"COACH'S GAME."

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 158, 6 July 1937, Page 8

"COACH'S GAME."

AMERICAN FOOTBALL. LIKE CHECKER BOARD. RUGBY IS MORE SPORTING. The contention that an Australian football game which he witnessed in Melbourne had more sporting spirit than American football was expressed by Dr. F. W. Hart, who, with Mrs. Hart, arrived in Auckland this morning by the Maunganui. Dr. Hart, who is a professor of education at the University of California, is visiting New Zealand for the purpose of attending the forthcoming regional conference of the New Educational Fellowship. "Our leading physical educationists now' place less emphasis on competitive athletic teams and more on sportsmanship and types of physical education which will carry over to adult life," said the professor, who himself played football in the United States for three years. "An American footballer ends his career with the last day he plays for his school." Football was not favoured in schools, he continued, so much ae tennis, handball and golf, which could be carried on for the next 30 or 40 years of a man's life. "College football hae become too highly competitive for the general good of the student body. I saw a game of football in Melbourne and it seemed to me to be more of a sportsman's game and less hazardous physically than American football. "It is far less a coach's game in the sense that there were no eubstitutes. In the United States the refinement of a good coach is to know just when to take off a man and just when to put another fa. It is just like a checker board." Another feature of the game as played in Australia wae that the players were not unduly hampered by clothes, while in America they took the field looking like prehistoric monsters. Even that, however, did not protect the vertebra at the back of the neck, which wae the focal point of a large number of the casualties in the game. College football attracted a very large following from the public, thousands of ■whom were content to sit back and do the cheering. He stated that at the Stanford University, near San Francisco, the greatest rival of the University of California as regards football, huge crowds gathered and sometimes the takings were in excess of half a i million dollars —more than the total receipts for the series of encounters in Melbourne over a period of two years.