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Show THE EAST GOOD, THE WEST BAD. There is no end to the discussion of the Reno prize fight or re- lated subjects. The Eastern press is censuring the West for allowing allow-ing these fights, to which a western paper replies that the exhibitions on the football fields of the East are far more brutal and injurious than the contests in the prize ring.. This paper says: ''In his address before the National Educational Association President David Starr Jordan of Stanford University truthfully said that college football as played in America is as brutal and sordid as any prize fight. "There is no doubt it is just as sordid, leads to quite as much gambling, is played for the money there is in it and is far moro brutal and far more dangerous. In a prize fight two men stand up squarely and pummel each other, but -if both men are fit neither is in danger of anything worse than a bloody nose and a battered face. In college football two mobs assail each other in a rough-and-tumble fight in which the whole eighteen may become inextricably mingled in a struggling mass, with the life being' crushed out of the undermost. under-most. "Nothing of that kind can occur in a prize fight. Nobody is hit when he is down, or below the belt. In college football the falling of a player is the signal for the opposing mob to fall on him and rend him. "The excitement and the passion of a college football contest is far more demoralizing than a prize fight.and socially more dangerous, danger-ous, because the participants are young men with characters yet unformed, and what is even worse, young women. And yet the Eastern press which deplores and denounces a prize fight in Nevada will give pages of enthusiastic description of a brutal and brutalizing football game. "And in so doing it faithfully represents the sentiment of those communities. The main scholastic events of the year at such seats of "culture" as our great Eastern universities are the rough-and-tumble combats of the football field. ' ; "This paper is no defender of prize fights. It is not criticising any epithets which Eastern people may bestow upon them. We only say that the enormous crowds which flock to witness the annual an-nual exhibitions of collegiate brutality prove that greater and more widespread degeneracy is found at the East than exists anywhere in the wild and woolly West." If football were to be called a fight, thousands who now defend the game and condemn prize fighting, would see in the college game quite as much to shock and offend. Although the west is being denounced as possessing lax morals, we know the East is hypocritical in its holy horror as there is more really demoralizing influences tolerated in the East than in the West, and, as to brutality, football, the Eastern college game, always has claimed 100 times more victims than prize fighting. |
