The Sunday Eight O'Clock/The Team
THERE are a good many respect able people who think that a champion football team is of more importance to a college than a million-dollar library or a faculty of prize winning Ph.D's. I should not go quite so far as this myself, but I am still convinced that a good football team is an asset worth while.
It is fine to watch a football game on a crisp November day when the sky is clear, and the air is invigorating, and the bleachers are running over with youthful enthusiasm; but it's no snap being on the team. The men on the team see nothing of the beauty of the sky or of the sun making the clouds glorious; they feel only faintly the enthusiasm of the crowd. To them the contest is a cruel, exhausting physical fight.
It is short, of course, and they enjoy it, perhaps, but it is a sport the training for which is most severe. A football coach is not always careful to be polite and kind; he must drive the men to their utmost capacity, and his words are often brutally goading. The men come in at night after their three or four hours of practice with discouraged hearts, and bruised muscles, and wrenched tendons, and fractured bones, and tired sore bodies to take up the real work of college. The glory and the hero worship they get out of it are not often commensurate with the sacrifices which they must make.
And we? We criticize the plays and the players, we are irritated because the score does not rise to the heights we had hoped, or we cheer passively if something pleases us. Few of us justly estimate the work that the fellows do or give them the credit they deserve.
Granting all the adverse criticisms which may be urged against the game, and they are many, there is no other single influence which does so much in a big institution like ours to foster democracy, to place undergraduates of all classes upon the same footing, to develop a feeling of loyalty to the university, and to unify the whole undergraduate body as does the football team.
November