WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH FOOTBALL?

Address by Edward K. Hall '92 at the Dinner of the Boston Alumni Association, January 30, 1926.

I would like to preface what I have to say about football tonight by telling you of a touching little incident of last fall's season that perhaps has not come to your attention.

You may remember the name of Hank Rawlings who was a famous back for three years on the Navy team. He is the man who made the 90-yard run for the . Navy's only touchdown in the Army game in the fall of '2l. He graduated in '22. After his graduation Rawlings went to sea. While his battleship was at anchor in some Scotland port Rawlings slipped one day on a smudge of soap carelessly left by a sailor on the step of an iron ladder forty feet above the steel deck. He fell and it developed that he had suffered severe internal injuries. When his superior officers broke the news to him that his injuries were permanent he took it like a Spartan and was shipped back to his mother's home in Newport, Kentucky. Since that time he has lain on his bed, his once powerful body racked with pain.

On the day of the Army-Navy game in New York last fall, after a member of the family had adjusted his radio set, Rawlings put the phones to his ears, and as the voice of Graham McNamee painted the gathering of the clans he felt once more the thrill of the game. Then from the far-off Polo Grounds came the message of the Navy: "The Navy regrets very much that Hank Rawlings of the Class of 1922 is not with them here to day." The message had scarcely been spoken when a special delivery letter was handed to him. I want to read that letter, it is signed by the Navy Football Team:

FROM THE NAVY TEAM TO HANK RAWLINGS

New York City, November 27,

"Dear Hank Rawlings "On the eve of our annual battle with the enemy, word has come to us that you are fighting now against sickness as you used to fight for these same colors that we wear. We; must both fight hard, this team and you, and we must both win.

"None of us on this Navy team were privileged to play with you. Had we been here, though, we doubt if we could have known you any more than we do. You see, a man who gives up everything he has to the Academy in the way you gave, never graduates.

"He goes on from year to year—the coaches tell whether he tackled hard or not—the upper-classmen tell their Plebe all his habits and eccentricities—the profs even let up on the formulae for a while and bring; him back to the classroom that we may better know him.

"So you see we all have known you, old Hank Rawlings, and we all have hoped some day we would be, known as you are. "And we all have liked you, old Hank Rawlings, and we all have hoped that some day we might be liked by the men on the Navy teams in your way.

"We know that you are up against a hard opponent and it has been a long quarter. We know you are tired and that the goal line seems more than the regulation 100 yards away. We know that you think it has been a game against all odds and perhaps it seems that even the Referee has been down on you for a while. BUT we know, too, that you have been in hard games before. You used to finish the quarter smiling—they all counted on you, Rawlings. You never complained in practice—you never flinched in games.

"You played harder when things went harder against you. We try to be that way. We try to push right on through when it seems we can't. We all try more than ever before in this big game. And we know you will, too, in your Biggest Game. We are all counting on you.

"And when those '4-N's roar out across the Polo Grounds each man of us is going to tackle one 'Navy and three Rawlings' on the end. We are sure you want us to win and this is to tell you to be sure we want you to WIN.

"Sincerely to a true Navy Man, "The Navy Football Team."

Now there is something fundamentally fine in a game that will furnish such a philosophy as is indicated in that lette:r, that will develop such friendships, that will produce such traditions, that creates such exquisite sentiment. Such a game is worth preserving in all of its wholesomeness and virility.

It is someone's business and it is worth someone's effort to make sure that such a game is neither cheapened nor spoiled.

That someone is every man who is a lover of the game.

We are a nation of sport lovers—but we do not stop often enough to consider what a tremendous influence clean sport has been and is today in moulding and building up the character of the nation. Any sport cleanly conducted, if not overdone, is good for those who participate. The results are constructive physically, morally and mentally. Except that they miss the physical benefits sports are also good for those who merely look on. If the sport is competitive, so much the better, for then we begin to get what we may call the spiritual results in the development of courage, determination, the spirit of fair play and the sportsman's standards of accepting victory with dignity and defeat without complaint.

When we come to the game of football we have a sport which not only contains all the values that I have mentioned to the very highest degree but we find additional values which put the game at the very top of the list and make it the outstandingly distinctive academic game of the country. Chief of these is the fact that it is a team game with all that that means and with all the lessons it provides in strategy, tactics, team play and the art of cooperation.

But, they tell us that too many people are interested in the game and too many people go to watch the games. To my mind the pity of it is that there cannot be more. So long as the game is played in the fine spirit of sportsmanship in which it is being played today, it is not only a far-reaching influence for good on those who have the good fortune to be participants but on the great majority of those who watch the game as well. No lad in the graded school or of high school age can see two good college teams throwing every ounce they've got into the game of football as it is played today, can see the players take their penalties and their tough breaks without "complaining and without quibble, without consciously or unconsciously becoming a better sportsman and a better potential citizen. Nor can he see the players of the winning team accept their victory modestly and the players of the defeated team accept their defeat with generous tribute to the winners and without alibi or excuse and not become a better sportsman and more of a gentleman himself.

Nor can the business man sit in a stadium and witness the fiercest kind of a contest carried on with the keenest of competition for the richest of rewards, yet all the time surrounded by the spirit of fair play and true sportsmanship without consciously or unconsciously raising his own standards of business ethics and procedure and consciously or unconsciouly deciding to take back into the game of business some of the finer things that have so appealed to him as he watches the boys on the gridiron.

It is no secret that the standards of business and the conduct of business affairs are on an infinitely higher plane than they were thirty years ago. Account for this as you may, I stand here to claim that the fact that thousands of business men would not consider that they were playing the game today if they should stoop to some of the business practices of thirty years ago, is due in a marked degre.e to the influence of clean sport. And that thousands upon thousands of boys who, during the last generation have absorbed into their own lives and characters the highest of standards of American sport have carried those standards along into their business careers and will stand for nothing below those standards.

If I had the time I would like to discuss the game of football as a team game, and the lessons it teaches in team play. I think it was Spencer who said that the highest test of a civilization was the abilty of its members to practice the art of cooperation. Wherever we turn today we see the truth of this statement. Civilization is every day becoming more complicated and more; complex, and whether in the college, the community, the state, the nation or in international affairs, we find success according to the ability of the individuals to cooperate for a common interest and a common purpose.

Much of our experience, much of our education and much of our ambition tends to produce individual workers. We need the influence of any agency that will help to produce team playe,rs and cooperators, and I know of no agency during the growing period of a boy's life that is such a powerful factor in this direction as the game of football which is team playnothing else. He learns that while much can be done through individual effort, infinitely more can be accomplished through concerted effort; that victory, although swee,t when the result of single-handed accomplishment is infinitely sweeter when it can be shared with others; that def eat or failure may bring unspeakable loneliness when borne by one man alone, but when shared with others in a worthy cause means friends not only for the moment but often for a lifetime.

But there is not time to extoll all the virtues of the game of football. The only point I am trying to make is that the values of football to the boys of this generation and the next are very great and nothing must be allowed to impair them. Yet the game of football has come in for more criticism within the last six months than for the previous fifteen years combined. Some-'of. this is justified, much of it, in my judgment, is not. lam not one of those who thinks there is much of anything the matter with the game of football itself. I do think there are certain unfortunate tendencies and certain conditions surrounding the game which must be rectified and rectified promptly if the game is to continue to hold the almost universal e.steem in which it has been held for the last fifteen or twenty years.

Fortunately, as I see it, the trouble mostly comes from friends of the game and if these friends will recognize the facts it should be a very simple matter to correct whatever needs correcting. Among the friends of the game I include the undergraduates, the coaches, the school and college administrators, the newspapers writers and the graduates.

Before, discussing what the friends of the game can do to protect its interests I would like to comment on one general criticism that we have heard so often, and that is the fact that the gate receipts are too large. What harm if the gate receipts are large? They are contributed in small amounts and I can see no harm in the aggregate being large provided it is being put to proper use. If there is any temptation to put any part of it to improper use this can quickly be remedied by the academic and athletic authorities by giving full publicity to the accounts. Simply as a matter of good business management, this ought to be done in any event.

Generally speaking the excess gate re ceipts from football throughout the country are being put to the finest of uses. The game is supporting, to a greater or lesser degree, practically all the minor sports which do not attract the crowds because they lack the element of physical contact and team play which make football so interesting to the spectator. What better possible use could be made of the money than to use the excess receipts from football in the support of basketball, swimming, soccer, baseball, cross country running, track and field athle,tics so that each and everyone of these games is open to every student of the college without tax or special burden.

Now to get back to the friends of the g-ame—let us start with the undergraduates. As I see it they could do the game great service by calling some of their football mass meetings at the beginning of the season and passing this kind of a resolution :

"Let us back the team throughout the season to the, very limit. Let us from time to time show real interest in the practice. Let us attend all the home games and to a reasonable extent the games away from home, especially when our team is likely to be the under dog. Let us let the team know we are behind them to the last man but let us not allow our loyalty to the team and interest in the game to carry us off our feet nor up and down too many blind alleys.

"Let us confine our backing of the team pretty much to the hours the team is practicing and to the days the contest is on. Let us cut out most of these midweek conversations and these footless dope fests about who is going to make whose All America team and whether Bill Jones of Penn State '22 was a faster man than Tom Smith of Harvard '24, and whether either of them could have made the Dartmouth team in '25.

"Let us decide right now that simply because a man does not read all the football dope in all the newspapers and does not then proce.ed to demonstrate to everyone on the campus that the dope is wrong, is not an evidence of disloyalty either to the team or to the college. And above all, let us not waste any time counting up next Saturday's score until the team enables us to do it with some degree of accuracy."

Such a resolution if adopted and carried out by a few groups of undergraduates would go a long way toward restoring the game to its proper proportions in the college program. It would be a good thing for everyone in the college community, players, undergraduates, faculty and administration alike. It would be a fine thing for the game, and incidentally it would protect it from the emasculating suggestions that the game should be made a purely inte,rmural sport or that the intercollegiate contests should be limited to three games per season.

And now just one suggestion as to where the friends of the game, the sport writers, can help. They can do the game a magnificent service by writing their football material with a better perspective of what the distinctive values in the game are, and by getting away from the habit of so greatly over-emphasizing the importance of the individual players which results in making paper heroes and celebrities of individuals. This is not good for a game which is first, last and all the time a team game and owes its prestige to that fact. That it is bad for the players is obvious, that it is equally bad for the boys of secondary schools needs no argument.

As an illustration of this tendency, last season several newspapers published every week an individual touchdown record to date—exactly like the homerun lists in baseball. As though it made the slightest difference on earth whether it was Oberlander, Horton or Tully who happened to be carrying the ball where it crossed the goal line. The touchdown was made by the Dartmouth TEAM.

Another illustration, and an extreme case in the glorifying of stars, was seen in a dinner given by a great Metropolitan newspaper for the men who were its choice for an All-America eleven. Now a dinner given a team in recognition of a successful season is a fine thing. A dinner given to a team that has not won a game during the entire seaon but has played all their games out with every ounce they had and has deserved to win, is an infinitely finer thing. But a dinner to eleven men brought together from different parts of the country who never played together in their lives is nothing else than an exhibition of individual stars who have been the victims of exaggerated publicity. Such a demonstration is unfair to their team mates who helped make them stars. It is bad business for the boys themselves and it is bad for the game, which owes its traditions to the fact that it is a team game, and which will forfeit its standing in the future to just the extent that it fails to continue to be a team game and becomes a game in which individuals are seeking to become stars.

Incidentally, this over-heroizing and over-glorifying of the individual player simply tend to make celebrities of a few individuals and affords the professional promoter an opportunity to sneak in and by luring these lads into a short time show game, to cash in by exhibiting them to the celebrity-seeking public, just exactly as a motion picture promoter cashes in on a hectically touted prize fighter or a sufficiently advertised divorcee.

Happily many of the leading sport writers in the country are beginning to recognize the fact that the custom of writing up an individual boy who is playing on a college football team after the manner and style of writing up a man who is making professional baseball his life career, is not good for the boy, is not good for the game and is out of place in academic sport.

And now let us talk about ourselves. We are graduates and some of the grad- uates are pretty bad offenders.

First of all, we are too prone to forget whose game this is. It belongs to the undergraduates. We had our turn when we were in college. To the extent that the undergraduates desire our advice, counsel and assistance in learning the technique, the traditions, the possibilities and conduct of the game we, of course, are anxious and ready to help. But the game is theirs, it is one of their diversions, one of their campus sports, one of the character building elements of their college life. This and other college sports constitute the best of safety valves, and safety valves are an absolute necessity in a college community; never more so than today. The first thing then for us graduates to keep in mind is that it is the undergraduates' game and not durs. « 1

Of course, every graduate if he has a drop of red blood left anywhere in his veins likes to pick up his paper in the morning and see that his college team has won a victory on the gridiron. He gets a real thrill out of it. We like to go into the office Monday morning and have our friends congratulate us on "our" victory. We like to collect a dime here and there from our various friends who were so rash on the previous Friday as to make disparaging remarks about our team. We almost get into a frame of mind where we think we had something to do with that victory and that something we once did or said or advised during the last frfty years helped lay the foundation for the triumph in which we now proudly share. We want to help some more. We want to make this winning of games a steady and permanent thing so that we can get these thrills regularly. We like to read glowing accounts of what our team has done and we simply eat up the cheerful predictions of what it is going to do next week or could do week after next if it had a real opponent to test its mettle. If our favorite sportwriter chances to question the ability of "our team or fails to devote a suitable number of columns of warmed-over dope about its past or super-heated prophecy as to its future, there are plenty of us instantly on the job to call the writer to account and, if suspicion seems to warrant it, even demand an apology.

The plain facts are, that too many of the graduates of the colleges have en- tirely lost their perspective and their sense of proportions. Their intense interest in the game has become all jumbled up with loyalty to the college, desire to see their team winning, anxiety to help in some way and failure to make any appraisal at all of the real purposes, place and justification of the game.

One of the outstanding evidences of this is the increasing insistence by the graduates for a "winning season". Let me make it clear at the outset that I am not suggesting that a team, should go on to the field with any other spirit than determination to do their supreme best to win that particular game. Without that spirit football is not football. The thing I am talking about is the too prevalent idea that in order to have a satisfactory season it is necessary to win substantially all or preferably all the games on the schedule. If the team fails to do this, no matter how hard they tried, nor how hard the games on the schedule may have been, they are considered to have failed. About two seasons like this and the graduates and undergraduates begin to call for' a new coach and I am inclined to think the graduates are the worst of fenders. On the other hand, if the team has had one or two so-called successful seasons, the demand comes in from the graduates for a harder, more diversified and more extended schedule so that if the team is again successful it will get a "rating" and an opportunity for the graduates and undergraduates to claim the championship of some section or other, or better yet, of the whole country.

Friends of the game, graduates and undergraduates and even some of the college presidents and faculty will do well to stop and think this out. We have unconsciously gotten into the wrong way of thinking: we know that football is not football unless the teams play to win and from this we have jumped to the conclu sion that the winning of games is the real objective of football. If most of the games have been lost, then the season has been mostly wasted. The fact that the schedule was very hard, that the players did not happen to be anything but ordinary average boys, the fact that they tried their 100 percent best and took their defeats like thoroughbreds—all are overlooked. Let us readjust our perspectives tives a bit and get our sense of proportion back.

It is not whether you win or lose but how you play the game. Football is a sport not a business. It is an incident in college life, not one of the purposes of the college. It is a character building agency, not an advertising medium. Its value to the student body is neither measured by nor recorded in, the scores. Its real values are too far reaching and intangible to be stated in figures. If while attending a game we kept our eyes glued to the scoreboard we would miss all the sport. It is equally true that if we measure the season by adding up the total scores we are missing the whole point.

This over-emphasis of the desire to have a "winning season" has naturally led us into another unfortunate tendency—that of making the winning of games too much of a business. If the idea is that the team must have a winning season then of course we must organize for a winning season. No precautions to prevent defeat must be overlooked, no legitimate dollar left unspent, nothing left undone that might help to pile up the season's score. Here again we must go back to the fact that we have been losing our perspective and sense of proportion. The "play to win" slogan is for the winners in the match, it was not intended to apply to the graduates, the coaches or any of the nonplayers. But then non-players are so keen to see their favorite team win and they want to help and they are largely responsible for the idea of organizing for the BUSINESS of winning,—or introducing efficiency engineering into sport.

Now there is all the difference in the world between PLAYING to win and making winning a matter of BUSINESS. Playing the game to win leads in the direction of all the finest traditions, rewards and standards of amateur sport. Making a business of winning the games leads us in the direction of the traditions, practices and standards of professional sport. This is not good for the game which bases the., prestige it has built up in the past fifty years on the fact that it is an amateur sport, played under amateur surroundings and according to amateur standard, and it jeopardizes its future and usefulness in the future to just exactly the extent that it departs from the fundamental principles which have made it the great game that it is.

Now for one more way in which,a few graduates in the various colleges have been hurting the game and a suggestion as to how all graduates can help eliminate the evil. AVhen we graduates attend these games we go as guests. True we pay an admittance but that is a privilege ex- tended to us by the undergraduates. They are glad to give us the opportunity to see the game, to share its thrills, its lessons and its atmosphere of youth and gaiety to use the occasion as a rendezvous to meet our old college friends. But we are the guests of the undergraduates. It is their party. It is only fair to them and to the game and plain common decency that we leave our liquor at home. I realize that only a very small percentage of the graduates of any college are offenders but it will need the combined and determined public opinion of all the graduates to stop it.

Unfortunately the custom on the part of this small minority of bringing liquor to the games and consuming it on the premises appears to be on the increase. I saw one big game in the East last year where four men were carried out of one section of the stand during the game. From the section they occupied and from their apparent age, I judge they were all graduates. Now I hold no special brief for Mr. Volstead but I do hold one for this magnificent college sport, and this sort of thing must stop. A college game at its best is a great family party where the graduates and undergraduates of two rival colleges gather together with their friends. It is an event to which men and families look forward almost like a college reunion. It is no place and no occasion for a public drinking fest or a private drunk and the interests of the game will not permit this sort olf thing to continue. A man who sells the seats for which he is priviliged to apply is denied the privilege of application in the future. The groups of men who use their seats as a booze rendezvous are far worse offenders. The graduates of the colleges can, if they will, promptly and effectively put a stop to this evil and it is up to them to do it.

i„ closing I would like to re-emphasize the fact that the graduates of our own and of all colleges can exercise a power ful influence if they will for the preservation of this great game.

Let us not be the ones to demand more than our fair share of victories. Let us not be the ones who are in any way re sponsible for any unwholesome or overdone publicity concerning the game or the individual players. Let us keep in mind the difference between winning and deserving to win; between playing the game to win and making a business of winning. Let us ask ourselves the question as to Who will keep the true ideals and real values of this greatest of college sports clearly before the vision of the undergraduates if the graduates themselves neglect to do so—and lastly let no graduate from any college use the occasion of an intercollegiate contest as a Roman Holiday unchallenged or unrebuked.

The game of football is a game richly worth preserving and we friends, yes and sponsors of the game must leave no word unsaid, no act undone that will tend to preserve it in all its wholesomeness, virility and vigor for the boys of this and the coming generation.

Webster Hall Portico