NEW SPORTSMANSHIP DANGERS

Evening Star, Issue 21632, 30 January 1934, Page 6

NEW SPORTSMANSHIP DANGERS

PING PONG PERILS From Budapest the decree has gone forth that ping pong, if not inevitably wicked, has peculiar moral dangers of its own, and that keepers of ping pong dens or saloons must get registered undei't heavy penalties. The Budapest authorities (says a ‘ Times ’ leader writer), will find that they cannot stop here. This is an age of sport, yet there is hardly a sport but brings its own temptations with it. Apart from the growth' of an inordinate desire to win, there are so many pitfalls that doctors, who glibly recommend patients to take up some game and get good at it, are risking moral loss for physical gain. Cricketers become egoists, footballers become vindictive payers-off of old and new scores, golfers move through blasphemy to atheism, and even fishermen lie. As for tennis players, they come to adopt a peculiarly shameless snobbery of proficiency. .And in all these games lies the' pitfall of self-deception which makes men adopt the play of one occasional lucky day as their natural form, and then bear with anger or resignation the bitter fact that they are, unaccountably but permanently out of form. Small wonder if the more conscientious kind of head master is fond of asking himself, in the public Press or , elsewhere, what is really the connection between games and goodness, and whether there is not much to be said for making games at school so unpleasant that no one will want to play them in later life—in short, for vaccinating boys against them as they are vaccinated against poetry by judicious compulsions. The moralist can at any rate reflect that the progress of invention has circumscribed the power for harm of indoor games, of what used to be called parlour games for the long winter evenings. Those games, led by Ludo, were popular and influential because they could be played round one table, with one lamp in the days of one lamp and readings aloud. They have been crowded out by films and wireless sets and gramophones, and moralists now have a pleasant change, contemplating the particular vices and' failings induced by passive pleasures in contrast with the younger, ruder, fiercer days, when behind shuttered windows little dice were thrown, and little counters crept forward along coloured boards, and halina men skipped crookedly to home and victory, and marbles ambled in and out of wooden cavities, and many a brave tiddloy was winked.