, and to fight.
There is of course an element of danger in most strenuous athletic games, and this danger is often the cause of a great deal of parental opposition to a boy's going into such athletic games, but there is danger in almost any activity that is worth while. A friend of mine in 1917, was talking with a young fellow who had just enlisted in the army and was preparing to go to France.
"Doesn't it frighten you terribly?" she asked, "to think of the danger of your being killed?"
"No," he answered thoughtfully, "there are so many things worse than being killed."
Even though there may be danger of physical injury in most of the strenuous athletic games played in college, there are so many things more to be feared than the possibility of getting hurt, that if I had a son I should be quite willing that he should take that risk in order that he might have a chance at the benefits of the training and the exercise. The parent who wants to keep his son out of football or basket ball because of the danger which he will encounter in these games is frequently encouraging him to be a molly-coddle. The ability to face danger and to endure punishment is what helps to make men out of boys, and it is worth risking because of the strength of character which it develops.
It is hard for the young fellow who has once got the athletic fever into his blood to get it out. After a hard game or a hard season, especially one followed by defeat, I have often heard an athlete vigorously affirm that he was through with the whole business. There was nothing to it, he avowed, and when he laid aside his athletic togs, he swore he would never put them on again. Perhaps the next season he was tardy in coming out at first, but he could not stay out of the game long. Neither danger, nor pain, nor exhaustion, nor possible defeat daunted him. The game had got into his blood and he had to take it up.
I have a vivid recollection of "Cap" the night after we had been defeated by Chicago. He had played a masterly, though a losing game, and had come away bearing on his body the scars of hattle. I called at his house after dinner to offer him my congratulations on the game he had put up and my eondolences on the unsatisfactory outcome. He was a sad looking figure. His nose had been broken and some one had kicked him in the eye, which was discolored and swollen shut. His whole body was bruised and sore and he was in a furious temper.
"This is my last appearance, pos-i-tív-ly," he growled. "There's nothing in it. A man's a fool to let himself be mangled up the way I am. I'm out of it. Never again for me. If I ever have a son who wants to play football I'll lock him up or strangle him. It's me in the future for the peaceful life."
I said nothing, for I knew the outcome. He was in the next game as chipper as ever, and the next fall he was the first man out on the field, when it came time for practice. He could not keep away from it any more than the average man can who has got the spirit of it into his system. When the call to arms came "Cap" was one of the first men to leave the peaceful life that he had so vigorously espoused, to face the hardships and the dangers of war.
In spite of my respect for the athlete and for athletic training, I have always felt that as far as an advertising asset is concerned the athlete has been very much overrated. Few students in these days go to college mainly because of their interest in athletics or in going to college choose an institution mainly because of the reputation of its athletic teams. If the boy himself who is entering college had the entire decision in his own hands the matter might be different, but since, even in the United States, father and mother still have a little to say in determining the place where son shall pursue his education, the character of the athletic teams of the institution under consideration usually plays a minor part. It cannot be left wholly out of consideration, but it is seldom the determining factor in the decision.
"A winning team is a fine advertisement for the school," the undergraduate constantly holds, and I am willing for the sake of argument to grant that it does its part, but I am equally sure that if it were the sort of advertisement that could be "keyed," if we could get from our undergraduates a frank, truthful statement as to the influence which, in each individual case, induced them to select the college of their choice, it would be found that successful athletic teams are in reality rather ineffective in adding to the attendance of any institution. That fact, however, does not in any way lessen my interest in the athlete and athletics, nor make me think any the less that the college that puts money generously into the training and development of its athletic teams and that encourages physical exercise generally among its students is acting wisely.
As I have studied the careers of our athletic students after they have graduated and gone out of college I have been convinced that the benefits of athletic training do not end at graduation. It is true that the man who wishes to make a case against the athlete can: present illustrations to show that even though the men engaged in athletics may average well there are still some very notorious dullards who make or try to make our athletic teams. The athlete who flunks is like the Sunday-school superintendent who becomes an embezzler. His intellectual or moral failure, as the case may be, is the more widely advertised and commented upon because of his other relationships. The ordinary student in college may fail and nothing be said of it; when the athlete fails the fact is commented upon at every fraternity and boarding house, is often the subject of serious faculty discussion, and is made the topic for an associated press dispatch in the newspapers. The flunking athlete is like a drunken man in a crowd—he seems far more numerous and attracts far more attention than the quiet sober citizen who goes unobtrusively about his business. For this reason his occasional lack of scholarship is much exaggerated and disproportionately commented upon. It has been my experience in executive affairs in college that it is easier for almost any other man to receive special consideration or special concessions when in scholastic difficulties than for the athlete. Whenever it is announced that the man who is asking for mercy or for reconsideration is an athlete there is very likely to be the stiffening of the jaw and the bending backward of the authorities, in order that there may be no thought on the part of any one that they are not walking and acting in accordance with the rule. Perhaps it is just as well so.
The college athlete who has gone out into the more active duties of life is a fighter; in college he has been trained to fight against difficulties, and he carries with him the results of this training. He is not afraid to tackle a hard proposition, he is not easily discouraged, his judgments are more rapid and more accurate than those of other men, and he is willing even in an apparently losing game to make a try—to stick. His athletic training has taught him endurance and has given him a physique which will stand hardships, and nervous strain, and long hours of work. He has usually learned, also, how to take care of his body, and so how to make the most of the physical and mental resources at his command. For these reasons his chances of success in any work which he takes up are greater than those of the man not so trained, and that success is quite generally somewhat in advance of what might be expected from a study of his scholastic record. The effect which his athletic training has had upon his body, and the effect which athletic practice has had upon his character and his mind, all conduce to his energy, his resourcefulness, and his self-reliance and so make for his success. He is likely to get on faster and to go farther than are men of similar ability who have nat had his training. The struggles and sacrifices which he made in his undergraduate years are more than compensated for by the returns which come to him in later life.
I have read the most that has been published in recent years concerning the evils of inter-collegiate athletics—the extravagantly large amount of money necessary to support such a system, the confining of athletic training to a very limited number of students, the gambling, drinking, and other moral dissipations incident to big games, but though I have known personally as many undergraduate students, athletes and otherwise, as any college officer in America, I am convinced that these evils have been very much exaggerated. I cannot deny that intercollegiate athletics is expensive, and it would be foolish to maintain for a moment that it is not accompanied by abuses and evils—I can think of no other activity, not even religious activities, that is free from them—but in my experience as a director and supervisor of undergraduate activities it has seemed to me that nothing else has done so much as athletics to develop real college loyalty, to unify a heterogeneous undergraduate body, and by giving an outlet for youthful enthusiasm and youthful spirits, to aid in the maintenance of healthy college discipline. It is true that athletic contests have at times been the opportunity for undergraduate outbreaks and disturbances, but these occasions have on the whole been rare and not infrequently a case of "great cry and little wool," of wide newspaper publicity and relatively little foundation for the facts alleged. I am sure that if it were not for the athletic contests and the athlete I should as a disciplinary officer have a much harder time than I now have.
There is the argument that the athlete supports a sort of physical aristocracy which maintains a monopoly over athletics and physical exercise and makes it possible for the physically elect only to obtain the exercise that all need. We should develop a system, the promulgators of this argument say, which would force every one into athletic sports and secure regular and pleasant exercise daily for every one in college from the freshman to the President. Such a physical millennium sounds alluring, and the theory is beautiful, but the result is about as likely of attainment as those implied in the theories of our socialist friends; they sound attractive on paper, but they are impossible of realization. In every college with which I am familiar there is a predominating percentage of students and faculty who, unless a chain were put about their necks and they were dragged to the fray would take no part in athletic sports at all. There are even more than we might suppose who take no pleasure in exercise themselves and who find no relaxation in watching other people engaged in sports. Whatever can be done to interest students and faculty in sports generally, I believe is a desirable thing, but such interest is not decreased by the development of athletic teams. As I have seen the athlete his training is worth all that it costs—to him, to the college authorities, and to the undergraduate body as a whole, in the development of character, in discipline, in college loyalty, and in the binding together of the students as a whole.