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Show gJ I !Sw- ACE Ji. ?&r. XX7'OULDN'T it be better," writes F. B., "if all forms of spectator sport were abolished and we put in 100 per cent concentration ,on winning the war? Suppose the millions or hundreds of millions mil-lions spent on sport were used to buy more war bonds and to help such war causes as the Red Cross? Suppose everyone ev-eryone used everything every-thing he had, beyond be-yond taxes and actual ac-tual living expenses, for the sake of winning win-ning the war as ( A Grantland Rice quickly as possible. Don't you honestly hon-estly think it would speed up victory vic-tory by many months?" - This might work out if human nature na-ture was not human nature. Human Hu-man nature just isn't geared that way. If all competitive sport were abolished, abol-ished, if there were no baseball, football, foot-ball, racing, boxing, basketball, golf, tennis, etc., left to watch or to follow fol-low or to read about or talk about, I think there would be a big drop in national morale, so-called, both among civilians and those in service. serv-ice. And I doubt that any additional addi-tional revenue would be diverted to war bonds or to any other war relief. With so many extra or loose billions bil-lions floating around, the great majority ma-jority would find another method of spending money,, apart from sport. It is beyond all expectation to find 135,000,000 people willing to concentrate concen-trate entirely on any one thing, unless, un-less, like Russia, their country was invaded. There are still too many selfish, or greedy, or thoughtless, or ignorant people in the general mass. A Concrete Example How close to 100 per cent can you come, for example, in getting even a college football team geared up for victory? You might make a guess around 90 per cent. You'd be wrong. I put this query to Bob Neyland, now General Neyland of the Engineers. Engi-neers. Bob Neyland's Tennessee teams were noted, not only on the winning side, but also for their morale. mo-rale. "The closest I could reach," Neyland Ney-land said, "was around 75 per cent. Having reached 75 per cent I then tried to shove the morale, all-you've-got idea up to 80 per cent. I always al-ways found there was a certain slump back to about 70 per cent. 1 tried every angle I knew to reach the 80 per cent mark, but I could never make it." You might still recall the old saying say-ing about "All work and no play." A certain amount of relaxation is one of the requirements for human efficiency. Up at West Point they put In something like 16 hours a day at the toughest sort of grind. Yet I know' that officers, and cadets need the relaxation re-laxation they get from football and otHer sports, even those not on any major team. They need it badly. An Important Problem There are two major schools of thought concerning s"port today: 1. On the one side we have a growing grow-ing group that wants to destroy or has little interest in the competitive side. This, includes the army's high command, backed up by numerous college presidents, fostered by high-school high-school officials. This group has already throttled or suppressed the competitive side in hundreds of colleges and many hundreds of high schools. They have been classified as the "dumbbell-swinging" or the calisthenic group. They don't believe in com- petilive training games. 2. On the other side we have a group, headed by the navy, and rather rath-er secretly supported by 95 per cent" of the army, plus all the keener and' more understanding college and high-school groups, that knows the value of competition, apart from mere mechanical exercises. It is this latter group that is keeping keep-ing competitive sport on the living s!de of the street today. The high-school high-school situation, especially in New York, is extremely sour. It is probably prob-ably at its best in Texas and Ohio. It is now a question as to whether or not the people of the United States want all such sports es football, baseball, basketball, boxing, track and field abolished in favor of mass calisthenics, such as Germany used up to the Olympic Games of 1936. It is a far more serious problem than the country at large understands under-stands just at this spot. But it is something that the real lovers of sport and our sporting tradition should begin to think about, before it is too late. |