Why Kill a Good Game?

Collegiate Football Apologists Are Killing the Game While Pros Thrive on Press Attacks Aimed at Amateurs

I SHOULD LIKE TO SAY a word on the game of football—criticizing no institution and no individual unless it be myself. In times past there were men who supported the game and who would stand up on their hind legs and fight for it. Walter Camp would face off the President of the United States in a crusading mood, and so would Ed Hall.

Since Ed Hall died, there has been no one to say a telling word in praise of the game. No college president will stand up for it, and most of them will not even try to understand it. Rather, they will apologize for successful teams and pray for a defeat—prayers which incidentally are soon answered. No athletic director will come out on the positive side. All of us talk of eligibility; we say "Most of our headaches revolve around the word amateurism," that we have no pros but that the other fellow has, that we don't proselyte, at least not as brazenly and effectively as the other fellow. Every one of us is so busy saying that he plays clean football that none of us ever bothers to say that he plays good football. The one recent exception, a statement to the press this week that "We are determined to have a good football team," comes as an antidote to an earlier statement "Come what may, we will have nothing but clean football teams." We are not commercial; we are merely depending on the gate receipts of football to support our athletic programs, and while we hold our pocket handkerchief before our streaming eyes with one hand, we keep the other hand busy scribbling decrees and policies and statements that are killing the game.

Now, I believe in amateurism and athletic purity as much as any of you do. I subscribe to everything that has been done, and to a good deal that has been said, for progress in that direction. But is the emphasis to be positive or negative? Is any one ready to say "We are playing good football and interesting football and damn fine football" or are we going to continue to sit by on our pretty well moth-eaten academic pedestals while the press, the radio and magazines, both slick and slimy, are glorifying the professional game and running the college game into the ground? What a bunch of suckers we are to support the all star games and make the pro's at our own expense! The only thing that the pro's have that isn't taken directly from college football is jitterbugs between the halves, and I think that they stole even that idea from Texas A & M. Collier's Magazine will boost professional football and damn college football and we remain silent or smugly platitudinous.

Intercollegiate football is a good game and a valuable game, or it is a worthless and a pernicious game. Let's decide which, and either support it or drop it. I believe that intercollegiate football is a good game. I believe that it is a good game because it requires guts and intelligence and team work and spark in its players. I believe it is a good game because it most readily and thoroughly makes cohesive our alumni. I believe it is a good game and a valuable game and an absolutely essential game because it serves the emotions of entire undergraduate bodies. No where else in our colleges, certainly no where in the academic side, is there any regard for the emotion, for the enthusiasm, for the deeper loyalties of college life comparable to the integrated feeling generated in the players and spectators of high grade intercollegiate football.

I don't believe it would be possible to drop football in any of our institutions even if we should desire it. I, for one, have no such desire, but I would like to see all of us, you and myself, come out more strongly and more frequently in positive support of a fine intercollegiate game.

DIRECTOR OF ATHLETICS

Following is part of an addressgiven by Mr. McCarter at a meetingof the Eastern Intercollegiate Football Association, representing 52 eastern institutions, at New York on January 10. Mr. McCarter was reelectedpresident of the E. I. F. A. at thismeeting for a third term.